What information sources do you use to create buyer/user personas?

Great question. When creating buyer personas, you’re ideally using data from current, prospective, and churned customers to create archetypes of your buyers. The goal is to understand more about your customers, design better products, create better marketing programs, and arm your sales team with the best talking points.   The problem is, most personas suck!  The ones I see most often have demographic info only (e.g. “Marketing Mary is 32, has a BA in Communication, and lives in a large city) or ...Read More

We just went through this exercise at Momentive, focusing specifically on building buyer persona "packs" – a collection of materials to help our broader organization understand our target personas. Depending on your project timeline, you'll likely want to conduct a blend of primary and secondary research as well as both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research (industry reports, surveys, etc) can provide great stats, but qualitative research (interviews, recorded calls) is wh ...Read More

There are a few different ways to go about creating personas (which may be more closely aligned to “archetypes” or “segments” depending on the terminology your organization uses). The way you source the data largely depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. But the short answer is you can use qualitative data, quantitative data, or a mix of both. Either way, you’ll usually get the best results with primary research data - data you collect as opposed to insights you find in published research. ...Read More

When I was running user research for Abstract SDK, my product marketing team used 11 sources of getting research data for forming user personas. It included Zendesk tickets from the support team, insights from chatting with potential users insights from competitors' research all Google Analytics data, insights from our design advocates and sales team, as well as data from the analytics team. When working on power user research with Lemon.io, my team found an unbelievable amount of useful informa ...Read More

Mary's answer is very good, and comprehensive, and many would do well to simply follow it. For those who enjoy a slightly more spirited debate on the nuances of persona development, I'm going to disagree on a few finer points (in the spirit of sparking a robust discussion!). First, where I absolutely, 100%, agree: Most personas SUCK. They typically come off as a hybrid of an emoji and a Pixar character and tell us NOTHING. I also couldn't agree more that understanding motivations should be the k ...Read More