You know what content should help your business achieve. But what does your audience want the content to help them achieve?
A detailed audience persona gives the answers, so you can address them in the content.
If you put off persona development or haven’t updated existing customer profiles in a while, we’ve got you covered. Follow these best practices, with expert advice, to guide you through the process.
We don’t advise delegating persona development to artificial intelligence. However, you can use AI tools to streamline the research process, analyze data collected from multiple sources, and close key knowledge gaps.
Better personas lead to more resonant content
High-performance content marketing puts personas among the most fundamental tools. Some compelling reasons include:
Personas detail critical audience insights. Developed through detailed customer research, direct conversations, and thoughtful analyses of relevant trends and opportunities, personas reflect your customers' genuine interests and intentions. That fuels resonant, relatable brand stories.
They help creative teams convey the customer’s voice. Without personas, you can only assume what your audience wants. That lack of direct knowledge can lead to content about your brand's best-known topics (your products and company) with little focus on what the audience wants to know.
They help unify strategic approaches, priorities, and creative processes. By sharing personas with other teams, like sales, PR, and product management, they function as a single source of audience truth. That makes it easier for each team leader to set topic priorities and align messaging across customer touchpoints.
They allow for audience segmentation and content personalization. You get a fuller picture of your audience by aggregating persona insights with content analytics data. That enables you to more precisely target the audience and customize the content for deeper resonance.
But they're not perfect
However, building personas through older methods may reveal shortcomings that outweigh their utility. Among them:
New customer trends, market conditions, and topics of interest emerge (and existing ones recede), making regular updates necessary.
Research and analysis of needs, preferences, and behaviors takes time, especially if you're thorough.
You must determine which data is most relevant and which adds unnecessary complexity.
Before you develop personas more efficiently and accurately, though, you need to master the basics, starting with gathering demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and emotional insights.
Collect and analyze customer insights
To create a persona, you must first collect data on your audience's needs, interests, and preferences. You also need to identify their role in the buying decision and where they show up in the buyer's journey.
You can find some of that information by analyzing your performance data. You must also surface deeper, more contextual, and emotional characteristics that are unavailable in any database.
Interview customers
Nothing — including AI — beats information directly from the customers. Through one-on-one interviews, consumers can reveal more details on their content needs and preferences than anonymized data or AI-generated responses would give.
Personal conversations also contribute an often-overlooked element of resonance: empathy. Real-world stories help you view the audience as humans, not just marketing targets. Without that, fractional CMO and bestselling author Joe Lazer says, your audience won’t feel seen and understood.
In a recent article in The Storytelling Edge newsletter, he says marketers need an inspirational muse, not a static portrait on a pedestal.
To find that muse, Joe recommends spending as much time as possible with the people you're creating content for. "Listen closely to their stories until their dreams and fears start to feel like your own,” he writes.
AI shortcut: While you shouldn't expect chatbots to elicit emotional responses, use AI to help make those human conversations more productive. Prompt a generative AI tool to create a list of sentiment-related interview questions that you can ask. Or enter your favorite icebreaker question and ask the AI tool for follow-up ideas to keep the conversation flowing.
Consult with your customer-facing colleagues
Gather audience insights internally and make your first stops at the sales and customer service departments. These colleagues regularly interact with the audience, giving them direct access to details about consumers' pain points, purchasing processes, and priority needs.
These internal conversations can also surface sentiment-related information, such as what keeps customers up at night, their areas of interest, and what motivates them to act on their purchase intentions. These clues reveal additional personas to target, issues to raise in your content, and industry terms and tone to use for stronger resonance.
Do external research
While you should consult your company’s resources and directly engage with customers, that data can be subjective, situational, or colored by interview bias.
To enhance these findings, do external research with publicly available information sources. Insights gathered through relevant blogs and social media profiles of industry influencers are less likely to be affected by your business agenda than internal conversations or direct outreach might.
LinkedIn profiles are another rich source of audience insights. In this article, Dennis Shiao, founder of Attention Retention, describes his process to unlock them:
Enter a broad descriptive term — like "marketing" — in the search bar to generate a list of people to research.
Click "people" and "all filters" and choose relevant criteria from the available filters, such as "location" or "companies.”
Assess which people on the list would be the most helpful. Focus on users who offer the most detail in their profiles. Identify other profiles to add to your tracker.
Examine the profile headlines for clues about their core mission, motivations, and ambitions.
