With QR Codes, You Can Create a Buyer Persona That Will Take Your Brand up a Notch — Here’s How

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, built out of the data you’ve already collected about them. You can use this persona to align your business goals or strategy across all departments, from sales to marketing and beyond.

Sally Shopper. Millennial Meg. Conscientious Ken — they could be your company’s poster child for success: your ideal customer. But who are they? You’ve spent time getting to know them, and you know their likes and dislikes. You’ve built up a whole story around each character.  

Perhaps you know that Millennial Meg works from her laptop and is more likely to spend on coffee than buy food from your coffee shops, or that Conscientious Ken likes to mull over his purchases before he makes a decision. 

Think of Sally, Meg, and Ken as your squad — and yes, they do have #squadgoals. Or buyer persona goals, at least: they align with your company’s mission and vision. Each persona represents a key segment of your customer base that you can use to ensure your sales and marketing strategies are consistent with each other and that the products you develop for your brand are in line with your campaigns. 

They’re the people who you want to buy from your business and the people your marketing and sales team should have in mind when developing new campaigns and targets. But how did you create your buyer persona? And how do you know that the buyer persona you created does represent the real-life people who use your products or services?

To understand more about developing your own buyer persona squad and how they can help you reach the customers who matter most, you’ll need to understand more about how to create buyer personas. From social media to generating brand awareness and more, QR Code Generator is here to lead the way!

How to create a buyer persona for your brand with QR Codes

A buyer persona is a close relative of, but not the same as, your target market. It’s actually a more detailed snapshot of who your ideal customer is and is more specific than just categorizing your customers by segmentation. When creating buyer persona examples for your business, you’ll need to flesh out more than just a general overview of your different target markets — you’ll need details.

There are some key points to consider when developing the ideal buyer persona for your business or brand. 

1. Give your buyer persona as many characteristics as possible

Creating buyer personas means more than writing a cute name. It means developing a well-rounded picture of who your customers are: their prospective ages, jobs, where they’re likely to hang out, how much they like to spend, their preferences, and more. It’s also possible to have more than one for your business, with each persona then centered around a specific part of your target audience. 

2. Use QR Codes to get as much data as you can

To create your ideal customer, however, you’ll need data and information to back it up. In practice, Meg, Sally, and Ken weren’t dreamed up before a brand launched a particular product, or a service opened its doors to the public — they were the result of hard-earned research and data capture by sales and marketing teams. 

To leverage QR Codes to the best of your advantage when creating buyer personas, you’ll need to learn how to track QR Code scans and how this data can capture a better picture of your customers.

3. Use targeted campaigns to learn more about your customers

When integrated with both print and digital advertising, you can use QR Codes to test how, where, and when customers reacted to a particular piece of your marketing strategy and use this information to build up buyer persona characteristics and preferences.

For example, it’s possible to use a QR Code for social media in the campaigns you develop to see which customers interact with your promotional strategy. And, when you’ve built up enough data to create a buyer persona for your brand, this is where product marketing with QR Codes steps in: you can run new campaigns with those customer personas in mind and use them to see how real-life customers react to them. 

4. Get real-life testimonials and feedback

If your marketing strategy has simpler needs, there is another way: asking your customers directly! A Rating QR Code and QR Code Feedback form allow you to pose questions directly to those customers who pass through your store, have your menu in front of them, or who are avid players of the video game you developed — giving you the opportunity to ask them who they are.

There’s so much you can do to create your ideal buyer persona with QR Codes, but to give you an idea of how to create your own buyer persona examples, let’s put them into practice.  

5 Examples of QR Codes and Buyer Personas in Action

No matter your industry, you should have an idea of who it is that you’re selling to. Luckily, QR Codes — and the multitudes of QR Code types at your disposal to help with your buyer persona definition — can help you get to know your customers better. 

The tracking data you have the potential to collect from each QR Code, along with the information the Rating and Feedback QR Codes allow you to ask from your customers, can help you create a customer persona that will take your business up a notch.

To inspire you about how to create a buyer persona and how QR Codes can help you every step of the way, we’ve detailed how five different industries could use different QR Codes to reach out to their customers and collect information they can then use to build their ideal buyer personas.

#1 Restaurant industry

Buyer personas aren’t limited to product-focused industries — services undoubtedly benefit from knowing their target audiences, too. If you’re running a coffee shop, for example, do you want to target Meg, freelancing from her laptop while sipping cold brew coffee? Or Ken, who’ll take clients to lunch? Or both?

In this scenario, getting to know your customers better, and using this information when building customer personas, can be as simple as asking them yourself! 

If you’re developing a new direction with your menu and want to know if it clicks with a particular segment of the customers who walk through your restaurant or bar’s doors, and how this can be used to paint a picture of your ideal customer, including a Rating QR Code on menus or receipts is the simplest, most straightforward way to ask. 

In the below example, a restaurant included a Rating QR Code on their receipt and asked customers to scan it. The restaurant asked a few simple questions that were easy to respond to — what customers thought of the service, how likely they were to buy certain menu items again, and some key questions to get an idea of demographics, such as if they were students who lived in the area, and their age range, for example — and correlated the responses.

