Understanding your audience will bring you many steps closer to creating content they want, need and actually consume. It will help you achieve more with less content – simply by producing exactly the content your audience is looking for. That’s what audience personas can do for you: Make your content creation on target for each of the personas you want to reach with your content.
71% of high-performing businesses have well-defined personas compared to only 37% of average-performing companies (Source: Deloitte Marketing Research).
And let’s be honest: We all want to be in the outstanding group of high-performing businesses.
Considering audience personas for your content creation will help you to create more impactful content – and avoid creating content that is not of interest to your audience – and a waste of your precious time.
What is a Persona in Marketing?
A persona in marketing is a fictitious person for whom you create your content – and even new products. The more you know about this person, the better can you target your content creation at this person.
But as the usual audience consists of more than one typical persona, the concept of audience personas is a form of segmenting your audience into a couple of groups of people that share demographics or other decisive characteristics that set them apart from other people from your audience.
Even if you already did your market research and know something about your potential audience and clients, audience personas can add valuable insights and details.
The more you know about your audience personas the easier it gets to identify questions, problems and pain points that you can address in your marketing.
This blog post is about audience personas and how they impact content creation. But there are other aspects where audience personas can help to make educated decisions for your strategy:
You can choose your marketing and distribution channels according to your knowledge about your audience.
You can also consider creating freebies and products that tackle the pain points of your audience you identified in your audience persona development process.
The key elements of an audience persona
There are some standard components you should consider for your audience persona profile. Not every component is always important. However, understanding and considering these components will help you develop a thorough audience persona profile.
Demographic Information:
- Age: Specific age or age range.
- Gender: Male, female, non-binary, etc.
- Location: City, region, country.
- Income Level: Annual income or income range.
- Education Level: The highest level of education completed.
- Marital Status: Single, married, divorced, etc.
- Occupation: Job title, industry, employment status.
Psychographic Information:
- Personality Traits: Introvert, extrovert, risk-averse, adventurous, etc.
- Values and Beliefs: Core values, political beliefs, social beliefs.
- Interests and Hobbies: Activities they enjoy, topics they are passionate about.
Behavioral Information:
- Buying Behavior: Online vs. in-store shopping, frequency of purchases, preferred payment methods.
- Brand Loyalty: How loyal they are to specific brands.
- Decision-Making Process: Factors influencing their purchasing decisions, decision-making speed.
Goals and Motivations:
- Primary Goals: Main objectives they aim to achieve, both personally and professionally.
- Secondary Goals: Additional goals that might influence their decisions.
- Motivations: What drives them to achieve their goals (e.g., security, status, personal growth).
Pain Points and Challenges:
- Primary Pain Points: Major challenges and frustrations they face.
- Secondary Pain Points: Additional issues that may impact their decisions.
- Barriers to Success: Obstacles preventing them from achieving their goals.
Preferred Channels:
- Communication Channels: Preferred methods of communication (e.g., email, social media, phone).
- Content Consumption: Types of content they consume (e.g., blogs, videos, podcasts).
- Social Media Platforms: Preferred social media platforms for engagement.
Technographic Information:
- Device Usage: Preferred devices (e.g., mobile, desktop, tablet).
- Software and Tools: Commonly used software, apps, and tools.
Customer Journey Insights:
- Awareness Stage: How they become aware of products/services.
- Consideration Stage: How they research and evaluate options.
- Decision Stage: How they make the final purchasing decision.
Not all these components are relevant all the time – but you may be surprised how much marketing value you can derive from unexpected factors. The above list should be considered as a suggestion. Not all information can easily be accessed but if you find it valuable you may want to invest some effort into getting it.
Don’t focus on the wrong elements for your audience personas
Some elements that describe an audience are easier to get than others. Dry facts you can get from LinkedIn or other social networks are often easy to get but don’t describe very well what is important for you.
For instance, gender is easy to get for many audiences. But often this is not at all important. Most of us don’t care if we sell to men or women as long as they need our offer.
What no analytics tool can give you are the personality traits, goals and pain points. These are harder to get and understand – but these are the interesting aspects.
