Analyzing Customer Reviews to Build Better Personas

When you’re planning an activation, pop-up, or other experiential event for your brand, building personas is a great way to develop insight into the interests, needs, and motivations of your target audience — the group or groups of people comprising your brand’s ideal customers.

Demographic data, survey results, and one-on-one interviews can provide a wealth of information for building these personas, but another fantastic source of information is often overlooked: customer reviews.

Reviews aren’t just a place customers go to complain about shipping delays and misunderstood policies. They’re a window into how your past and present customers perceive your brand, their expectations for and experiences with your products, and the quality of customer service you provide. Within those perceptions is a vast amount of information about who your customers really are and how to connect with them.

Analyzing those reviews identifies themes and common characteristics among your customers, which aids in the creation of personas — detailed fictional representations of your target audience.

Personas are useful because the worst mistake a marketer can make is trying to target everybody, says delve.ai. By analyzing reviews and crafting personas based on your findings, you can “supercharge your marketing results” by focusing on the consumers who are the best fit for your brand.

Here’s how to find relevant reviews of your product and use them effectively as you create personas for your next experiential event.

How Are Reviews Better Than Surveys or Interviews?

When a customer responds to a survey or sits down for an interview, they’re answering questions you ask them — so the scope of those questions is limited by your notions about your product and your brand. But you don’t know what you don’t know, and you might not ask about subjects that matter to the customer.

When a customer writes a review, on the other hand, they’re describing an interaction with your brand at a firsthand level, revealing what they value, what they desire, and what they find frustrating.

And unlike surveys, which customers might complete out of politeness or for the sake of a coupon code, many times customers write reviews because something about the experience — the product or service, the interactions with your brand — moved them. That information creates a much richer, more personal picture of how customers use your products, how they feel about your brand, what motivates them as consumers, and where their pain points and frustrations lie. It helps you understand what feelings your brand inspires and what they feel most strongly about.

What Can Be Learned from Reviews?

Reviews can help build buyer personas by identifying psychographic traits — values, social status, desires, goals, interests, opinions, and lifestyle choices, according to a recent blog post on delve.ai. These traits, combined with demographics like age, gender, household income, and geographic location, can be assembled into individual personas representing different segments of your target audience.

Positive reviews help identify what customers consider your brand’s strengths; pay attention to what they praise and any direct comparisons they make between your product and another brand’s.

Spend as much time with negative reviews as with positive ones. Doing so might not only clue you in as to customer pain points, it might also suggest that your product is hitting some of the “wrong” customers — people who aren’t likely to enjoy or appreciate your product for any number of reasons. You may also learn both new uses for your product and misuses of your product — instances where you may need to educate consumers about the product to increase satisfaction.

Don’t neglect your competitors — looking at reviews for other brands’ products or services can help identify what differentiates your brand in consumers’ eyes as well as deepen your understanding of what matters to customers. Comparing the two can reveal your products’ obvious strengths and weaknesses, but paying close attention to emerging patterns can reveal strengths and weaknesses that hadn’t occurred to you. The absence of a characteristic that irritates your competitor’s customers might be an asset you hadn’t realized was important to consumers.

Where Can I Find Customer Reviews?

Your website could be one source for customer reviews, but that’s just a starting point if you hope to build a rich persona reflective of lots of consumers. Using multiple sources ensures a more balanced picture of how consumers feel, says a blog post on idiomatic.com. “For example, people are likely to post negative reviews and comments on public forums like social media but may be less honest about their struggles when speaking to a representative of your business directly.”

Googling your business is a good place to start; if your company has a Google Business profile, customers can rate you on a 1 to 5 scale, and they often include written feedback. Amazon is another great source, if you sell through that marketplace. Trustpilot is a third-party site that lets consumers post reviews of products; even if your brand isn’t represented there, competitors and similar-but-different product categories might be.

Social media, especially Facebook, is a rich source of customer commentary. “The sheer size of [Facebook’s] user base has made it one of the most popular business review sites,” says delve.ai.

How Are Reviews Analyzed?

Once you’ve collected customer feedback in whatever form — reviews, surveys, interviews — look for trends and patterns. If you have access to star ratings, calculate averages and trends over time. If you’re working with written feedback, “You’ll want to categorize feedback to assign a ranking or understand which aspects of your organization people are providing feedback on and whether that aspect is positive or negative,” says idiomatic.com.

Categorizing feedback “helps to make sense of the data and drive actionable insights,” says fibery.io, which suggests categorizing by

• sentiment (positive, negative, neutral)
• theme (e.g., features, customer service, price)
• customer segment (such as demographic or psychographic groups)

From there, identify aspects of the product or service that receive the most commentary as well as popular themes such as ease of use, aesthetic experience, or quality.

When you have a clear picture of what customers comment on and who they are, begin to assemble personas that combine demographic characteristics, psychographic traits, and responses to your brand’s products or services.

A persona that describes your ideal customer is what hubspot.com calls a “proto persona.” Such a persona might include gender, age, location, household income, education level, and family structure (married/single, number of children). From there, assign each persona a set of interests, needs, and problems that align with your product. These can be summarized in statements like “Jeff wants environmentally friendly products that save time and fit his budget” or “Amy is very health-conscious but doesn’t like plain water and is suspicious of artificial sweeteners.”

Each of these personas should encompass multiple characteristics identified in your research such as demographic details along with pain points or positive product attributes your customer reviews uncovered. Naming each persona helps make it “real” — and thus more memorable for your team as you design your activation or other experiential marketing event.

Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing agency based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile Marketing has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Get in touch to discuss your next project.