Rating QR Code on a restaurant receipt prompting the patron to scan and rate their experience
A Rating QR Code on a restaurant receipt asks customers to rate their experiences. 

#2 Retail

In the retail industry, knowing your audience is crucial to delivering the experience your customers will appreciate most. Whether you run a fashion boutique with a style-savvy set of shoppers in mind or a grocery store catering to nutrition-conscious consumers, creating buyer persona examples that are rich in details will help your sales, buying, and marketing teams source and sell products that your customers will truly love. 

Sometimes, however, your customers might need a little nudge to tell a little more about themselves than they might normally be willing to. 

To learn more about its customers, and to create more holistic buyer persona examples that will help its brand align across all its different departments, the boutique in the below example incentivized its customers to scan their Feedback QR Code by coupling it with a QR Code giveaway.

The premise is simple: by scanning the code, customers can enter themselves into a competition for shopping vouchers. In return, they answer a few straightforward questions that the store can use to build up a picture of who they are: their ages, where they come from, their preferences, their style, their background, and what they think of the store.

Feedback QR Code on a boutique's table tent prompting shoppers to scan and leave feedback for a chance to win a shopping spree
A fashion boutique asks shoppers to leave feedback via a QR Code and gives them the opportunity to take part in a giveaway.

# 3 Software and game developers

Gaming might take up a whopping 37% of internet traffic, but how do you know which kind of gamer is likely to appreciate your game or platform? 

Even in the gaming industry, customer persona marketing has its place. There’s a world of difference between a casual gamer tapping at a puzzle game on a commute and a die-hard Fortnite enthusiast on a marathon session — so where does your game lie in this spectrum?

QR Codes can help you learn more about the kind of gamer — and buyer — personas you can build for your software and games. In the below example, a Social Media QR Code is used in an app store to direct gamers to specific social media channels. The company can use the tracking data to build up a better picture of who plays its games, where they are, and what kind of devices they use, and correlate this with the data of its followers on social media.

Social Media QR Code on a gaming company's e-shop prompting visitors to scan and follow their social for the latest news
To build a better profile of its users, this gaming company encouraged users to follow its social media channels.

#4 Consumer Products

Who wants to buy your product? And how do you create a cohesive marketing strategy that speaks to both your brand and your ideal customers?

If you have a niche product, you’ll want to know who your ideal customers are so you can sell to them. Building a buyer persona is the solution, of course — but how do you collect the information you need to create one?

In this instance, an emerging gin distillery leveraged an Image Gallery QR Code to get scans from buyers. When drinks enthusiasts scan the code, they can view luscious images of the gin’s ingredients and production and visit the distillery’s website. 

For the distillery, they were also able to collect scan data: where and when the QR Code was scanned, and on what device. The image gallery QR Code also contains a URL linking to the company’s website, where visitors are asked a series of short questions — their age, preferences, and profession, among others —  that are then used to build a brand buyer persona.

QR Code on a bottle of gin prompts people to scan for behind the scenes business practices
A coupon QR code helps this gin company collect more data about its customers.

# 5 Electronic Products

In 1997, under the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple launched its ‘Think Different’ campaign — and completely pivoted how people view its products. What made this campaign special was how it transformed Apple from a niche company on the verge of collapse into one of tech’s biggest companies and leaned into the emergent lifestyle aspirations of consumers at the time. 

Crucially, buyer personas played a key role in creating the Apple you recognize today — these buyer persona goals are aligned with the kind of consumer for whom tech is an essential part of life. 

Of course, Apple’s trillion-dollar success is a story many can only dream of. It does, however, demonstrate the importance of understanding buyer personas in every industry — electronics included.

In the below example, an audio equipment company wanted to update its ideal buyer persona and use it to develop new products. To do this, it needed more cohesive information about its customers — who are they? What are they likely to spend? How do they view technology in their lives?

It targeted the public with a poster QR Code campaign and encouraged passersby to scan the Dynamic URL QR Code integrated into the poster’s design. The information it collected was two-fold: on one hand, they were able to use QR Code tracking data to see where, when, and on what device potential customers had scanned the code, and, when the customers opened the URL, they were directed to complete a short, more detailed survey that offered a discount off their next purchase of audio equipment.

QR Code on an electronic company's poster ad prompting viewers to scan and visit their website
For this electronics company, a QR Code on their poster campaign encourages customers to visit their website.

Next steps: testing your buyer personas

Data? Check. The ages, backgrounds, preferences, and needs of your customers? Check. Now, it’s time to put your personas into action!

Once you’ve collected data from your QR Code campaigns — whether asking customers for feedback, using scan data to see where and when they interacted with your products or directing them to your website — you can correlate this information to create buyer persona examples that will give you a better picture of your customers.

By using buyer personas with QR Codes and creating a marketing campaign targeted at the ideal buyer persona you have created, you’ll be able to see how your ideal customer lives up to its image. Your new campaigns should be aligned with your buyer personas, and by tracking their success, you’ll be able to see how your hard work has paid off.

Author
Aoife McKeown

Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Aoife has been living and working in Berlin, Germany, since 2012. Her work focuses on creative writing, editing, and marketing copywriting, and she’s currently a Content Writer with Egoditor. Feel free to connect with Aoife on LinkedIn or reach out to her via her website.

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