First off, what is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer based on your market research and real data about your already existing customers.It can be a powerful tool for businesses at all stages of their journey to get an idea of how to target their customers and provide the best services and products possible.

There is a lot of different ways you can approach creating your buyer persona. The most basic step towards creating a buyer persona is to understand the kind of people you want to target as a business. Once you understand that, the next steps are to establish how viable your buyer persona is and how it will fit in with your wider business model. The temptation for many new businesses is to have their buyer persona as ‘everyone’ and this approach can actually be more of a hindrance to a business than a benefit. Some important things to consider for a buyer persona include:

• Interests
• Personal Information 
• Professional Information 
• Aspirations 
• Age 
• General Demographic Statistics
• Values
• Location 

Having a targeted and granular buyer persona can help you target, enhance and market your business specifically towards those your products or services are intended for. In addition to that, there is nothing to say that your buyer persona can’t change and develop as your business grows and you pivot directions or change business models.

In this article, we are going to take a look at how you can use data from your marketing channels to help enhance or create a buyer persona based on your existing outreach channels. We are going to look at your website data in the form of Google Analytics and also look at how insight data from social media channels can help you build a clearer picture of what your ideal customers look like.

How to use Google analytics to enhance your buyer persona:

Google Analytics is a completely free platform you can set up alongside your companies website. You simply drop a snippet of code onto your website and the two platforms will be linked. Once your website is connected to Google Analytics that’s where the fun starts. Google Analytics will gather all sorts of useful information for your website and help you to monitor site visits, bounce rates, conversions and much more.

The part of Google Analytics we are most interested in for this article is the demographic features, based on the visitors to your website Google Analytics will build up a comprehensive report of your site’s demographic including age, gender, interests, location, behaviours and technology.

If you do not already have Google Analytics then please click here to check it out and for any advice on setting it up on your website don’t hesitate to get in touch.

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at how Google Analytics can help shape your buyer persona:

1. Look at your demographic overview

First things first you will want to begin by looking at your demographic overview, this pulls the age range and gender of your target customers/ audience. For example, if you look at our overview on a demo account, you can see that the main age range of our target audience is 25-34 and most of them are male.

The demographic overview report tends to be quite general. It does not offer you enough information about who your audience actually is in terms of specifics. That being said the demographics dashboard is a really good way to get a quick pulse check on who is visiting your website and what those visitors look like. From here you can click into each area on the dashboard to get a more granular view of things like age, gender and interests.

2. Demographics: Age

Next up you will want to dive deeper into your audience data, to get a clearer idea of your buyer persona. Looking at the age of our demographic, you will be able to see what age range is generating the most revenue. As you can see from our age data at on our demo account it is the 18-24 age range that have had the most sessions. It is the 55-64 age range who have spent the longest on our website and the 18-24 age range has had the highest number of goal completions.

3. Gender Overview

It is important to know what gender visits your page the most, so you know how to target that specific gender. It depends on what business you are running that determines if it is worth your while looking at this report. For example, if your business is aimed at females, then there is no need to look at these reports.

From our gender analytics, we can see that even though most of our users are male, however, it is females who have the higher conversion rate but we can see that it is males who spend longer looking at our site.

4. User Interests and Segmentation

Finally, you will want to find out what your audiences’ interests are. To find this out, on the gender overview, click what gender you want to view and then at the top you will see the word other highlighted, click this, then choose affinity category and this will bring up those specific genders’ interest.

As you can see, our three biggest interest categories are: Sports & Fitness/ Sports Fans, Shoppers/Luxury Shoppers, Media & Entertainment/ Movie Lovers. Another aspect of the interest reports is you will also want to look at the in-market segment. Do this by going back to where the affinity category is highlighted and typing in, in-market segment. As we can see our users are highly interested in real estate and property.

This is everything that you need to know about how to get started creating your buyer persona using google analytics. We hope our guide has made google analytics a little more clear for you and given you an indicator of how your analytics data insights can help shape the direction and focus of your business.

How to use social media to enhance buyer persona:

Look at your existing social media data

In terms of social media insights, you are going to want to do some research on the channels your business is already set up on. Each channel has its own insights platform. On these insights, you will see information about users who are currently following your page. It is an innovative idea to take note of the data you find i.e., percentage of genders, the main age range that follows you just so you can begin to create your buyer persona. These analytics will differ for each platform, as each social media website has different demographics. For this article, I am going to use Instagram as an example:

Location and Age Range

As you can see from the image below, location and age range are an area of insight that can be gathered from your social media insights report. Similar to the data gathered from your Google Analytics, you can also gain insight into these areas here. Location and age range for your social profiles are a great way of helping to build up your buyer persona using data streams from multiple different social media platforms as well as your website.

In addition to helping with your buyer persona, you can also use the location and age range data to enhance your targetted advertising on social media, for example, in the image down below you can see that 6.4% of visitors are based in London. If you were going to target some ads based on the location you could focus more of your budget around the London area.

Followers & Gender

Next up we have some additional insight into follower demographics, in the example below you can see we have a breakdown of both age and gender. This is a really valuable tool for helping to gain a breakdown and insight into the age range you should assign to your buyer persona as well as an indicator of gender. In the example below you can see that 75% of followers on this particular profile are women. Based on this information you would likely class your buyer persona as a woman. That being said, you should never dismiss the other 25% of men completely, it simply means that for your primary focus you should focus on the areas that are already strong with your business and if it’s applicable look to expand and become fully inclusive down the line if that is part of your growth strategy.

Social Media demographics are especially useful when you create ads on Instagram and Facebook. On the integrated advertising platforms on social media channels, you can see the following information about your audience: gender, age, likes, dislikes, geolocation, education level and other extremely specific details. This can all help towards creating your ideal buyer persona.

Looking at social media analytics is less complicated than google analytics to begin with, but we would always suggest looking at both to get the most accurate and full picture of your customers. We hope this article made learning about your user’s buyer persona that more clear and will help you to map out your buyer persona no matter what stage of your business journey you are at. To learn more about digital marketing, SEO, social media marketing, read the rest of our Manchester digital marketing blogs.