Personas in content marketing: DO THEY REALLY COUNT?

Do you understand your target audience for your content marketing and, consequently, for whom you are selling?

If you're developing a content strategy, you've most likely conducted audience research to determine those details.

Also, you've probably heard of personalities if you've conducted audience research.

A persona is a tool for content strategy that helps you better understand your audience and position all of your material so that it speaks to them.

The most crucial factor in content marketing is your brand's target audience, and a persona summarises all of your thinking, research, conversations, data, and insights on that demographic.

This confirms that personas do, in fact, important in content marketing. Let's investigate further.

What does a content marketing persona mean?

We've already established that a persona is a tool for content strategy. How does it function?

A persona is a fictional portrayal of your intended market. To develop a fictitious persona or avatar that represents your ideal customer, their key similarities—including defining qualities, interests, habits, demographics, aspirations, obstacles, and more—are blended and condensed.

This gives your audience a face and a personality since those on your team who operate independently from the client experience can quickly turn into a faceless mass (like content creators, who ironically have little direct interaction with your audience but are in charge of the bulk of communications).

Also, if your target audience is divided into several groups, you can develop a number of personas to represent each group and use as a guide for producing, publishing, and distributing content.

You can see how a persona might become very intricate. You almost feel as though you're reading a dating profile when you create one.

The fact is that all of these specifics need to be supported by study and factual information. These characteristics are real. Instead, they result from researching people in your target audience, talking to them, conducting surveys of them, and reviewing data. Nothing should be based on hunches or educated guesses.

The better you are able to speak to them in your content, target their precise needs and concerns, demonstrate empathy for them, and address their problems, the more you will know about your ideal customer and persona. And that's effective.

the importance of personas in content marketing? Reasons to employ them

Your outcomes can be significantly enhanced by a content marketing plan that incorporates specific personas. According to one case study, this method improved website traffic by 210% and lead generation by 97%.

Personas can increase the effectiveness of your website by 2 to 5 times and increase email click-through rates by 14%.

How do personas function? These are three of them.

Personas represent actual data in a visible way.

Personas should be totally based on data, insights, research, and actual consumer encounters, not assumptions, if you're doing it correctly.

So, a persona represents actual information you have discovered about your customers. A strong persona may stand in for numerous hours of study, months of social listening, and innumerable consumer encounters.

A persona can only be useful in this way. But the benefit to your content marketing is apparent.

Personas capture your consumers' actual personalities (when done right)

Personas have the rare capacity to capture the genuine spirit of your audience since they are the culmination of countless hours of customer research.

When trying to target your messaging and tailor your material, this is crucial.

How? You are much more likely to punch your audience in the gut or hit them in the heart with compelling information when you employ and refer to personas when creating content.

Personas, for instance, can direct the tone and writing style of your lead magnets, blog articles, and other types of content (i.e., ebooks, whitepapers, case studies).

It may also help you choose what to write about or how to approach particular subjects. For instance, if I were writing a blog post about presents to offer coffee enthusiasts using the aforementioned coffee shop persona as my guide, I could lean more towards inexpensive gifts than luxurious ones because I am aware that my persona is price-conscious.

Personas are a highly effective marketing tool.

Personas are a helpful marketing and organisational tool. They can coordinate your customer outreach and communication strategies across your brand.

Sharing personas with various teams, such as sales and customer support, can lead to better customer interactions and an improved understanding of your customers. Also, more positive encounters can result in increased client satisfaction, more sales, and repeat business.

Personas can also be shared among your marketing team to unify the strategies of various creators. For content creators, graphic designers, video editors, and social media administrators, personas are useful.

Last but not least, using personas will help you develop your brand's voice, tone, and style rules. Your persona(s) will influence the tone you adopt for particular situations, the voice you employ in content, and the style and personality you develop for your brand identification.

How to develop reliable personas

The usefulness of your personas for your content marketing will directly depend on how accurate they are. Here's how to make sure they're accurate and helpful.

Get customer information from reliable sources.

There are various areas to collect the information that will guide the development of your persona. The finest sources include some of these.

Always remember to discard your assumptions if the data doesn't support them.

• Sales team: Your sales staff may provide you with information on your customers because they work directly with clients.

• Customer service staff: Your customer service team should have a wealth of knowledge from personally assisting your clients, particularly concerning the problems and queries your audience faces frequently.

• 1:1 interviews: For in-depth, personal information, I always advise speaking with ideal clients one-on-one.

• Social listening: To obtain information, watch and listen to your ideal clientele on social media.

• Consumer surveys: You can find particular information from a broad range of your objectives through surveys.

• Analytics: Be sure to examine your analytics programme for accurate information on the people who are visiting your website.

• Social media insights: If you have a following on social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn, you can use the tools particular to the platform to gain real-time analytics about your audience.

synthesise and analyse the data

You can begin to evaluate and make sense of the audience data once you've spent some time collecting it from various sources.

As you sort through it all, look for similarities, reoccurring themes, and patterns. What specifics keep coming up? What phrases do clients frequently employ when describing themselves and their objectives/problems?

You may discover several groups of people or several ways to divide your audience during this procedure. Each of these categories can be used to create a cohesive identity.

Complete the persona categories.

A character data sheet will resemble your finished persona quite a bit. Using the information from your investigation, fill in the following categories.

• Name: Give each persona a distinctive name to make it simple to distinguish between them. Some businesses (particularly B2Bs) name their personas after their position within the organisation or their most identifying characteristic (e.g., "Marketer Molly" or "Sarah Student").

Background and characteristics: What age range does your persona fall into? What gender are they? Who lives there? What do they make their living off of and what is their income?

What are their objectives? (Consider goals in terms of their occupation for B2B personas; for B2C consumers, take into account their life goals in relation to your industry, such as health and fitness goals, lifestyle goals, skills aspirations, etc.)

• Obstacles: Which obstacles in their job or personal lives frustrate them the most?

• Content preferences and consumption patterns: It's a good idea to mention the kinds of information they prefer to read and the platforms they use to access it.

• Social accounts they follow and blogs they read: What comparable companies, bloggers, and influencers do they enjoy and follow?

Add quotes that assist develop your identity from actual customer conversations. The teams in charge of customer support, sales, and social media can keep an eye out for and gather these.

• Photo: Adding a photo to your profile significantly personalises it. Add a stock image of a person who accurately represents their gender, age, and lifestyle to your persona.

Bonus: Develop a more compelling presence.

Your persona(s) can be used throughout your business and content marketing as a helpful tool for comprehending your prospects.

Consider making your persona an asset in light of this. Here are a few illustrations:

• Request that a graphic designer use a character to represent your identity and turn your document into a visually appealing infographic.

• Arrange your persona for simple reading and post it in a public venue, like a shared Google Drive, online workspace, or file-sharing platform.

• Refer to your content strategy's identity in links.

• Make a presentation that demonstrates to your various teams how they may use the persona in various ways to assist them in performing their tasks more effectively.

Personas are important in content marketing, so start developing yours today.

In content marketing, personas are important. They are an essential tool that every brand's content strategy arsenal need to contain.

Personas are the product of weeks or months of research and data synthesis when done correctly. They enable teams throughout your company to quickly gain a thorough grasp of your ideal client. The sales, customer support, and social media departments all benefit from personas.

You can create the perfect messages and material that will connect with your audience by using a comprehensive persona. Your writing will be more pertinent, sympathetic, focused, practical, and interesting.

Using personas for any brand has no drawbacks. So, it's imperative that you get to work on developing your personas as part of your plan.