Creating Great Personas for Fantastic Content

content marketing
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On any given day (including weekends), the top priority for a marketer is to write fresh content. Times have changed because nowadays, providing fresh, fantastic content regularly is absolutely mandatory. Writing all of the time has become totally necessary.

It used to be that marketers only had to write content when there was a necessity at that particular moment. Now, not only is it imperative for new content to be written regularly and frequently but it has to be of the top quality and it has to attract the audience very quickly. If the content doesn’t grab the readers quickly, they will go to someone else and you may never hear from them again. Knowing the wants and needs of the target audience is critical to the success of your business in the day and age of social media. The big question is how do you make all of that happen successfully? Building effective buyer personas, which define the ideal profile of your prospective buyers, will really make your work a lot easier.

Divide demographically

It is critical for you to have a deep understanding of who your target audience is and exactly what makes up your perfect client. What are the needs, wants and concerns of your clients and prospective clients? Where do you need to go in order to reach your target audience and exactly what types of content should you be writing for them? What you need to do is to create a persona (a representation) of your ideal client.

Creating personas

The personas that you create are based on real information. You gather information based on demographic information and your target audience’s online behavior, personal histories, motivating factors and what keeps them up at night. The way that you begin to develop the personas is by studying the customer base that you already have. You need to pinpoint the qualities of the people who buy from you the most. You will find that you have several different types of buyers and each one deserves a lot of attention and a great deal of thinking. You will need to attach a large amount of details to each person, such as a description of the person, name, professional role (including title, if you have it), the niche or industry with which they associate and demographic information.

Understand your target audience’s needs

When creating personas, you will need to ask yourself several questions:

  • Which problems are the members of your target audience trying to solve?
  • What does your target audience need the most?
  • How can you help them to succeed?
  • What specific information are they seeking?

If you truly understand your target audience, it is not a huge leap that you will need to take to understand the wants, needs and challenges of your target audience. If they have gotten to the point of connecting with you and your business, the chances are very good that they didn’t arrive at your doorstep by accident. The more detailed information you add to the persona that you are building, the simpler it will be for you to write the content that will benefit your target audience the most. The better your content, the more your target audience will relate to you. If you can do this, you are on your way to really creating fantastic content that will make your audience reach out and touch you.

Conclusion

Creating buyer personas is not as difficult as you might think it is. If you can do that, it is actually going to help your overall online marketing strategy and it will help you to create content that is exactly what your target audience needs. If you can succeed at that, it will convince your target audience that you are the person who they have been searching for and they will eventually be thrilled to buy what you are selling. If you are able to do all of the work ahead of time regarding building the personas, you will find the rest of your work to be much smoother.

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Author

  • Carolyn Cohn

    Carolyn Cohn is the Co-Founder & Chief Creative Services of CompuKol Communications. Carolyn manages CompuKol’s creative and editorial department, which consists of writers and editors. Her weekly blogs are syndicated globally. She has decades of editorial experience in online editing, and editing books, journal articles, abstracts, and promotional and educational materials. Carolyn earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo.

4 Responses

  1. Teresa Hearne says:

    Via LinkedIn Groups
    Group: NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants)
    Discussion: Creating Great Personas for Fantastic Content

    This is a very good blog post. Thank you! I actually think it runs both ways in that I may have an “ideal buyer” but buyers also have an “ideal seller.” They may be less strategic about it but the “persona” I present to a prospective buyer will influence his/her buying decision as much as whether I’m presenting my product to someone who may actually want it– my “ideal buyer.” I’m so glad you mentioned content because it is so, so, SO critical now and probably the hardest thing for people to do, write rich, original, substantial content. But, without an ongoing infusion of new (and good) content, we are dead in the water. Anyway, just wanted to add my 2 cents. Thanks for an excellent blog post.
    By Teresa Hearne

  2. Tony Russo says:

    +Tony Russo via Google+

    I am in the middle of preparations for this. Your article helped me structure my plan. Thank you!

  3. Kerry Kerr McAvoy says:

    +Kerry Kerr McAvoy via Google+

    Excellent article. Thank you for sharing. I was just doing this exercise in my head–now I know I am on the right track and need to spend more time on it. Thanks once again!

  4. Thena Berry says:

    Via LinkedIn Groups
    Group: The Content Wrangler Community
    Discussion: Creating Great Personas for Fantastic Content

    this is applicable to tech writers as well. though we don’t have the driving need to produce marketing materials we still need to understand our audience in order to create relevant content
    By Thena Berry