Content marketing is a must for any company that wants success in building its business. However, it is no longer enough to create just blog posts or eBooks. Content should be persona-driven. In this guide, you will learn how to create persona-driven content and why you need it.
A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. The general idea is that you should create content for your audience based on their needs, wants, and preferences.
Besides, personas can reduce the amount of guesswork that goes into creating content, making it more relevant to your readers and allowing you to focus on the things that interest them.
Trying to understand how to create high-converting persona-driven content? It can be tricky. To help you with this, I’ve compiled these 8 simple but impactful strategies that will get you started on your persona-driven content journey.
What is a persona?
A persona is a detailed description of an archetype, or group, of potential customers. Creating personas helps define user expectations so that you can create the appropriate content for a specific audience.
What is persona-driven content?
Simply put, persona-driven content is created with your prospects’ persona in mind. To help you identify how you want to portray your business, use these 8 strategies to create persona-driven content based on your target audiences’ characteristics, interests, and goals.
1. Define your ideal audience
If you want to reach your audience, first ask yourself who they are. Identifying the audience you are interested in targeting is the first and most important step in persona creation.
Do your research and learn more about your target market so you can create content that they will love!
Knowing their demographics will help you shape your content into the right voice and tone. If a majority of your core readers have kids, write about kid-friendly activities. If most are female, think about the type of content they would love to see or read.
Your job as a content marketer is to determine who exactly this person is and then focus only on writing content that speaks to them. This will save both you and your audience time in the long run.
2. Define your buyer personas based on data, not assumptions
Each day, your prospective customers arrive at your site, inspired to connect with your brand. Time and again, this person will take the time to read. But only if your content is relevant to them.
Buyers have their values and behaviors that influence the way they consume information. Defining your buyer personas is about discovering who they are and what they want. Doing this is based on data, not assumptions.
The problem with defining buyer personas based on assumptions is they aren’t real people and therefore aren’t representative of your audience. This rarely leads to effective content creation.
3. Provide value and solve problems
The purpose of every visitor is to get value from your website. We have to take full advantage of this opportunity by showing visitors that we are capable of solving their needs and problems.
To be truly memorable and to convert more visitors into customers, your content must provide valuable information. But providing some useful, relevant information is not enough; it must be presented in a way that helps solve problems.
Remember that people pay for value. With the right value proposition, you can sell your product and services to your customers. You will also attract excellent content contributors to your blog or website.
4. Find out what niche topics and content pieces your personas are interested in
What do your personas care about? Do they like to shop online? Or do they prefer brick & mortar shopping? Are they interested in professional development, or are they looking for the next new trend in fashion? What about hobbies and family life?
Knowing what topics your personas care about can give you some direction on possible blog content and topics. Being in the shoes of each persona is a great way to create thought pieces and content that speaks directly to their problems and interests.
Find out what topics or problems your personas are drawn to by having a conversation with them. This will help you narrow down where to put your advertising dollars down.
The next step is to figure out where your personas spend their time. This will help you with your strategies on how to reach them. Better yet, this will provide a good idea of what type of content your personas want to read.
Location is another important factor to help you reach your customers. You can use social media analytics and Google Analytics. You can also use other website analytics to check where exactly your personas are spending their time.
Whether you use social media or not, it is important to understand where your personas spend their time online. It’s also important to remember that they visit different sites at different hours of the day, so don’t forget about these differences when planning your social media campaigns.
6. Create scenarios based on your persona
Target the persona with complete, accurate information. Use only information that applies to your entire audience. Create a story or scenario relevant to your persona and write the content from that perspective.
These scenarios include specific and detailed contexts your personas would experience while on the web. This helps deepen your discovery. It also will help you craft messages and content that resonates more directly with your audience.
To craft accurate scenarios: Understand your target persona’s needs. Get an insight into understanding the behaviors, motivations, goals, and personalities of your target personas. This should drive all of the work you do in understanding how they exist on the web.
7. The right content at the right time
Content is an important part of every business communication strategy. However, you have to know when and how to use different types of content depending on the relationship you have with your audience.
The best way to deliver the right content is to know what type of content that your persona is expecting. Take inventory of your content. Also, look at the volume and types of content you have available.
Then analyze which type of content can be delivered during which phase in the audience decision-making process. You can refine your content plan by matching up the kind of content you might have available with the expectation of your persona.
8. Keep your adjustments up to date
I know we all love to focus on being creative with content and design, but make sure you keep your adjustments up to date. Some of the most basic stuff can boost readership.
People change and so do their interests. When you start, you should update your adjustments regularly by conducting some thorough online research. You don’t have to do this daily. Doing this once every 2 or 3 weeks is sufficient.
