Why is it easy to buy the perfect birthday present for your bestie but almost impossible gifting someone more distant? The answer to that question should be easy. Because you know your best friend’s preferences better. This is precisely the idea of personas in content marketing. Get better acquainted with your target group; interests, favorite information channels, likes and dislikes and you will be better equipped to create content and distribution that matter. In this article you will get insights on what you should think about when creating personas, and which tools and tricks to make use of.
What are personas?
Personas are documented, fictive characters, representing your ideal audience(s), and done right they can make content marketing efforts hit the mark by having a specific person in mind when deciding market segmentation, distributionchannels, content angles and influencers. It is much easier to come up withmind moving content ideas for one specific person rather than 25 different people. According to a case from boardview.io the use of personas can improve the customer engagement six-fold while resulting in a 20% increase in revenue.
This is not an exercise performed over a few hours, but a complex and continuous process where data from many different sources reveal an informational pattern that enable you to give birth to fictive persons who would not only want to consume your content – but also buy your product.
What should I know about my persona?
There is no ‘one solution fits all’ when it comes to personas. It is all down to what type of content, product or service you are doing, the goals for your communication and also whether you target B2B or B2C. In many cases, it will make sense to identify several different personas. For a product like toys it could be the target user (a 5-year-old child) and the target buyer (her mother), you can have different personas for different products or in B2B you can have several different company roles influence the buying decision also calling for multiple personas. Here are some considerations to make.
Demographics and location
Gender, age, profession and geographic location is a good place to startwhen defining your persona. You should have a good idea about this already but support your assumptions with research as we’ll touch on in a minute. It is a good idea to name your personas as it will be easier to communicate and more relatable to the organization. Names like Marketing Margaret or Evan theEnvironmentalist both reflect roles/types and are easy to remember foreveryone.
Background
Putting some thought into which phase of life your persona is in willgive you an idea of obstacles, wants and needs as well as how your particular offering fit in. This could be information on upbringing, marital/parental status and maybe more importantly interests, preferences and ambitions. If you can combine your content with something relatable for your persona, you will automatically become more relevant.
Daily routine
How would a day in your persona’s day look like? Where would she go and how would she act? How, when and where would she consume content? Knowing these things will make it easier for you to choose distribution channels and timelines for your content.
Obstacles and challenges
You can dig even deeper into the person you are molding. What are her obstacles and pain points in relation to your offering? Are there any specific psychological aspects of her character to be aware of and what are her general day to day challenges. All of this takes a lot of in-depth research, but it will help you with planning your content to perfectly align with your persona’s preferences.
