Personas can be developed and validated in a variety of ways. Where possible, we’d always recommend using a combination of the below three:

Method 1: Market research

There’s a great deal of insights for both B2B and B2C consumers that can be found online, from blog posts and social sites to forums and press interviews, you can often find first-hand accounts from the personas themselves.

Method 2: Persona workshops

Persona workshops provide invaluable insights to the way your actual audience interacts with your brand. Whilst the CEO may think they know their target audience, it is often the people who deal with customers daily who have the most accurate knowledge.

Method 3: Consumer surveys 

Consumer surveys allow you to gain insight into your core audience, the type of language they use and where their brand affinities lie. No matter which method you use, we’d always recommend surveying a small proportion of each persona to validate your research.

This step-by-step guide focuses on method 1 – market research. We’ve listed all of the free ways that you can use to conduct effective research to support your persona development below.

Tactic 1: LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is a social network that’s set up specifically for business. If you don’t already have a LinkedIn profile, we’d recommend you set one up. If you are a B2B organisation, it is also where you can get direct insights into the personas you’ll be developing. It’s a great way to get an idea of demographics (including age, gender and education), interests and daily responsibilities. We’ve listed the steps to use LinkedIn for research below:

  • Search for the job title you are focusing on in the search bar and filter by ‘People’ – a list of people in the role will appear. This can then be further filtered by location and by companies – if you’re hoping to target a specific region or company type – this can be especially helpful.
  • Review the search results for common themes, is a gender more apparent? What age range is most prevalent?
  • Click into a few of the results (you can set your profile to private if you don’t want the person to know you’ve been looking at them!)
  • Look into their career history – have they studied at university or worked their way up the ladder? Is there a description included in their current experience? This can give a great insight into daily duties.
  • What are their interests? This can be a great indicator for where they look to learn and brands they admire.
  • Click into the activity tab – here you’ll get a breakdown of what they interact with on LinkedIn, do they share and like articles? What are their sources? This can also give you insights into where they get their knowledge. If they are particularly active – you know LinkedIn will be a great platform to market to them on.
  • The education section can give you further insight into your persona's background. Take note of what degree they studied or if they didn’t go to university. Accomplishments is also a good section to find out if your personas seek out further learning opportunities.
  • The volunteer section is not one to be ignored, here you can discover what your persona cares about on a personal level.

Remember – you need to look at more than one person and keep an eye out for patterns. No two people are the same and you’re looking to build a generalised picture of your persona.

Tactic 2: Job board research 

Whilst the job boards can be pretty impersonal compared to LinkedIn, they do give an idea of what a persona’s daily duties entail. Of course, a job posting is likely to miss out all the bad bits, but it will still allow you to get an understanding of the job role you are focusing on as well as any other job titles the persona may have. There are a multitude of recruitment websites online but for the purpose of this, we’d recommend the following:

Tactic 3: Online research

A simple Google search is not one to be overlooked and is always a great tool when it comes to research. Often, you can find ‘day in the life’ blogs and interviews with all kinds of different personas. All you need to do is type in the persona job title followed by ‘day in the life’ or ‘interview’ and you’ll be faced with an array of results.

Tactic 4: Forums

Forums such as Reddit and Quora can be an invaluable source when it comes to market research. The ability for users to set themselves as anonymous encourages open discussions allowing you to get real insights into what makes people tick.

This is often more beneficial for a business to consumer audience but depending on what you offer there still may be valuable conversations that you can leverage.

Both forums have a search functionality so you can tap directly into your target audience, you can also ask your own questions on these platforms free of charge.

Dependent on your industry, there may also be a myriad of industry specific forums where you can conduct business to business research.

Tactic 5: Talk

Wherever possible you should talk to your personas directly. Leverage any existing contacts and reach out over email to ask if they’re happy to have a 30 minute conversation about how they use your product or service. Think about the types of questions you can ask that will help build a clear picture to help you market your organisation. We’ve listed a few to get you started:

  • What is your role within your organisation?
  • What are your goals within your role?
  • What frustrates you in your role?
  • Where do you go to learn about products and services such as ours?
  • Where do you go to learn generally?
  • What prompted you to seek out our product/service?
  • What are your concerns over using our product or service? Is there anything that almost prevented you from purchasing?
  • What process did you go through to procure our product or service? Who and what else was involved?
  • Why do you use our product or service? What problem does it solve for you?
  • What benefits do you get from using our product/service?
  • Where did you find out about it?
  • What are the three main things you aim to get out of our product/service?

With a little time and effort, you’ll soon find that the internet and your existing networks are a treasure-trove for extracting persona information. Don’t forget to download our persona templates so you can build your personas as you’re conducting your research.

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