This is also a great way to track what worked and what didn’t with your visitors over time. Your analytics will become more accurate as well.
Here’s why you need to create persona-driven content
Communicate with audience in their language
If you want to get people’s attention and communicate with them in their language, then you need to learn how to effectively create persona-driven content. That means writing about topics that appeal to each persona by the way they handle challenges.
Creating content for your audience is essential to sustaining your leads. It also requires you to consider the information they need. Once you define your target personas, you can start to communicate with them in their language.
Increases the specificity of the target demographic
Cast a wide net by writing for the masses? Think again. By using custom and persona-driven content, your messaging has a greater chance to resonate with the actual person reading it. The most important step of developing persona-driven content is to properly define your persona.
Analyze target demographics by thoroughly researching your customer. Find out their name, age, where they work, how they spend their time outside of work, and what they value in a company. Once you’ve successfully defined a customer persona, you can begin to create specific content that appeals to them.
Improved knowledge of the problem areas
As marketers, we want to build our brands, but that means putting in the time to fully understand who are end-users of their products and services. The goal is to uncover all of those moments within their day and week when they seek solutions to their needs.
When I talk about persona-driven content, I’m talking about creating information that is useful to our audience and solves a problem. With a clearer understanding of your target audience, you are better able to understand what problems they have, and how you can solve them.
Find out what your consumers expect from your brand
Content marketing is about humanizing your brand and reaching out to your audience. Who are the people that buy your products and how can you appeal to them using persona-driven content?
No matter if you’re developing a TV ad or a video for your blog, chances are that your consumers have certain expectations when it comes to what your brand should deliver.
The sooner you can understand the heart and soul of your consumers, the clearer your branding will be. They do not care about you, they care about themselves.
Promotes content by increasing traffic
The ultimate way to generate traffic is by producing good content that people want to read. By focusing on the benefits for each of the personas, you can more effectively tailor your messaging.
This allows you to tailor content and outreach for each persona, which allows them to be better informed and makes it more likely they will engage with your content.
FAQs
Do I need a blog for my content marketing campaigns?
Yes, you do. Like all online marketing, content marketing benefits greatly from a blog. A blog is a remarkable way to distinguish your business from the noise in the marketplace. It’s the best way to prove expertise and to build trust.
Furthermore, blogs act as an entry point for your target audience, generate leads & social signals for your content. More than just creating a simple blog, you must write regularly by adding valuable content on topics of interest.
See also: How to format blog posts that Google will love.
What happens if I don’t understand my audience?
You don’t have to be a psychotherapist to recognize that understanding the needs and wants of your audience is essential to building a strong customer base.
Defining your audience allows you to see “through their eyes” and understand what they want, search for, and idealize. Understanding these aspects of your persona allows you to establish a meaningful connection with them through writing that truly resonates.
When you don’t understand your audience, you will have to spend time on the internet or on surveys to try to understand them. For example, if your product is an item for children, it may be helpful to interview parents.
Try to understand what their needs are? What kind of personalities have they been purchasing items for in the past? If they shop at any specific store, then go online and see what products and brands they like the most.
Why do I need persona-driven content?
Content is not a one-size-fits-all and probably won’t resonate with all of your personas. Instead of creating generic content, persona-driven content provides more opportunities for you to engage and connect with your personas by creating content targeted directly to them.
What does a good customer persona look like?
A good customer persona will be broad enough to cover a large number of customers with the same needs, but narrow enough that it doesn’t cover everyone in the current market.
Good customer personas need to be customer-centric and provide basic information such as demographics, motivation, purchase history, etc. A good customer persona is a composite of different data sources.
Sometimes, these personas include a high-level ‘sales message’ that captures the key message you would like your customers to know about you from the start.
What exactly is the role of buyer persona in content strategy?
A buyer persona is the single most important element of content strategy. It is like an avatar for every buyer.
The main role of the buyer persona in content strategy is to understand the buyer’s needs and wants. It helps in creating high-quality content for different personas based on their business goals, pain points, and preferences.
A persona-driven content strategy focuses more on solving problems your prospects or customers are facing in their daily work.
Final thoughts
Creating persona-driven content is an ongoing effort. You’ll always be refining your persona to match your customers more and more closely. This post highlights effective strategies on how to create persona-driven content marketing campaigns.
I believe that by now, you know how to create your perfect persona-driven content and why personas are important. If you like this post, then I suggest you check my post on how to promote your blog for free.
Furthermore, we all know that content marketing can be overwhelming at times, and if you use certain tools, you can easily manage your campaigns. Check out my post on free content marketing tools.
Oh yeah, and to be competitive in content marketing, you need to know some content marketing trends and statistics. I appreciate you taking the time to read this post. Please share it with your friends.