Customer Persona in Content Marketing: How To Create The Perfect Persona (To Make You More Money)
You’ve heard of a buyer persona but you’re wondering what it is exactly and why it is important to your business.
Are you looking to improve your content marketing campaign and understand your ideal customer better?
This guide will help you:
- Understand buyer persona
- Create a buyer persona to increase your ROI
- Connect with your target audience at a deeper level.
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Contents
What is a Buyer Persona in Content Marketing?
If you are marketing anything to consumers, it is important to understand buyer persona in content marketing. A buyer persona includes detailed information about your ideal customer.
Once you know who your ideal buyer is, you can tailor your content and marketing toward that person.
Have you ever seen an ad and the product or service sounded like it was meant for you? This is probably because you fit perfectly into the company’s buyer persona.
They knew exactly what you wanted and what would make you go for the purchase.
Take Jen for example.
Jen is a new business owner. She started an online company to help mothers who are homeschooling their children. She was having a difficult time reaching her potential customers and was running low on money to continue advertising.
Just as she was about to give up, she heard about the importance of buyer personas.
She spent the next week consumed (and slightly obsessed) with creating her company’s buyer persona.
She learned all about this hypothetical woman.
What type of house she lived in. What types of sports her kids played. Her fears of homeschooling. And much more.
After figuring this out, she changed the messaging on her instagram ads to DIRECTLY connect with this woman.
She changed the copy on her website and funnel to pinpoint that woman’s pain points and paint a clear picture of how her service can make that woman’s life better.
The result?
Triple the conversions. Triple the revenue.
How?
Simply by understanding her ideal customer better.
What can you learn from this story?
You need to:
- Get to know your customer well
- Create your ideal buyer persona
- Use your buyer persona in your content marketing campaign
Customer Persona in Content Marketing Definition:
Buyer persona – Detailed information about your ideal customer who is likely to make a purchase.
Customer persona – Detailed information about your ideal customer who is ready to make a purchase, or who has already made a purchase.
To be clear, the difference is where your customer is at in the buying process. Are they a potential customer or are they ready to buy?
This is important because your message to both of them will be different.
The message to your buyer persona will focus on getting them to purchase.
Your goal with your customer persona is to increase your customer retention rate.
Let’s look at why creating a buyer persona is critical for any business.
Why Create A Buyer Persona in Content Marketing?
Are you ready to increase sales, connect with more potential buyers, and get WAY more results per dollar spent on marketing?
That’s where creating a buyer persona comes in.
Don’t just create a buyer persona, either. You want to use it on a regular basis and refine it as necessary.
Don’t just create a persona and forget about it.
You may be wondering why you should take the time to do this.
According to business.com, persona marketing can help 71% of businesses exceed their expected revenue.
Let’s take a look at a few reasons to create a buyer persona in content marketing including:
- Improved targeting
- Enhanced messaging
- Exceptional ROI
Reason 1: Better Targeting
Creating a buyer persona is useful for targeting your potential customers. Your target market should be based on the research of your buyer persona.
This is ESPECIALLY valuable when you are using paid ads. If you’re going to be spending money on each and every click, you better know everything there is to know about your buyer persona.
Understanding your audience extremely well allows you to create ads that speak to them: targeting them without wasting your money.
Why does this matter?
Remember Jen? She had just spent over $1000 on marketing, trying to reach her potential buyers and didn’t get any return on her investment or ROI.
Jen was out of money. She did not know about creating a buyer persona and marketed to the wrong set of people.
She learned to create a buyer persona and improve her ad message.
She was able to:
- Reach more potential buyers
- Increase sales
- Achieve a greater ROI
Better targeting matters because without your ideal buyer persona in content marketing you will waste your hard-earned money, like Jen.
When you don’t create a buyer persona, you don’t know who you need to target, and you wind up targeting no one.
If you are unsure of who your ideal buyer is, your message will not matter to them and/or they may never see it.
In marketing everything matters:
- The right timing
- The right message
- The right audience
Reason 2: Better Messaging
If you know your buyer persona, you can connect with them at a deeper level through better messaging. According to Forbes, it is essential that a business who wants to be successful focuses on:
“developing or understanding how it will fit into customers’ needs, wants, values, and lives; and building a customer experience that turns the offering into a complete customer solution.”
Why does this matter?
If you don’t have the proper message, you will not reach your audience.
You can have the right timing and the right audience, but if they do not connect with your message, you will not grab their attention.
Jen can now pique the interest of her audience because she understands what they want and need.
Had Jen not learned about buyer persona, she would have continued to send the wrong message and may have had to close her business.
Jen now understands the importance of buyer persona and by creating her buyer persona she:
- Increased interest
- Helped more homeschool families
- Spends less money on advertising because she is able to easily reach her target audience.
Understanding buyer personas has been a life changing experience for Jen and her new company.
Better messaging means you have a higher chance of reaching your potential customers and not losing them to your competitors.
Reason 3: Better ROI For You
If you know your ideal buyer persona, you will be more likely to:
- Have a successful content marketing campaign
- See a greater return on investment (ROI)
Focusing on better messaging will yield:
- Increase in the number of views
- More clicks
- Boost in followers
- Rise in the number of purchases
- Greater customer retention
Why does this matter?
Increased ROI is good for business.
