How to Create Buyer Persona Research for an Event: Detailed Guide

You might think you have a clear picture of your targeted event persona, but getting into the granular details can be super helpful.

No event marketers want their time, money, and efforts squandered due to haphazard marketing. Therefore, conducting buyer persona research for an event is imperative to promote your event.

A buyer persona gives you a snapshot of your ideal customers based on your research to represent the different user types that might be interested in your event.

Here are some key benefits of creating detailed buyer personas:

• Improved targeting help you focus on your content and strategically position the event
• Gain the information and perspective you need to craft your event message suitable for personas
• Discover insights into your audience channel behavior and maximize your event impact

In this blog, we will cover the following key areas:

1. Research your target audience
2. Conducting surveys and interviews
3. Analyzing existing customer data
4. Social media monitoring and analytics
5. Utilizing website and landing page analytics
6. Validating and refining personas

The Ultimate Guide to Creating the Detailed Buyer Persona

To promote your events, you must be well-informed and aware of your buyers. A detailed buyer persona can bring life to your event marketing strategy and help you craft more positioned content.

It can help you make better choices about who to target, impactful ways to reach them, and decisions about propositions.

Let’s explore a step-by-step guide to creating a compelling event buyer persona:

1. Researching Your Target Audience

Statistics show that almost half, 48%, of online ads, don’t reach the right people, and billions of digital marketing dollars are wasted.

Therefore, all great buyer personas start with research.

Even if you have an idea of your buyer persona for the event, it’s worth diving deeper and researching. 

Always remember that even if you have the best event activation ideas, you cannot succeed until you have a clearly defined buyer persona.

For research, you must gather the following data:

Demographic data

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Income level

Psychographic traits

• Interests and hobbies
• Values and beliefs
• Lifestyle choices
• Personality traits

Typically, buyer persona research starts with either qualitative or quantitative research. Qualitative buyer persona research includes in-depth workshops, interviews, focus groups, and first-hand data. 

While quantitatively, buyer persona research refers to analyzing and identifying groups within your target market statistically based on demographics, behaviors, attitudes, or a combination of these factors.

2. Conducting Surveys and Interviews

Understand why you’re conducting the surveys and interviews. You need to know the detailer buyer personas to create the strategy for content marketing of your events. 

Here are some good questions you need to ask as an event marketer before diving into conducting surveys and interviews:

• Who your buyer personas are?
• What attracts your buyer persona?
• What is their motivation to get interested?
• What makes them take the required action?
• How can you improve their experience?

Designing effective survey questions

You don’t have to be an expert to design survey questions. But for effective survey questions that drive results, you need to learn the right ways and techniques.

There are different types of survey questions that you can include to understand the buyer persona. Some of the most commonly used are listed below:

• Open-ended questions let the respondents verbalize the answer with no choice of solutions provided.
• Likert scale questions have end-points that indicate the degree of agreement and typically include strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, and strongly agree.
• Multiple-choice questions limit respondents to answers listed but help analyze each respondent’s choices individually.

Conducting one-on-one interviews

Buyer personas put a face to the target audience and help event marketers create more relevant and valuable content. 

Consider these tips while conducting one-on-one interviews:

• Identify the right people
• Determine the interview format
• Prepare interview questions
• Build rapport with interviewees
• Practice active listening techniques
• Gather both quantitative and qualitative data

3. Analyzing Existing Customer Data

Data is the new gold!

But do you know how to create a buyer persona by analyzing customer data? 

With the advent of technologies, event marketers can gain valuable insights into user preferences, behavior, and needs. Analyzing existing customer data helps you improve the experience, drive business growth and develop effective strategies to unlock event success.

Utilizing CRM and customer databases

CRM and customer databases contain all information collected, governed, transformed, and shared with the event marketers to make better decisions.

The magic of CRM and database fuels the attendee experience at the event.

Some of the key benefits include:

• Provides visibility over customers
• Drive acquisition, retention, and development
• Optimized processes and offering
• Catch and nurture leads

Identifying patterns and trends

As an event marketer, you can identify patterns and trends in existing customer databases. It can reflect specific patterns, seasonal fluctuations, and event market trends.

Depending on the data trending upwards or correlations between two sets of numbers, you can visualize and build predictive models.

Extracting key insights from customer interactions

Analyzing existing customer databases is like embarking on a treasure hunt. Extracting key insights from the existing customer database will increase your chances of designing better event marketing strategies and communication plans.

Once gathered, you can make iterations to your buyer persona and refine the profile further.

4. Social Media Monitoring and Analytics

It is not a question of competition regarding social media monitoring and analytics; the best way is to understand both. 

Once you’ve gathered, you need to know your audience and improve your strategy to improve outcomes.