When you are developing your audience personas, you need to focus on aspects related to the reasons why people will act on your content or buy your products. In different stages of your business development, different aspects of your audience personas can have varying impacts on your strategic decisions:
- Early in your online business, you need to consider the preferred channels of your audience to make educated decisions on your chosen social networks and communication channels.
- The more you engage with your audience the more you will learn about their pain points. This may impact your product development.
- Your relationship with your audience and your “fame” will develop over time. This can influence the customer journey.
Persona Development Process: How to gather data
There is one important thing I have to point out up front:
Creating audience personas is never set in stone. You should refine them as you get more information about your audience and customers.
Don’t try to figure it all out in the first step. You may not even know what to ask at this point. But as you grow your audience, communicate more with people from your audience and develop various channels you can use to interact with your audience, you will open new options for audience research.
When you scroll through my suggestions for your audience research to build your audience personas, you will see that most methods require you to have some audience. That means you don’t have many options when you are new to the market.
Here is what you can do to create audience personas:
Market Research:
When you don’t have an audience, this is the place to start your audience research: Competitors and industry reports.
Social Listening:
I am a huge fan of getting inspiration and ideas on social media. Just listening to conversations and comments gives me so much information. People ask questions on social, they talk about their struggles. You just have to find your target audience and listen to them.
You can get more out of this if you become an active member of the conversation taking place in your niche on social media.
Interviews:
Talk to your customers. Try to find out as much as you can about them. Some things they tell you may ring a bell and lead you on.
Surveys and Questionnaires:
These are easy to set up with Google Forms or Survey Monkey but they require you to have some kind of audience or they won’t tell you much. If you already have subscribers and can use your email list or followers on social media these are worth a try.
But you need to understand what questions to ask and what types of answers to suggest. Statistics also need some basic understanding of what surveys can tell and what they cannot tell (that is the mathematician in me speaking 🙂 ).
Analytics:
Your website analytics as well as social media analytics can provide valuable insights. You can get information about user behavior on your website, interest in your content on social media and a ton of information about your audience for instance on LinkedIn.
Customer Data
If you already have customers, you can get information from them. You can ask them why they bought a product and what kind of products they would be interested in.
You can also conduct interviews or get them to fill out a survey to understand what kind of people become your customers. This is valuable data to identify your ideal audience.
Why Audience Personas Matter for Blog Content
I have talked quite a lot about how to get data to build your audience personas. But we have not talked so much about WHY you should do this and what impact audience personas have on your blog content.
The reason I am writing this post is that when you know your audience you can better choose your blog topics. You can avoid creating content that your audience is not interested in and focus on topics that tackle the real pain points and challenges your audience faces.
You want to target audience personas with your blog content. If you don’t know who you target, you will struggle to create targeted content.
Knowing your audience persona can make your content creation a lot more efficient.
Relevance:
Knowing who your audience is, what phase in life they are in, what they are interested in, and what kind of money they can spend will help you to create content that is relevant for them. Focusing on topics that your audience is interested in and content that resonates with specific needs and interests is more engaging.
Increased Engagement:
The better you target your content at your audience the more engagement you will get. Audience personas tell you a lot about your audience and their interests and pain points. This way they make it easier to create content specifically for them. This will help tailor content to elicit comments, shares, and subscriptions.
Conversions:
The closer your content hits the pain points of your audience the easier it will be to convert them into customers. The better you understand your audience the easier it becomes to find topics that are closely related to their interests – and your products. Content aligned with audience goals can drive desired actions (e.g., purchases, sign-ups).
Personalized Experience:
If your content consistently hits the interests of your audience, they will feel understood and get the feeling that you create your content specifically for them. Your audience’s content experiences will become exceptional.
Brand Voice & Tone:
Audience personas can influence the style and language used in your blog writing. Knowing more about your audience will help you to use a language they can identify with and connect to.
Results and Metrics:
You should see a measurable impact of working with audience personas. Examples of metrics to watch are traffic increase and decreasing bounce rates.
How Audience Personas Impact Content Decisions
My focus in my content creation is to help you to create better content that has more impact. I also want to show you how to create better and more targeted content so that you need less content for more success.
Because I have been stuck in the hamster wheel of content creation that did not even bring me the results I was looking for.
