An effective content strategy should rely on precise data. In fact, if you want to generate leads and convert prospects into customers, you need to understand your targets and their concerns.
Personas are fictional characters that embody your real and potential customers behaviors, needs and concerns. They help you understand your audience and offer you guidelines on how to behave with each type of customer.
You can create your own personas by answering to a few questions. Let’s see how you can create personas for your company.
Define your personas
There is no need to create more than 5 personas for your company. 3 to 5 ones will be enough to describe your customers and their specificities.
Many templates exist to help you out with creating your personas. This questions are probably the main ones you need to answer:
Name of the persona
Job title
- Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
- Details about their role
- Typical day
Demographics
- Age
- Gender
- Salary / household income
- Location: urban / suburban / rural
- Education
- Family
Goals and challenges
- Primary goal
- Secondary goal
- How you help achieve these goals
- What does it mean to be successful
- Primary challenge
- Secondary challenge
- How you help solve these problems
Values / fears
- Primary values
- Common objections during sales process
- How to you prefer to interact with vendors (email, phone, in person?)
Marketing message
Elevator pitch
And then from one company to another, there are specific criteria that can be taken into account. For instance, you could add questions about hobbies, blogs and news they read, how they use internet, etc. It is up to you to find any other questions that might be relevant to build your personas.
Search for your personas informations
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To build your personas, you need to dig into all the informations that customers has left to you. You do not know where to look for? Here are some ideas:
Google Analytics
You can check from where your customers come from, what types of queries they are asking and which keywords they are using, how much time they spend on-site, which devices they use, etc. It will help you draw your customer browsing habits with actionable data.
Social Media
You can look into your social media accounts to find further informations. What are your followers talking about? What are their concerns? Are they talking about problems they meet with your brand or product? How are they using your social medias?
Questions
You can directly ask questions to your customers. Surveys and interviews bring precise insights and feedbacks that can make the difference with your personas. Personas based on interviews from salespeople, customer service interactions and customers themselves are the most effective because you can really dig into goals, values and fears.
Your team
Your team has links with your customers. From the marketing service to the customer or technical one, they all have different types of interactions with your customers. Ask them for their insights and data and match your results.
A/B testing
Looking to what is currently working with your audience and what is not can provide you useful informations about your customers.
Then you can draw different profiles when you have gathered these informations. BuyerPersonas offers different examples you can look at.
Be careful with your personas
Share your personas with all your team
As a marketing component, personas should also be shared with the sale department or the hiring one. As personas can help you in being more productive, other services may also find it useful to have access to deeper insights about your customers. For example you can create two versions of a personas: one detailed for the marketing team and a shorter one for the rest of your employees.
Don’t rely too long on your personas
Once you have created your personas you could be tempted to rely on them for years. Unfortunately, some features may change over the time and you will need to refresh your personas data if you want to avoid a loss of relevancy.
Map your personas buying path
Your personas help you to know your customer buying journey. Drawing a map of your customer’s journey will help you to identify the goals, activities and informations required at each step from the start to finish. In clear, it will optimize your content marketing strategies since you will better know their expectations.
