Content marketing alone cannot deliver organic traffic unless it is employed strategically. However, most businesses fail to create a refined content strategy that can achieve the desired results in terms of organic traffic. In this post, we will tell you how you can devise an effective content strategy based on personas that represent your best targets.
We strongly believe that every piece of content that you write should be targeted first towards the personas and then towards the search engines.
What are Personas?
In its most basic form, a marketing persona is a consumer profile that helps you target the right people with your content, and tailor the message accordingly. Persona can also be defined as an exhaustive description of a business’s ideal customer that is so detailed that you can imagine the persona as a real person.
According to HubSpot, “Personas are fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers. They help you understand your customers better.”
The idea is to know everything about the buyer persona; their job role, their demographic, their likes and dislikes, and more. This way you are able to better target your buyer persona.
How To Create a Target Persona?
Identifying your target personas could be a daunting, time consuming, and effort-intensive task, but believe us; its every bit worth your investment. Here is an outline that you can use to capture the demographics, values, attitudes, fears, biases, and aspirations that you think would best describe the perfect prospect for your offering.
- Personal details: Married/Single, Kids/No kids, Life style
- Professional background: Job responsibility, Job skills, Experience, Job title, career path
- Demographics: Age, gender, income, education
- Professional goals: Success oriented, Wealth seeking, Fame seeking
- Personal interests: Sports? TV Shows?
- Attitudes: Risk taker, tech savvy, competitive
- Values: Team player, Leadership style, Eco-friendly
- Challenges: What keeps him/her from achieving professional goals?
- Pain points: What does he/she worry the most about?
- Potential roadblocks: What could be his/her objections when you move towards a potential close?
This list is far from extensive, and you may have to consider many other factors depending on whether you are targeting individuals or businesses. However, the objective is to make the persona as real as possible. For example, 30 years old, Female, CFO at a large construction company, and so on.
Where To Get This Data From?
You may have to rely on several resources to collect all the information you will need to create an authentic persona.
Speak To The Sales Team
You should get your entire team together and get their inputs on the type of people they approach for sales, type of queries they receive, people who visit the website or call up customer service, what ticks with the customers, who makes the decision, and so on.
Check The Site Analytics
Your website analytics will tell you the type of people who visit the site, what keywords they use to find you, and the amount of time they spent on the site.
Social Media Research
Social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook can reveal a great deal of information.
Market Research
Most authentic and reliable information comes from direct market research. Interviews are a great way to get an insight into customer profiles, needs, attitudes, and other characteristics.
After you have created the personas effectively, you should then begin to tailor your content to specific layers of the sales strategy.
Tangible Benefits of Aligning Content Strategy With Buyer Personas
Creating personas helps your content creation and marketing efforts numerous ways. Personas help with objective planning. It helps understand how a target segment is likely to respond to a particular marketing message, and it helps you tailor your marketing content accordingly. By creating personas, you are able to create a succinct and highly targeted marketing message, and with this you can achieve the best possible outcome. Most importantly, it helps improves return on investment on strategic marketing initiatives.
Are you ready with your buyer personas? Make sure you share them with our content writing team so that we can tailor the content in a way that clicks with the right audience and helps garner organic traffic and conversions.
