4 Reasons to Use Personas for Your Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketers and small business owners (with the role of a marketer!) have the responsibility of creating relevant, interesting, and informative marketing strategies tailored to their target audiences. Among the most effective tools necessary for content marketing to relate to audiences include using buyer personas. But what exactly are personas, and why are they critical? Read on to find out more about Personas.
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What Are Personas?
Personas, or buyer personas, involve a detailed description of people that represent a business' target audience. It involves a semi-fictional representation of ideal customers of a particular company based on actual research and data derived from current and potential customers. As a marketer, personas can help focus your marketing efforts on qualified prospects, allowing you to create targeted marketing messages.
Why Customer Personas Are Essential for Your Content Marketing Strategy
Creating accurate buyer personas prompts you to examine peoples’ motivations and develop valuable content truly tailored for your audience. Here are four reasons to start using personas for your content marketing strategy.
1) Personas Help Relate to Your Customers
Many companies utilizing content marketing focus only on the end-product of their content instead of first investing in understanding and analyzing buyers' behaviors. Using personas helps marketing professionals learn from current and potential buyers, including what they need and how their behavior continues to evolve. Having this data helps align your content marketing strategies to resonate with your customers and address their interests.
2) Personas Are a Useful Marketing Tool
Buyer personas play a critical role in enhancing customer relationships, personalization, and relatability, essential for marketing campaigns. Persona-driven marketing impacts initial conversations, traffic, conversions, and ROI, including stimulating lead generation and customer loyalty. With personas in hand, it is easier to identify the most effective ways of promoting your content and target your message for better search engine optimization (SEO).
3) Personas Are Perfect for Personalization
With personalization becoming a larger emphasis in content marketing, personas help create personalized content relevant to the audience's interests, personalities, and circumstances. Personas focus on customer wants, needs, and likes which help marketers create tailored content that prospects require.
Using CRO software with personalization and A/B testing features, you can then dynamically change content on your website to both identify and implement what works best for your specific personas. One tool we personally use and highly recommend at Igniting Business for A/B testing and personalization is called Zoho PageSense.
4) Personas Facilitate Objective Planning
Many marketers and small businesses will find it difficult to create successful content marketing strategies without understanding what their audiences want. Or, more pessimistically, they end up creating content that is pointless and yields little to no results. A buyer persona provides the necessary information to make more objective decisions and plan your content marketing efforts. Personas help take the guesswork out of content planning, whether you’re drafting service pages, weekly blogs, email newsletters, or simply a call-to-action for your website.
How to Create Accurate Personas
Crafting customer personas is a lot of work. But at a high-level, you should work to gather as much information as possible (remember, your current customer base can be a mighty source of valuable information). The following are just a few examples of data you can collect:
- Personal information like age, location, hobbies, income levels, etc.
- Professional details like occupation, title, etc.
- Purchasing behavior
- Values and fears
- Pain points requiring a solution
- Common objections to using your product or service
The following are the simplified steps to create and update accurate personas:
- Gather your personas' demographic-based and behavioral information from past customers and prospects.
- Identify your personas’ goals and key data points.
- Create detailed messaging and calls-to-action for each persona.
- Train your team (sales, customer service, marketing, etc.) to address the personas’ needs and concerns.
- Implement measurement and conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools to measure your success and test new iterations.
At Igniting Business, we can help you get started with an effective content marketing strategy using accurate buyer personas. For more information, contact us today. Alternatively, if you’re in charge of marketing and simply need some extra resources, check out our recommended marketing tools or subscribe to our free monthly newsletter.
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