4 min read  | Buyer Persona

The buyer research every startup must do

Every new startup wants to rapidly grow customer opportunities. Ensure you've done enough research to fully answer these three areas identified below. This helps focus your efforts, and gets your marketing off the ground.

1. Not knowing what you want

Although demographic information is useful, you'll need to go deeper than this to create personas of your potential buyers.

Buyer personas help you understand the goals, behaviour, and the needs of different prospective buyers of your product / service. Here are some useful aspects to consider during your research:

  • What do they do throughout the decision making process?
  • How do they evaluate alternatives?
  • What triggers the decision to make a change?
  • Who and what influences their purchase decision?

2. Not telling a story

After identifying your main buyer personas, separate them into groups that define where they are in their buyer's journey:

  • Influencers — those who are likely to advocate, pioneer or recommend your product.
  • Early Adopters — those who are likely to have a pressing need for your product.
  • Slow Adopters — people you will need to educate.

These three categories will have differing needs that require varying content and forms of communication. For instance, influencers will likely be more technologically capable and need to understand quickly how their followers will benefit.

With 7 in 10 consumers saying they prefer to learn about a company through a collection of articles rather than an ad, and two-thirds saying the information provided helps them make better purchase decisions - understanding who your buyers really are and what they want is critical.


3. Expecting too much

After understanding the preferred channels that your buyers would use to connect with you, you'll need to focus on building content that is likely to be useful to them.

For each audience, identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to use to measure marketing and valuation success. Some KPI fields and methods of measurement are:

Reach: Unique visits, geography, and mobile readership

Reach generally consists of understanding how many individuals have viewed your content, where they are viewing it from, and how they are viewing it. This provides a good baseline with which to compare the effectiveness of each of your different forms of content.

Engagement: Bounce rates, click patterns, and page views

Engagement builds upon the data you get from reach. It tells you how much time people are spending interacting with your content, which content they find most relevant, and whether they are coming back for more. This helps you understand what kind of content your audience reacts to so you can optimise it accordingly.

Sentiment: Comments and social sharing

Through reach and engagement you understand the quantitative aspects of how your content is faring, while sentiment helps you develop a qualitative understanding. Analysing sentiment allows you to understand prevalent attitudes to your content and business, identify your strongest advocates, and respond to negative comments. Additionally, making your content sharable improves content reach and sentiment analysis.



For the same reason you'd get an accountant or lawyer, you may need professional assistance to build a world-class marketing strategy—and the right content to make it work. If you're having trouble developing buyer personas or creating content that gets clicks, Aamplify's expert team of consultants can help. Get in touch with one of our team to learn more.