Review the about and experience sections for insights into the nature of their work, the challenges they face, and the goals they focus on.
Scan the activity section to discover the topics they discuss or ask about. Note any relevant professionals tagged or referenced in their LinkedIn posts and add them to your research list of additional audience candidates.
Look for any groups you’re a member of and review their conversations to enrich your understanding of the persona's passions and topical priorities.
Use progressive profiling
Progressive profiling uses automation tools, smart lead forms, and directed questioning to learn about the audience over time.
For example, after users download a gated asset, you dynamically serve them additional content on similar or related topics. By analyzing how (or if) they engage, you can assess whether your persona assumptions, including their content needs, were correct.
AI shortcut: With progressive profiling, you gradually collect more insights about your most valuable visitors, suggests Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO at Orbit Media.
“You can export these details and give [them] to AI to get deeper insights,” he says. That can surface critical direction-setting clues, such as the persona's likely funnel stage, most pressing challenges, or emotional triggers. However, remember Andy’s words of caution: "Make sure to remove personally identifiable info first. AI and PII (personally identifiable information) don't mix!"
In his video about creating an AI marketing persona, Andy recommends asking highly specific questions to uncover novel insights. He shares these sample prompts:
Services to promote: I'm a vendor selling marketing services. Which services are you most likely to outsource?
New topics to raise in your content: What people/roles on your team have the strongest influence over the decision-making process?
Motivations and emotional connections to explore: What happened that made [you] realize you needed help from a marketing company?
Informational needs and preferred volume: What/how much information would [you] need about an agency before contacting them?
Go deeper than demographics
Demographic and behavioral insights provide a baseline understanding of your target customers and how they make decisions. Yet, these data points don't fully account for the emotions in those decisions.
Andi Robinson, owner of Hijinx Marketing, describes a more holistic persona approach: Explore customer needs through the lens of personality types.
As Andi outlines in her Content Marketing World presentation (below), personality refers to differences in people's characteristic thinking, feeling, and behavioral patterns. "Knowing your audience's personality traits can help you better understand their behavior and preferences, which gives you an advantage in implementing your content marketing strategy," she says.
Those advantages include pinpointing new customer segments, accessing richer data, and increasing loyalty through personalized conversations.
Here's how Andi suggests determining personality types:
Deploy content-based research: Develop surveys or assessments based on standard personality tests like Myers-Briggs, DISC, or Enneagrams. Ask questions to gauge sentiment around issues of relevance to your business, such as how they would prefer to make purchase decisions or resolve conflicts.
Observe social media behaviors: Look for personality clues by analyzing the content they share, topics they discuss, and the tone of their social interactions, as well as any feedback or direct conversations with your business.
Conduct interviews and focus groups: Ask open-ended questions and encourage participants to share their thoughts, feelings, and experiences related to your business rather than just their purchase processes and behaviors.
Andi says you can likely correlate your findings with one of four personality types. The signature characteristics of each can inform your persona-based decision-making, including what tone, voice, and content types will resonate most.
Type A: These intrepid high achievers are driven to succeed personally and professionally. They're typically results-oriented, highly organized, and prefer to take control rather than follow others' leads. As they can be competitive, they may respond well to messaging that triggers a fear of missing out.
Type B: These individuals tend to be more flexible, creative, and contemplative than others. Their ability to see the bigger picture and think outside the box suggests an affinity for content focused on innovative ideas and novel approaches.
Type C: People in this category are detail-oriented, analytical, and cautious. Often viewed as logical, practical, and systematic decision-makers, they prefer to think things through and carefully weigh all the options before acting. It may be best to stick to the facts when engaging this personality type, rather than playing on their emotions.
Type D: Those who fit this profile are more socially inhibited and may experience a high level of worry, anxiety, and irritability. These individuals can struggle with motivation and fear of the unknown — triggers you can avoid (or reflect) in your conversations.
Review your metrics data
While refreshing your understanding of audience needs, don't overlook the insights generated through content analytics and measurement activities.
Though past behaviors aren't always reliable indicators of future needs, Zontee Hou, managing director of Convince & Convert, has noted ways your measurement strategy and tactics can surface valuable persona insights, including:
Social media conversations: Look at where your audience interacts most, who they interact with in each community, and for what purposes. Pay attention to the terms, tone, and language in their conversations and carry these details into your personas.
