As a content marketer in today‘s digital age, you‘re competing with a staggering amount of noise. According to Worldometer, over 7.5 million blog posts are published every day. That‘s on top of the 500+ hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, the 350,000 tweets sent per minute, and the 65 billion messages sent on WhatsApp every day (Smart Insights).
To say it‘s a crowded landscape is a massive understatement. The only way to stand out and connect with your audience is to deeply understand who they are and what they care about. Enter the power of audience personas.
What is an Audience Persona?
An audience persona, also known as a buyer persona or customer avatar, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal reader or customer. It‘s based on real data and insights about your existing audience‘s demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
Think of it like creating a detailed character sketch of the person you‘re trying to reach with your content. Personas go beyond surface-level data to paint a robust, three-dimensional picture of your target audience.
"Buyer personas are examples of real buyers who influence or make decisions about the products, services or solutions you market," according to the Buyer Persona Institute. "They are a tool that builds confidence in strategies to persuade buyers to choose you rather than a competitor or the status quo."
Why Audience Personas are a Marketer‘s Best Friend
Audience personas have become a go-to tool for content marketers for a reason. The benefits are many:
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More relevant, resonant content: When you know your audience‘s pain points, challenges, and desires, you can craft content that speaks directly to them.
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Better targeting and segmentation: Personas allow you to segment your audience and tailor your messaging and tactics to each group.
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Improved product development: Understanding your customers on a deep level helps inform product improvements and new features.
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Increased customer empathy: Personas help your entire team internalize and empathize with your customers‘ needs.
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Higher conversion rates: Targeted, persona-driven content can significantly boost conversions and sales.
The proof is in the numbers. According to a study by Cintell, companies who exceed lead and revenue goals are 2.2x as likely to have and document personas than those who miss these goals.
Additionally, 71% of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas vs. 37% who simply meet goals and 26% who miss them.
Another study by Demand Gen Report found that 49% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make purchase decisions than they did a year ago. However, 76% say they have higher standards for the content they consume compared to a year ago.
In other words, B2B buyers are craving high-quality, relevant content now more than ever. And audience personas are key to delivering that.
How to Research and Create Actionable Audience Personas
Now that you‘re bought into the why, let‘s dig into the how. Follow these steps to create detailed, data-driven personas that inform every aspect of your marketing.
Step 1: Mine your existing data
The first step is to gather insights from the data you already have on your current customers, email subscribers, website visitors, and social media followers.
Some key data points to look at:
- Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, job title, industry
- Psychographics: Goals, challenges, opinions, interests, habits
- Behavioral: Web and search activity, email and social engagement, purchase history
- Comparative: What other brands do they buy from? What influences their decisions?
Use tools like Google Analytics, your CRM, social media analytics, and email marketing platform to dive into the data.
Step 2: Talk to your team
Your colleagues in sales, customer service, and account management have a wealth of knowledge about your customers. Pick their brains to identify trends and commonalities among your best (and worst) customers.
Ask questions like:
- What are our customers‘ most common questions and objections?
- What motivates someone to choose us over a competitor?
- How do customers describe the value and benefits of our product/service?
- What does the sales process look like and how long does it typically take?
- What causes deals to fall through?
Step 3: Go straight to the source
To augment the quantitative data, you‘ll want to gather qualitative insights as well by talking directly to your target audience. Some tactics:
- Interviews: Conduct 1:1 interviews with customers, prospects, and people who fit your target profile. Ask about their goals, challenges, influences, and content preferences.
- Surveys: Send surveys to your email list or current customer base. Keep it short and sweet to boost completion rates.
- Focus groups: Get a group of customers or potential customers together to ask questions and facilitate a discussion. It can uncover helpful insights and language to use.
- Social listening: Monitor social media conversations and online reviews to see how people describe your brand and their challenges.
Step 4: Identify audience patterns and segments
As you‘re gathering all this intel, look for patterns and commonalities that emerge. Are there a few main goals or challenges that come up repeatedly? Do they cluster around certain demographics like age, job title or industry?
If you have a complex product or several different types of customers, you may need multiple personas to represent the key segments. Aim for 3-5 distinct personas. Any more than that gets cumbersome to implement.
Step 5: Craft your persona profiles
Now it‘s time to distill all that research into actual persona documents. For each persona, include:
- Persona name – Give each persona a real name and even a headshot to make them feel like real people.
- Demographic info – Job title, career path, age, gender, income, location, family status.
- Psychographics – Goals, challenges, pain points, influences, buying preferences.
- Quotes – Include actual quotes from your research that capture this persona‘s feelings and experiences.
- Behavioral info – Where do they go for information? How do they research potential solutions?
- Objections and role in purchase process – What might hold them back from buying? Who else is involved in the decision?
- Content preferences – What content formats and channels do they prefer?
- Brand affinity – What brands do they like and what brand voice resonates with them?
