Belonging to a small marketing department isn’t easy. Whether you’re a team of one or have a few people working with you, you typically have an overwhelming number of tasks and limited resources to get the job done.
With so much on your plate, it can be a struggle to craft intentional content marketing. You may feel like your content is an afterthought or lacks direction. Yet you know that without consistent, strategy-driven content, you can miss out on building connections that drive quality leads.
That’s where buyer personas come in. Also known as customer avatars, personas are detailed representations of your ideal audience. And they’re key to creating meaningful content that speaks to and attracts your ideal, high-value customers.
What Is a Buyer Persona
Put simply, a persona is a detailed description of a member of your unique audience. They dive deep into your customer’s:
- Demographics (age, income, location, gender identity, job title, education)
- Challenges and obstacles
- Communication styles
- Online behaviors and preferred method of media consumption
- Needs
- Wants
- Interests
- Motivations
- Professional and personal goals
- Lifestyle, daily routines and social life
- How your service or product helps them overcome a challenge or reach a goal
With a detailed buyer persona, you can understand your customers on a deeper level. This understanding will give your content a clear direction because it shows you how to speak to them in the best, most personalized way.
Why Do I Need a Buyer Persona?
Whether you write content for your website or your blog, you need to know who you’re specifically writing for. Speaking to a general audience is a bit too broad. The only way to generate qualified leads is by drilling down into who your audience truly is.
You’re probably thinking, “But, what’s wrong with everyone being my audience? Isn’t that what we’re aiming for?”
The truth is, your service is meant for individuals with specific problems that only you can solve. And those specific individuals need content that is tailored to fit them, not everyone else. They’re who your service will benefit the most, which means they’re the ones who are most likely to crave what you have to offer.
Buyer personas will help you:
- Target your marketing: A detailed persona allows you to focus your time and content efforts on people who will actually engage with your business. By understanding the needs, desires, pain points, and behaviors of your target audience, you can craft messages that speak directly to your customers’ interests and motivations.
- Efficiently use your resources: With limited resources, small marketing teams need to make every dollar and hour count. By identifying your ideal customers and their preferences, you can focus your resources on the most effective marketing channels and tactics to reach your target audience.
Sure, you may be able to quickly create an ideal customer off the top of your head using demographic information such as age and gender. But, this is still too general by itself.
Your customers are unique and have so much more to them than simple demographics. If you can tap into and speak to their unique attributes, you’ll connect with them in an invaluable way.
How to Create the Perfect Persona
Before you start brainstorming, researching and crafting, make the task easier by downloading this free, comprehensive template for your ideal customer avatar. This template will help ensure you cover all your bases for your ICA.
Start With the Customer Information You Already Have
Does your company have a sales or customer service department? Then start there to gain insights into your existing customers. Talk to any team members with a customer-facing role and gather the available customer data to narrow down on persona details.
From their career goals to their demographics, no piece of information is too small. Most of all, try to determine how they became customers in the first place. What was their motivation to buy from you? What challenges did your company’s service or product help them solve? What kind of content did they engage with?
Creating Your Buyer Persona
The beauty of each persona is this: there isn’t one just like the other. In fact, that’s the goal. You want your persona to be unique to what you have to offer.
Whether you write on a piece of paper or open a new document, remember to get as specific as possible for each category.
Give Your Persona a Name
This might seem silly, but putting a name to your persona is important. It helps you to better connect with your persona and begin to create conversations involving this persona. And, truly, this persona is real, just in a broader form as your ideal audience.
Create a List of Demographics: The First Step in Creating a Well-Rounded Persona
Demographics are important for targeting the right niche audience. Start by taking down your persona’s age, gender, location and other demographics such as their education and job title. Your persona’s demographics will start painting a picture of an individual instead of a crowd.
Dive Into Psychographics: The Most Important Step in Persona Creation
Do you know what makes your audience unique from the rest? It isn’t necessarily just their demographic information. Instead, it goes much deeper than that.
Put some deep thought into your persona’s demographics and take some time on this one! You’ll want to start by answering these questions:
- What are your persona’s goals? What goal does your persona have that your service can help achieve? This is where you’ll lay out why they are seeking out your service and how you can help.
- What are your persona’s challenges? Define your persona’s challenges when it comes to reaching that goal and what you can do to help them overcome them.
- What are your persona’s values? Your audience will value certain things over others. Maybe they value good communication or a high work ethic. Whatever it is, you’ll want to show how you can deliver on those values.
- What does your persona fear? What does your audience fear during the process? Are they worried about the price of your service, or the time investment? Discover those fears so you can demolish them in your content.
- Where does your persona hang out? Who does your persona turn to for support? Entertainment? Knowledge? What sites do they visit online?
Put all this information together and you have a unique-to-your-audience persona.
How to Use Buyer Personas to Inform Your Content Marketing
Once you’ve crafted several buyer personas, you can begin noticing common links between them. Some might share the same goals, interests, lifestyles, communication preferences and challenges.
Start categorizing them and see which have the same content interests, pain points and needs. Then, you can brainstorm content topics that matter to them and help them solve specific problems.
Pay special attention to where your buyer personas consume content online and what kind of messaging resonates with them. Do they consume informative podcasts, conversational blogs or videos with a lighthearted tone?
Knowing what kind of content they’re most likely to engage with will help you decide which platforms to focus on. Plus, you’ll be better equipped to articulate personalized messaging that connects with your customers authentically.
Need Some Help Creating Content for Your TargetAudience?
Think of your buyer personas as fluid tools. You can go back and update them as you continue to observe and learn about your ideal customers who drive value to your company.
Even when you have buyer personas ready to go, sometimes creating content can just be too much. That’s okay. It’s why we’re here. If you need help creating content, in your voice, for your target audience, reach out to our team today by calling 612-643-1824 or send us a quick message.