Audience personas are an important tool to help you create content that is better for your specific audience.
The more you know about your ideal audience, the better can you target your content. Because what is “high-quality” for one audience could be totally useless for another audience persona.
Here is how audience personas influence your content creation:
Content Relevance and Topic Selection
The more you know about your audience the more highly targeted topics will come to your mind.
I have learned the hard way that creating content for a niche is not the same as creating content for an audience persona.
Audience personas help to choose the best topics, topics that are highly relevant to exactly this audience. They will provide you with many topic ideas from knowing, understanding, and communicating with these personas.
Personas guide what topics to cover and how deeply to delve into them.
Understanding your audience personas will help you become more efficient with your content creation and help you avoid creating content that your audience is not interested in.
Instead, you can tailor your messages to address the needs, preferences, and pain points of your different audience segments.
An interested audience will engage more and deeper with the content you provide.
Content Formats and Tone
Audience Personas influence the format that best suits your audience. Some audiences love listicles, while others hate them. Some audiences want to watch videos while others like to listen to content. Considering your audience’s preferences for content formats will help create better content that is more fun and easier to consume for your specific audience.
Audience personas can also influence the tone, style and language used in your content creation. It is like me talking in a different tone to my friends than to my countess godmother (no kidding, my mum’s sister is a countess.) Knowing more about your audience will help you to use a language they can identify with and connect to.
SEO and Keyword Strategy
In my professional career, I have worn many hats.
I was a scientific researcher in applied mathematics. I had to use the terminology of mathematicians to fit in and sound as if I understood the subject.
My research topic was joint work with engineers about calculating groundwater flow in rocky underground. When I started this project, I had to learn the terms of the engineers – me and my engineer coworker had a lot of fun getting our respective languages right.
When I left university, I worked as a management consultant for utility companies, and again, I had to learn all their technical terms.
When I founded a startup and started online marketing, I again struggled with some terms I had never heard before (what the heck is a lead, there is not even a German word for it…)
You see where this is going, don’t you?
You have to speak the language of your audience, use the terms they use or you have no chance of surviving in their field. If you want to be found by the right people via search, you need to rank for terms they are looking for. You can only do targeted SEO if you know your audience.
Choosing your content distribution channels
Groups of people prefer distinctive channels they use and social platforms they are active on.
Knowing your audience personas gives you clues as to where you can reach these people and how you can communicate and connect with them.
You can also gather information about the times when you can reach your dream audience when they are active and open to conversations.
Content goals and metrics
Personas help set clear, measurable objectives for content marketing efforts by defining what success looks like for different segments. This could be increased engagement, signups for your email list, higher conversion rates, or more shares.
Knowing your audience personas and what you want from them is an important part of your content strategy.
Goals are important to understand which metrics and numbers to watch and what outcomes are good and which ones are disappointing.
Why an Audience Persona is more than a Buyer Persona
More personas can help you with your business than buyers. And often they are all thrown into the same bucket. And then people are trying to sell their beginner tool to influencers. That is not going to work.
Be clear about what you want from the persona you reach out to.
- What do you want from them?
- How can you make them take the action you want?
It is not all about buying from you.
Sometimes you are after shares, sometimes you want engagement. These are important too. Because these help you build your brand, your reputation, and your visibility!
These personas are different and you need to approach them with different content. They have different goals and interests, they need to be triggered with different offers and call-to-actions.
Elevate Your Content with Audience Personas
Understanding your audience brings you many steps closer to creating content they want, need and will consume. By producing exactly the content your audience is looking for, you can achieve more with less content. Audience personas make your content creation precise, ensuring it is on target for each persona you aim to reach.
Audience personas help you create more impactful content, avoid wasting time on content that doesn’t interest your audience, and ensure your marketing efforts are effective and efficient. They provide valuable insights into your audience’s demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and preferences, guiding you in creating content that resonates deeply and drives engagement and conversions.
Audience personas are not just a tool for better content creation—they are a strategic asset for aligning your marketing efforts with the needs and interests of your audience. By leveraging detailed personas, you can enhance the relevance, engagement, and impact of your content, ultimately driving greater success for your business and saving you the frustration of creating content that your audience is not interested in.
