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How to Discover Your Customer Journeys and Buyer Personas

If you’re a business owner, you’re always looking to understand your target audience better.

By understanding your audience’s needs, wants, and desires, you can figure out how to position your product as the solution to those same needs, wants, and desires. You can also brainstorm new additions to your product line that will boost your profit margins and deepen customer loyalty.

But understanding your audience isn’t as easy as asking them what they need (although that can certainly help).

To understand your particular target audience, you need to identify the customer journey and buyer personas for your brand.

Need help doing that? Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered with this article.

What Is a Customer Journey?

Simply put, a customer journey maps the steps a customer takes as they get to know, eventually purchase from, and continue to engage and buy from your brand. That last step is what differentiates it from a buyer journey, which ends at the point of purchase. Customer journeys continue beyond that, allowing you to focus on retention and upselling as well as the initial acquisition.

Why Is a Customer Journey So Important?

It returns the focus to your customers, not you. Your customers are the ones driving revenue. Likewise, they should be the ones driving your marketing initiatives, not the other way around. Only by paying attention to your customers can you stay focused on delivering the products they want, and providing the content to persuade them.
It prevents leaky funnels. A perfect marketing funnel doesn’t exist. There will always be people who drop out for one reason or another. But you can patch more of those holes by identifying the content, website, and product gaps that are losing you customers.
It helps you discover who your customers truly are. When it comes to marketing personalization, specifics are always more effective than broad-sweeping demographic buckets. With a defined customer journey, you can pinpoint the types of people you’re after and the behaviors they take to engage with your brand.

Mapping Your Customer Journey

In today’s world of countless customer touchpoints, the customer journey is no longer linear. It often involves lots of steps back and forth.

A customer may see your social post, read your blog, go back to social media to follow you, forget about you for a while, be reminded by another social post, sign up for your email newsletter, and then receive an email that convinced them to make a purchase.

The customer journey is unique to each customer, but it is possible to simplify things. You just need to have buyer personas.

What Are Buyer Personas?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target customer, outlining their key demographic information, motivations and pain points, and marketing channels of choice.

Typically, a brand will have a handful of personas they’re targeting. For example, an ethical swimwear line might have two main personas:

The first persona could describe vegans who are primarily focused on incorporating veganism into other areas of their lives, such as clothing. They follow vegan influencers on social media and read their blogs. They also tend to shop from eco-conscious or local retailers rather than big box stores.
The second persona describes fashion-forward Gen Zers who are focused primarily on the latest fashion trends, including sustainability fashion. These folks would follow fashion influencers on Instagram, or watch YouTube channels.

Either of these personas has elements that make them distinct. They have different motivations causing them to seek out the ethical swimwear, they’d hear about it through different channels, and they may fall into different age groups, income levels, or relationship statuses.

When developing a buyer persona, many business owners find them easier to remember (and therefore easier to consider when crafting your marketing strategy) when they’re given a name and a face. As such, it’s common to see buyer personas that look something like this:

Even if you don’t choose to name your personas, at a minimum each should include:

Key demographic details (age range, location, marital status, education, and income level)
Goals and motivations (specific to your brand or service)
Challenges or pain points (specifically, the ones your brand can solve)
Where and how they shop (online, social media, in-person, with or without coupons)
Where they discover brands (influencers, blogs, traditional news outlets, TV, podcasts, social media)

Now, how are you supposed to amass this information? Let’s tackle that in the next section.

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4 Audience Research Tools for Customer Personas and Their Journey

In order to develop your customer journey and buyer personas, you’ll want to perform deep audience research. That may involve organizing surveys or feedback groups with current and potential customers.

You can also get a jumpstart right now by looking to your existing customer data. This reveals who your current customers are. You can then refine your marketing to target these customers more effectively, and determine what you need to do to attract the other target customers you’re not reaching quite yet.

1. Traffic Analytics

Tools like Google Analytics help you answer questions like:

What are the top entry channels (email, social, or SEO)?
What are your top entry pages?
Do they differ by channel?
What can you do to optimize those pages for the channels they’re already performing well on?
What’s your bounce rate?
Is it common for people to leave after one page, or do they browse further?

In Google Analytics, you can view the specific content journeys your customers take. Navigate to Behavior > Behavior Flow, and you’ll see the top landing pages on your site, and how customers browse from there.

Take this snapshot of Google Analytics for a fast-casual restaurant, for instance. We see that the majority of people visit the menu page after landing from the home page, so as a brand, we’d want to make sure that links to the Menu are highly prominent on the homepage to reduce drop offs.

2. Behavior Tracking Software

Tools like HotJar and Crazy Egg help you answer questions like:

Do people drop off as they scroll down your website?
Are your CTAs and important navigational links placed in the areas their eyes are most likely to track?
Do your forms have too many fields? Too few?
How else do you need to improve your UX to boost your conversion rate?

3. Social Media Analytics

Your Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and Instagram Analytics are a treasure trove of information. You can discover who’s following you, where they live, and what their interests are. These interests may include other companies or influencers you can partner with to promote your brand.

4. Persona Generator Tools

There are also many online tools that help you map out buyer personas and customer journeys. One of our favorites is the Make My Persona generator by HubSpot. You can beautifully outline all the details about each of your personas, and export a visual graphic to download for posterity.

Finding Your Target Audience

Mapping customer journeys and building buyer personas. Who knew owning a business would require so much data visualization?

If you’d prefer to focus on the operations and leave this complicated fact-finding mission to the experts, contact Your Marketing People. We’ll work with you to understand your needs and goals as a company, so we can align those to meet the needs and goals of your target audience.