Creating Buyer Personas is the key to understand, at a very early stage, your ideal customers. This is an art that you must master in order to ask the right questions to the right people and, logically, get the right answers for your needs as a Digital Marketer.
Before getting into the matter, is time to introduce the main character of this article: research. When we think about it, one of the humongous queries that comes on top is: “Where can I get reliable information?”
Therefore, we’ve come up with the top 7 sites (or at least ideas or suggestions) in which you can gather demographic data to build solid and data-based Buyer Personas for your business. So, before moving on to the websites/dataproviders, let’s remind quickly what the term of Buyer Persona stands for:
As we state in our marketing glossary (which you can access for free here), a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation designed to teach and to guide you towards who is your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your target’s pains and goals.
This whole definition allows you to understand both the meaning and importance of a Buyer Persona, to comprehend your prospect’s behavior and background in order to drive your marketing strategies accurately.
But where do you get real-data? Nowadays, data is literally in the air since we ourselves or data marketplaces/agencies have at their disposal direct communication channels with people out there. You can take advantage of them to create a solid starting point whenever you want to collect data for building Buyer Personas.
Keep in mind that it is essential to collect as much information as you can such as your Buyer Persona industry, business (in case of a B2B scenario), geographical location, experience, job function, pains, goals and of course demographic data. You can always give a visual identity to your Buyer Persona by adding a stock image.
Now, it’s time for you to know this 7 pretty websites we share with you as recommendations to start building your Buyer Persona.
Shoutout to Zippia for collecting great quality and recent demographics on US People, focused on job seekers. This website will guide you to a well-founded starting point if you know what kind of employee/job industry are you trying to reach. We’ve personally used it to build some Buyer Personas, and it simply rocks.
Once you enter Zippia, you can search for any job title (e.g Sales Director) and the results will show data like average age, average income, employment percentage by gender, and more related info to your Buyer Persona.
In their own words, Gale “provides sources that offer demographical data and demographic research” on topics like Spending Patterns, Consumer Demand, Political Influences, Trends and Projections, etc.
The best feature of this huge data library is that you can get your analysis to the next level and help you choosing a business location, identifying your market size, researching your competitors, among others.
One thing you can do with their “powerful online resource” Demographics Now is generating demographic reports (comparison, rank, or summary) focused on a specific geography to understand the characteristics and attitudes of consumers within your chosen range.
Regardless of the country, it is not that common to not find a National Census Bureau website that can also guide you towards knowing your surrounding community respecting their behavioral patterns and economy.
For example, in the US Census Bureau Website, you can find a section called QuickFacts that will provide you general statistics for “all states and counties, and for cities and towns with a population of 5,000 or more”. You can also filter the info as you need so you can explore and segment even more your Buyer Persona.
Do not forget to also take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (US Only).
Even though the World Bank focuses on a global perspective, they deliver great quality data and indicators that you can also use when widening your knowledge about foreign Buyer Personas just if, for example, your goal is to impact an international market, but you don’t have enough cultural and social context to do so.
The most interesting part of this website is that you can cleverly turn data indicators into insights and possible pain points of a certain population, gender, etc., that will get you out of that narrow vision of your Buyer Persona.
Simply choose the data category you want to learn more about and start filtering by country, time and indicators. Try it out!
There are a lot of existing hiring platforms but very few of them also gather data on job titles, job seniorities, annual income, average age, etc. Here you go some examples: CWJobs.uk, Careerexplorer, Zippia, etc.
For example, if you want to deepen the annual income of certain job industry or job title, in CWJobs UK you can use their salary checker, and it’ll be displayed “the average salary plus the highest and lowest average salary for that position”.
Datarade does just as they promise, you can find the right data effortlessly given the adopted marketplace structure in their business model. As a result, you can just go “buy” (as simple as that) the data you need from one or more of their data partners.
Since they have a lot of research possibilities, you can start by browsing all categories and find the right data to your business and Buyer Personas from 560+ data categories. On the other hand, it is also possible to get a free expert advice, which will guide you through the whole sourcing process of finding the right data providers for you.
At last but of course not least, you can always take a look (if you are already running your business) at what is the data you’re getting about your audience (coming from your website, social media, Word-of-Mouth and other marketing channels).
By doing this, you will get to know better the persons that are already interacting with your brand and how they do it. For example, in Google Analytics you have the option to gather important data by exploring the following reports (not limited to):
Now, with these recommendations, you can go into further detail on who is your idea buyer and craft solid and well-oriented marketing strategies that will engage with your audience.
Remember to always have your Buyer Persona on top of your mind when taking business and marketing decisions.
Need help creating or defining your brand’s buyer persona(s)? Then, you must check out our Buyer Persona Generator Tool designed to help your business and marketing strategies engage your ideal audience. GETitOUT makes it easy with beautiful buyer persona templates, examples, and AI suggestions for pain points & goals.
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