Here‘s an example B2B persona for a project management software company:
Name: Marketing Mary
Demographics
- Age: 32
- Job Title: Marketing Manager
- Industry: Tech, SaaS
- Team: Manages a team of 5
- Education: Bachelor‘s degree in marketing
Goals
- Successfully launch marketing campaigns on time and under budget
- Prove ROI of marketing efforts to leadership
- Streamline project management and communication with cross-functional teams
- Increase qualified leads and conversions
Challenges
- Juggling multiple projects and tight deadlines
- Collaborating with busy colleagues in other departments
- Communicating results to executives
- Getting team to adopt new tools and processes
Influences
- Peers in other companies, industry thought leaders
- Online communities and Facebook groups
- Marketing blogs and publications like MarketingProfs, HubSpot blog, Content Marketing Institute
Objections
- Hesitant to add another tool that the team has to learn
- Doesn‘t want to disrupt current workflows
- Needs to justify cost to manager
Role in buying process
- Primary researcher and evaluator
- Convinces manager/VP of the need and value
- Gets buy-in from cross-functional team leads
Brands they like: Asana, Trello, Slack, MailChimp
Quote: "I feel like I‘m always putting out fires and reacting instead of being proactive. I need a better way to plan marketing projects and campaigns and keep all the collaborators on the same page."
Step 6: Distribute and use your personas
A persona is only powerful if it‘s put into action. Once you‘ve created your personas, share them with your entire company. Print them out, put them on the wall, and discuss them in team meetings to ingrain them into your company culture and DNA.
Then, put those personas to work! For every piece and campaign you create, refer back to your personas.
- What questions would Marketing Mary have about this topic?
- What key benefits would grab her attention in an email subject line?
- Where would she look for more information on this?
- What format would she prefer to consume it in?
Over time, you‘ll start to see your personas as real people you‘re creating content for, not just a vague notion of your audience.
Persona Pitfalls to Avoid
When done right, personas are an incredibly valuable addition to your marketing toolkit. But many companies aren‘t reaping the full rewards of personas due to some common pitfalls:
Making assumptions instead of using data.
Your personas need to be based on real research and insights, not guesses or assumptions. Regularly revisit your customer data to validate and update your personas.
Not going deep enough.
Basic demographic info isn‘t enough to create content that resonates on an emotional level. You need to dig into the psychographics to understand their attitudes, aspirations and secret desires.
Using too many personas.
In an attempt to capture every type of customer, some businesses create a dozen or more hyper-specific personas. But the more you have, the harder it is to keep them all straight and create content tailored to each one. Limit yourself to 3-5 unique personas.
Creating them and forgetting about them.
This is perhaps the biggest mistake and why some claim that personas "don‘t work". Personas only work if you put them to work. Refer to them constantly, update them regularly, and keep them alive in the minds of your team.
When crafted carefully, personas should feel like real people you know, not a lifeless collection of data points. They should be a living, evolving tool that keeps your team focused on your customers‘ needs.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Personas
The ultimate goal of using personas is to create content that resonates with your target audience and compels them to take action. Some metrics to track to gauge how well your persona-driven content is performing:
- Engagement: Time on page, bounce rate, pages per session, comments, shares
- Lead quality: Conversion rates, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), sales qualified leads (SQLs)
- Sales: Revenue generated, deals closed, length of sales cycle
- Retention: Churn rate, customer lifetime value, NPS score
Keep in mind that it may take some time to see the full impact of your persona strategy. But when implemented consistently, personas have been shown to boost metrics across the board.
Personas of the Future
So what‘s next in the world of audience personas? As artificial intelligence and machine learning become more sophisticated, we‘ll likely see more data-driven and predictive personas.
Already, many companies are using AI to analyze massive datasets and identify patterns to build more accurate persona profiles. Tools like IBM Watson and Google Analytics 360 offer AI-powered audience insights and predictions.
"AI enables marketers to leverage their own first-party data to construct persona identities and predictive journeys for their target customers," according to Forbes. "AI constructs the journeys of statistically significant persona identities, analyzes the nodes where the predictive journeys end, and offers marketers the insights necessary to keep those journeys in motion."
So instead of manually combing through data and making educated guesses, AI can do the heavy lifting of uncovering key persona attributes and predicting their next moves. This allows marketers to be even more targeted and proactive with their content.
But even as the technology evolves, the core concept remains the same – using data and empathy to understand your audience on a human level. No matter how sophisticated the tools become, that will always be key for winning hearts and minds with your marketing.
Bring Your Personas to Life
Audience personas are a powerful weapon in any content marketer‘s arsenal. They allow you to laser-target your messaging, create more robust content, and build genuine connections with your customers.
But perhaps most importantly, personas help instill a sense of empathy across your organization. They put a human face to the data and remind you that you‘re not just marketing to faceless consumers, but to real people with real struggles, passions, and stories.
When you commit to not just creating personas, but to actually using them consistently, they can truly transform your marketing from ho-hum to remarkable. So go forth and bring those personas to life – your audience (and your bottom line) will thank you.
Need help creating data-driven personas and weaving them into your content strategy? Let‘s chat.
