As the owner of a website, it’s your job to know who your audience members are and exactly what they’re looking for. Fortunately, the smart use of buyer personas can make your job much easier. These are representations of your ideal customers, and can be used to tailor your marketing approach to their specific wants and needs. They are also quite easy to create, especially with the help of analytics data.
Buyer personas can play a major role in your marketing campaigns, as they give you a basic template to work with that makes it easier to create products or experiences for your target customer base. They help you to understand basic customer needs and wants, which enables you to provide better solutions.
One of the best ways to create your buyer personas is by using data analytics. In a nutshell, data analytics is the process of examining a group of collected information. In the case of buyer personas, this includes data on customer demographics like age, gender, and income, as well as key user behaviors such as clicks.
Data analytics offers you an in-depth look at your current website visitors, which can help you to create the perfect buyer persona for your site. You can even use analytics to branch out to previously unknown audience groups, and expand your business as a result. All three of the following methods are crucial, regardless of the type of business you’re running, or the niche you occupy.
Know Who Your Audience Is and What They Want
Your audience members are the people who find what you’re offering useful. This can include your blog articles, your social media posts, and of course your products and services.
With this type of audience data in hand, you can also see if there are overarching patterns (for example, you might discover that your visitors are largely female). That way, you can better target your audience as a group.
To use analytics to learn about your audience, we recommend that you:
- Take a look at demographics. The majority of analytics tools (including Google Analytics and Open Web Analytics) will offer a look at major demographics, including age and gender. This will give you a basic overview of your current audience.
- Consider the technology your audience is using. One easily-overlooked type of analytics data is the technology your audience members are using when they interact with your site. This can be valuable knowledge to have. For example, knowing that the majority of your audience uses mobile devices can help you improve your site’s design so they are getting their needs met.
Once you know who your audience is, you can also begin to target your content more effectively. As a result, it will better serve the needs of your audience and answer their most important questions.
Understand How Your Audience Found You
Customer acquisition is a specialized area of web analytics, which aims to discover how your audience found you in the first place. When you learn where your audience is coming from, you can then optimize those avenues more effectively.
For example, if you know that most of your customers or clients are coming from search engines, you can pour more effort into improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. On the other hand, you can also spend time working on those areas that aren’t bringing in a lot of visitors yet.
Where your audience comes from may also offer further insight into who they are. For example, an audience that largely visits from social media is typically on the younger end.
You can implement these techniques to improve your buyer personas:
- Make smart use of acquisition data. This includes where your traffic is coming from (search engines, social media, etc.) and, depending on the software you use, even how well your campaigns are working.
- Create targeted campaigns. Marketing campaigns are targeted attempts at connecting with your customer base. Using a tool such as Matomo, you can create campaigns for the social media platforms and search engines that your audience shows a preference for.
When you know how visitors are finding your website, you can also spend more time on the sites they frequent. This is especially useful when you are able to target new social media platforms they’re spending a lot of time on.
Learn How Your Audience Interacts With Your Site
User behavior describes how people interact with your site. Once you learn what visitors actually do when they arrive on your site, you’ll quickly find ways to optimize your current setup. You may even discover an entirely new way of running your website.
- Find a solution that tracks user behavior. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics enable you to see how people are using your site, and they can also offer insight into behavior flow, search patterns, and more.
- Use heatmaps to analyze your pages. Solutions like Open Web Analytics let you see exactly where users are clicking on your website, using something called a “heatmap.” This helps you get a better idea of the typical visitors’ thought process, and see whether key elements are being noticed or ignored.
With a greater understanding of user behaviors, you can then implement changes to your website that improve its overall User Experience (UX). This is a win-win for both you and your visitors.
Buyer personas are a critical part of any marketing campaign, but they can be difficult to put together without the right information. That’s where analytics data can help. With the effective use of analytics, you can collect the data you need, and use it to create personas that fully describe your audience and their wants.
Do you have any questions about how to use analytics data to hone your buyer personas? Let us know in the comments section below!