Having a buyer persona is vital to your company’s success. It improves your performance and increases chances of lasting success by keeping your goals consistent. Of the companies who developed buyer personas, 71% of them exceeded their revenue and lead goals. Furthermore, 47% of the companies who exceeded their goals work to consistently maintain their personas.
To truly connect with your customers and grow your business, you will need to know them on a more personal level than their buying habits alone. However, one person won't give you an accurate representation of who your audience is. People are unique individuals and can easily mislead you with too small of a group to represent your advertising strategy.
As much as 90% of companies using personas have been able to create a clearer understanding of their buyers and have been better able to reach them. They're meant to broadly represent a large group of people, which is why too small of a subject base will skew your persona. One person, or even 5 or 10 people, cannot accurately capture your audience.
It's impossible to get a 100% perfect reading onto your sample size, but it’s surprisingly possible to get insight within a 5% to 10% margin of error. To achieve a reading with a 10% margin of error, you only need 80 out of 500 people to respond. A bigger response is better, since hearing from 220 out of 500 people gets you a 5% margin and 345 responses get you a 3% margin. From there, you follow patterns and pull out the most relevant ones to your persona and purpose.
Even having a margin of error between 5% and 10% significantly increases your chances of business success. Since getting accurate readings beyond that requires so many additional responses, it can easily be too costly for its added benefit. When conducting surveys, receiving between 80 to 220 responses to base your target persona on is ideal.
Everyone interacts with your product and services differently. It's crucial to understand which experiences are broadly shared to verify and discover pain points. That allows you to narrow down your priorities and know where to focus.
Think of it this way:
Not to mention, including more people in your target persona research also helps you tailor your messaging to specific audiences with more precision.
Finding more people for your target persona research is surprisingly more accessible than you may think. The truth is, people are open to providing personal information as long as they don't feel like you're taking it from them without their permission. The portion of consumers who said they're willing to share more when brands are transparent rose to 73% over the last two years.
There are several methods for reaching your consumers for target persona research. To name a few reliable ones, there is:
If you’re intimidated by this process, working with a media partner ensures you’re getting the right message to the right people at the best time. Reaching your current and potential customers can be challenging but working with media experts gives you more guidance and advice to keep you on the right track.