Social media is an essential element of the event marketing checklist; you must know ways to monitor social media analytics:

• Leveraging social media platforms
• Identifying relevant hashtags and keywords
• Tracking engagement and sentiment analysis

With a daily active user on Facebook 2 billion, event marketers can examine the analytics of the social media platform to make the best use of mapping and data visualization.

5. Utilizing Website and Landing Page Analytics

An expert event marketing agency can help you create a compelling website and landing page for your event and utilize analytics to improve results. 

Follow these steps to utilize analytics:

• Tracking website traffic
• Analyzing user behavior
• Identifying conversion points and drop-off stages
• Analyze average session duration
• Understand how users are discovering your content
• Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of your interface

Also, these are helpful for SEO for event marketing plans. For example, bounce rate tells you the page where a user leaves before taking action on the event website.

6. Validating and Refining Personas

After you define your buyer person, it’s time to refine further. As the strategy continuously evolves, validating event marketing buyer personas for better results is important.

Validating and refining of buyer persona for the event is an ongoing process. It is recommended to be practiced every couple of months or quarterly after analyzing the results of the event marketing campaign.

Testing persona accuracy

To truly connect with potential users, you need to test their accuracy. You need to compare the data and revise your assumptions by identifying gaps.

Here are some ways to test persona accuracy:

• Prototyping
• Role-playing
• Usability testing
• Storytelling
• Feedback

Seeking feedback from stakeholders

Most importantly, seeking stakeholder feedback and aligning persona accordingly will help event marketers get their buy-in and support. You can share your personas through different formats, such as reports, posters, videos, and workshops.

Iterating and refining personas as needed

Analyze the impact of personas and refine them as and when required.  Indicators such as satisfaction, engagement, retention, conversion, registration, and attendance.

Know Your Ideal Customers

The first question we ask ourselves is, who are the types of people or businesses that we would really enjoy collaborating with?  Who are our dream customers?

The life of you and your team will thrive if you can effectively find the people who truly identify with your brand.  This is an ideal situation as opposed to pursuing just anyone, which can cost a lot of marketing dollars and bring unnecessary stress to your company.  

Doing the research on your customer segments and knowing who you don’t want as a customer will bring some much-needed clarity on who you do want.

NOTE: it’s possible to have multiple dream customers. Create persona buyers for all of them.

Who is Able to Pay for Your Services?

The next question we ask is who can afford our services. Too many businesses focus on clients that only discuss the cost and not the value associated with it.  By focusing on clients that are aware of the value that you bring, you’re able to have a better working partnership geared for the long term.  

Finding customers that understand the value you bring from your services is the first step to a successful bootstrapped business.

Persona Buyer’s Research Sources

Use the following tools for your audience desk research:

• Niche forums
• Online libraries
• Wikipedia
• Check competition + their advertising
• Newspapers
• Google Trends
• Amazon or other marketplaces
• Clickbank.com
• TV and Video commercials
• Google Adwords
• Facebook Audience Insights

Awesome, we have done the research; it’s time to summarize your findings into a persona buyer overview. Remember that this exercise aims to craft an in-depth buyer persona that you can go after in your next event. Whatever you’ve learned so far, you can test it out when promoting posts on LinkedIn.

We have seen too many examples of personas from new clients that have been too generic and questions about why their marketing hasn’t been working.  We were thrilled to have given them more guidance.

Use Case Buyer Personas: YourGoals

Who is my dream customer?

The CEO of YourGoals prefers to work with women in the same age group as herself. This is based on previous customers she worked with and with whom she believes she connects the best.

Her reasons are simply because it’s easier to understand and level with them. Besides the physical aspect of personal training, your goals also focus on cultivating a stronger mentality that can apply to all areas of life. She feels like men generally don’t open up to her as much as women do, thus making her job a bit more difficult.

Who can afford my services?

Many people would love to work with a personal trainer. However, there are only a limited amount of people who can afford it. As there was not enough customer data, we decided to look at the competition and make our own personal assumptions.

Personal training is high in price, so the individual needs to have a more-than-average income. Questions we’ve asked are things like if they are University schooled or an entrepreneur. Single or married?

Your goal likes to work with women older than 30, this demo works out great because most people at that age have a stable income and thus have more money to spend on personal training.

Who is the decision-maker?

In this case, the main focus will be on women that are decision-makers themselves.

We will look at the competition and who is following them. Then we search if there is any public research on the topic. For Your Goals, we came up with the following:

Conclusion

To conclude, we can say that event buyer personas help event marketers understand the audience they’re promoting the event to and how likely they are to become interested.

Each buyer persona represents the ideal profile that might be interested in your event, considering all aspects of their demographics and psychographic traits. By conducting buyer persona research for an event, you make data-driven decisions, make better calls on content and improve communication to increase event visibility and attendance.

After all, event buyer persona is the key to success.