Who do you want to consume your content? If you don’t know, you are simply shooting in the dark. You need to define the exact person who has the exact problem that your product or content will solve. You need to create a buyer persona so you have someone specific to develop your content for.
A buyer persona (aka user persona or marketing persona) is the archetype of your ideal customer. Or as Conversation Marketing calls it, your imaginary friend. It embodies enough information to make that persona seem like someone you actually know or could work with.
The trick is to get the persona together in order to proceed with content development.
- Who is she?
- What motivates her?
- What is her title?
- What are her responsibilities?
- What are her hobbies?
- What is her daily goal? (not necessarily the exact problem she needs solved right now)
- Is she an experience tech user?
- Is she the decision maker or is she a researcher?
Where can you get this type of detail?
1.) Interview Current Customers
Speak to your current customers, especially the newest ones. Find out:
- What are their basic demographics and psychographics?
- What problem did they need to solve?
- What tipped the scales to make them pursue a resolution? (What broke them out of status quo?)Who are their influencers?
- Where do they go to do research? Where do they get trusted information?
- How do they like to consume content?
These are all questions that anyone selling a product or service needs to know about their ideal customer.
2.) Keyword Research
What words are people using to find your site? The terms that lead them to your door tell you about the type of problem they have, the questions they need answered. These terms can spark development of specific content to address those topics while painting you as an authority or thought leader, someone they know has the answers they seek.
3.) Website Behavior
Access to a good analytics program, such as Google Analytics, can tell you a great deal about someone’s agenda as he accesses information on your site:
- What pages were visited most?
- Where did he spend the most time?
- How long did he stay on your site?
- How did he get to your site? What is the referring URL?
4.) Study Competitors and Industry Resources.
Look to your competitors and learn what content they offer the customer you are competing for. Read trade publications, blogs, reports, and other content to get ideas about topics that are currently on everyone’s mind and what problems they have. This can also give you a hint about the style of content development that is preferred, how technical it needs to be, and how it is best presented.
5.) Check Professional Networks
Specialized social networks and forums are treasure troves of information about what your customer needs to know and how he communicates. Every industry has a community that interacts to learn and offer information, often on problems that are current, on-going, or urgent. Here is your chance to create content that speaks to immediate industry issues.
6.) Talk to Sales and Customer Support
These people need to be part of the cross functional team to create the persona for content development. If sales doesn’t know your ideal customer, you need a new sales force. Between sales and service, most of the problems facing your ideal customer have already been identified in some manner and point to problems new or future customers may experience. Content development must proactively address those concerns.
Put all this information together. Give your persona a name: MedTech Tilly, Programmer Pete, Bob the CEO, something to help along the illusion of personhood and allow your empathy and imagination to interact with this persona as if it was a person of flesh and blood. This empathy will inform your content to make it eminently consumable to your ideal customer.
One last thing…none of this is set in stone. As with all marketing campaigns, you need to test your content and tweak it as data comes in that tells you what is working and what isn’t. Your persona may get tweaked too as the definition of your ideal customer is made richer over time.
A buyer persona gives you someone specific to write for rather than a nameless, faceless stranger. Knowing what your ideal customer may ask, need, or have a problem with creates a pathway to earning her trust and her business.