If you’re reading this post, you’re either Alexander or Alexandra. And you need the best content at the best price to reach your business targets.
These are a few of the details in our personas. When we create content, we’re not doing it for millions of people with billions of needs. But for you, our persona with unique needs.
Of course, our marketing personas represent people who are our ideal audience. People who need the solutions that we provide.
You might be thinking:
What is a marketing persona?
To put it simply, a marketing persona is a document that contains the details of your ideal audience and potential customer. These include their name, age, job position, location, and other details.
Most importantly, a persona contains a problem your ideal customer has, the solution they need that is the same as the solution you provide. You can have a few buyer personas for your business depending on the solutions you provide.
See, a marketing persona determines how effective your content marketing will be. Without a buyer persona, your content lacks focus and you leave your business results to chance. This is the worst way of attracting customers.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
Also, statistics show that personas can make your website 2 to 5 times more effective for your targeted users.
How to create marketing personas
Having said that, how do you create simple buyer personas that help your content marketing bring in more leads and customers?
State the solutions you provide
Whatever product you sell or service you provide, it’s about providing a set of solutions to your customers. But many times, businesses are on autopilot and fail to state clearly what solutions they give to customers.
Instead, they list the features of their product and talk about how their product is great. They also talk about how their company is great.
That’s all fine. But your content isn’t created to boost your ego. A potential customer doesn’t care about a great product. They only care about the solutions the great product can provide.
And that’s evident in this Theodore Levitt’s statement: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”
To be able to connect with your persona through your content, you need to list all the possible solutions your product can provide.
State your audience’s problems
When you consider it, people don’t always use every feature of a product. They use features that solve their problems.
When you understand their problems, you can create content that shows them how your product can help solve their problems.
If you already have customers in your business, you can ask them the biggest problem they use your product to solve. In another way, you can ask them the product feature they use most and what they use it to do.
If you have no customers yet, you can ask a few people who could be your customers about their problems. Of course, this has to be related to the product you’re offering.
Define your ideal audience
No matter how great your product is, some people have no need for it. There’s no benefit in creating content for those people.
Never create content for everyone. Your content needs to speak to people who are likely to become your customers.
However, it’s difficult to create content for your ideal audience if you don’t know them. Some details of your ideal audience you need to have are:
- Name
- Gender
- Age
- Income
- Job position
- Work challenges
- Solutions needed
To help you create your persona, you should ask these questions:
- What’s their duty at work?
- What results are they trying to achieve?
- What are their obstacles?
- What solutions do they need to eliminate these obstacles?
Your persona should contain as many details as possible to help you understand your customer’s perspective. If you’re creating a product used in the office, you should have as many details as possible about their work environment.
If it’s a product used at home, then you should have more details about their situation at home and how they need your product. Check out this example of a buyer persona by Indie Game Girl below:
Humanize your persona
Your persona is just a document you’ve created. But don’t forget that it represents human beings.
You need to add empathy to those details to be able to create content they can resonate with. To do this, you’ll have to imagine a day in your persona’s shoes.
Who are the people they interact with? What pressure do they face from their boss because of the problems they have? Who are those responsible for decision-making in their organization?
When you see your persona as a human being and create your content to relate to their challenges, they’ll engage better with your content.
Identify your persona’s preferred content format
When people say content, most people mean written content. But there are other content formats that you can use to attract your potential customers. Some of these are:
- Videos
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Podcasts
- Slides
You have to consider that not everyone fully engages with written content. Nielsen Norman Group found that an average web page visitor will read 20 to 28% of the page content.
Therefore, you should consider other content formats that might be more suitable for your audience. In many cases, you should create your content in various formats and see which format draws the highest engagement.
After all, it’s been found that people only remember 10% of text 3 days after reading it compared to 65% of visual content.
Identify the right marketing platform for your personas
When people talk about content marketing, they often talk about content creation and forget the marketing aspect. If you create the perfect content for your ideal audience but fail at marketing it, what will happen?
Your content will go unread and you still end up attracting nobody to your business. Consider this for a moment: how many marketing platforms do we have?
Too many. Fortunately, you only need a few that are most effective for reaching your personas.
For instance, if you sell a B2B product to executives, LinkedIn is a more suitable social media network as most of your ideal customers are there. Whereas if you sell fashion products to millennials, Instagram is a better option to market your content.
Generally, these are the common marketing platforms you should consider:
- Social media
- Search engines
Consider the various marketing platforms and find the best ones to promote your content. According to the Demand Gen Report, 47% of buyers viewed 3 to 5 pieces of content before they engaged with a sales rep.
Ensure you promote your content on the right platforms. Below is an example of a template from the Content Marketing Institute that you can use to create your persona:
Conclusion
Creating a persona is a vital part of your content marketing. And other parts of your business operations in fact. With a detailed persona, you can create content that attracts engagement and convert website visitors to customers.