You can spend less money on advertising and more money on the things that matter most in running your company.
Advertising is an essential component. However, you want to avoid losing your dollars.
According to Business News Daily, only businesses that pay attention and track ROI will be successful in the long run.
Let’s look at how to develop buyer personas in content marketing to help you better track your ROI.
How to Develop Buyer Personas in Content Marketing?
Developing a buyer persona in content marketing is simple but not easy.
A buyer persona should not include made up information based on who you think your ideal customer is. Make sure to use data that you have worked hard to gather from your current customers.
If you are a brand new company, you may give some initial surveys to potential customers and gather that data. This is called customer discovery and is a critical step for any new business.
You can review and modify your buyer persona as you grow and develop your product.
Once you know who your potential buyers are and what problem you are solving, you will want to focus on finding out as much as you can about them.
Step 1: Understand Exactly Who Your Ideal Customer Persona is and How They Spend Their Day
Here is a list of things you should ask during your customer discovery and include in your buyer persona:
- Are they male or female?
- How old are they?
- What is their household income?
- Are they married?
- Do they have a family?
- Do they have pets or children?
- What is their job and seniority level at work?
- Where do they live?
- What do they value?
You will then want to know what their daily life is like:
- What do they do before and after work?
- How much time do they spend in the car, at home, and at work?
- What kinds of books do they read?
- Do they listen to music?
- Do they watch TV?
- Where do they enjoy spending time and with who?
How to do this:
You can find out this information by asking your current and potential customers. Most often, people love to talk about themselves.
Contact potential customers and your existing customers. Let them know you are looking to improve your services. Invite them to answer some questions about their experience with your company.
The most important thing to remember is that you need to listen. This is no longer about you, this is about them. Ask the questions and let them give you their answers. Don’t try to defend their response. Listen and acknowledge.
If you truly listen, you will be surprised at how much people are willing to share.
This is your chance to really make sure you understand your customers so that you can help solve their problems.
Step 2: Understand Exactly What Types of Problems Your Buyer Persona Has
It is necessary to know what types of problems your customers have.
Make sure to ask these additional questions while interviewing your customers:
- What keeps them up at night?
- How do they define their problem?
- How do they think about their problem?
- Who do they talk to about their problems?
How do they want their problem solved:
- Are they expecting to have a personal phone call?
- Do they prefer to communicate through text or email?
- Are they expecting the sign-up process right there on your website?
In order to give them an experience they want and expect, you need to understand what they are looking for and why.
How to do this:
To understand your customers’ problem well, you will want to dig deep. You can dig deep by asking more questions. As they answer one question, listen well, and that will usually lead to another question. Continue this process. It will allow you to really get to know them.
According to Forbes, people do not like to be sold to.
Knowing your customers well will allow you to create a message and share content with them that will build trust.
Once they trust you, they will be more likely to purchase your product or service.
Step 3: Understand the “Language” That Ideal Buyer Persona Speaks
According to Business2community.com, understanding the language of your customer is critical.
The three things to focus on when speaking to your buyer include:
- Identify with your customer
- Drop the jargon
- Carefully select your words
How to do this:
To find out your customers’ language, you can follow them. Go to the places where they spend their time. You can look to see what type of content they look for and how they respond to that content. Reddit and other forums are a great place to start.
As you follow them, you will begin to notice:
- The types of things they search for
- How they speak in the forums
- What words they use
This will be very helpful in developing your message.
Step 4: Determine, Based On Data, What Type of Content Your Buyer Persona Wants
You will want to know how your buyer persona searches for content.
Where do they look for information?
- Facebook or Instagram?
- Blogger or Reddit?
- Do they ask Siri, Alexa, or Cortona?
- Search google?
- Watch Youtube?
Next you need to know what type of content they enjoy using most.
- Do they want to engage in video content?
- Purchase step-by-step guides?
- Do they LOVE data and science?
How to do this:
Following your buyer persona and understanding what type of content they utilize will be essential. This will help you know what type of content to create that will grab their attention.
If you are only creating YouTube videos and they don’t watch Youtube videos, you are wasting your time, money, and energy.
You need to meet them where they are at.
Step 5: Understand What Will Encourage Your Ideal Buyer Persona to Take Action
Once you know your ideal buyer persona, you should begin to understand what will make them take action:
- Will they download a free or paid guide?
- Do they buy something IMMEDIATELY if it’ll solve their problem?
- Maybe they need to think about things and talk it over with a spouse?
How to do this:
Knowing how and why they take action will be critical for you to develop your call to action. Visit business2community for ideas on how to experiment with your call to action.
Find the one that works best and stick to it for awhile. We recommended running an A/B test. This will allow you to test out two types of call to actions that work for your potential buyers. Revisit this often and update your call to action when necessary.
Examples of Buyer Personas in Content Marketing
Listed below are three examples of buyer personas. Pay attention as you read them.
You should be able to get a good idea of:
- What products and services they would be interested in purchasing
- How much they can afford to spend
- Where they spend their time
- What content they read
- What will get them to make a purchase
Content Marketing Buyer Persona #1:
Content Marketing Buyer Persona #2:
Content Marketing Buyer Persona #2:
Let us, here at Portland SEO Growth, help you create better messaging in order to reach your customers and gain a greater ROI. Here are some of our success stories.