Social media listening: Pull keywords from the brand-relevant conversations you're monitoring to understand which topics are discussed and the questions asked. Additionally, noting keyword shifts and keyword volume conversation can illuminate emerging trends and areas of interest worth exploring in your content.
AI shortcuts: AI can help you collect and contextualize social media insights, applying them to your personas. Here are a few ideas:
Create an agent to continuously scan multiple platforms, pinpointing relevant conversations and keywords.
Ask it to identify common traits among conversation participants and determine which characteristics most indicate purchasing behaviors or brand affinity.
Train an AI agent on your completed persona and task it with updating and refining the details to align with emerging social trends or behaviors.
Build your customer personas
Persona development is a customized process because it addresses your organization’s unique marketing challenges and opportunities. However, you can start with the following B2B audience framework. It keeps you focused on the most valuable insights among all the compiled data.
Step 1: Envision your ideal customer
Pick an audience member most likely to be helped by your content. Name that persona and outline the characteristics most critical to your business. To help, answer these questions:
Who is this person? What demographic and psychographic characteristics describe them?
What is their job title and function?
What kind of company/industry do they work in?
How long have they served in this capacity within the organization?
What experience/expertise do they bring to this role?
How does their job relate to others in their department and the organization?
Step 2: Consider common objectives, responsibilities, and obstacles
Now that you understand more about the person and their role within the workplace, proceed to these types of questions:
What goals do they have to achieve in their job?
What challenges frustrate them most about their role?
What gaps might they look to fill? What problems do they need to solve to alleviate frustration?
What keeps them from addressing those gaps and problems?
Step 3: Characterize their role in your business's buying cycle
Not all your customer targets are sole decision-makers, especially if you're marketing a big-ticket item. The answers to these questions reveal where your persona fits in the purchase process and who else they need to consult before buying:
How influential are these people in the decision-making process? Where might they get pushback?
Who else might influence the decisions (internal and external)?
Do they need others to sign off on decisions, or do they have the final say?
How far along are they in the buyer's journey?
What questions are they likely to ask to satisfy their purchase criteria?
What obstacles might stand in the way of satisfying those criteria?
What words are they likely to use to search for the answers they need?
Step 4: Incorporate personal communication preferences
Your persona should include functional insights related to their job and details related to their engagement behaviors and content preferences. Note their preferred topics, content platforms, formats, and social channels. To get those answers, ask these types of questions:
How do they typically discover, access, and consume content?
Do they gravitate toward certain media formats over others?
Do they prefer accessing content on a computer, mobile device, or other channels/platforms?
Do they get most of their information during work hours?
Do they favor immersive experiences or quick summaries, snippets, and clips?
What media sources do they rely on most for relevant, trustworthy information?
How much information might they want to receive? How often?
How often are they exposed to relevant content/information during a typical day?
How often do they log on to social networks? Which ones?
Do they actively participate in social media conversations or simply observe and absorb them?
Have they expressed a preference for receiving information on a daily, weekly, or less frequent basis?
Who/what influences their content consumption?
Whose advice do they trust or seek most when engaging with content (e.g., industry analysts, vendors, thought leaders, subject matter experts, friends, colleagues)?
What internal or external events might trigger variations in their content consumption pattern?
With these answers, you can identify content ideas most likely to catch the persona's attention or move them closer to making a purchase.
Activate your personas across the enterprise
Take these additional steps to ensure your brand as a whole benefits from the same deep persona understanding.
Share them internally
While developing personas is primarily a marketing exercise, sharing the resulting information with other teams that create or use content is important.
It's also helpful to intentionally share your personas with the sales team and HR for onboarding new hires. Doing so can help them become more familiar with your customers and prospects.
Frankly, in the age of social media, anyone in your organization could engage with prospects and customers, so it's helpful for all employees to align around the same information.
AI shortcut: Input the detailed persona into your AI tool and ask it to create a summary of it tailored to each functional department based on the insights most relevant to their roles.
Update them regularly
You'll likely refer to these personas for years. Problems arise, though, when you rely on the information long after it's lost relevance.
Revisit your personas regularly. These updates will ensure they remain aligned with your evolving content marketing strategy.
Your content can't help an audience you don't understand
Content marketing works best when you know and create content for a specific audience.
Meticulously crafted buyer personas can help you identify their interests and motivations, communicate with them on their terms, and keep them in mind throughout your content marketing processes.
Updated from an October 2022 article.
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