This probably isn’t going to be a much of a surprise, but we can’t just barrel forward creating content without a plan. We have to figure out who we’re making content for first.
The way to do this is to create personas. What are personas? Personas are fictitious “characters” that stand in for typical customers. A persona represents a specific group of customers who share similar product interests or consumption patterns. These similarities allow marketers to create content that will appeal to a large number of customers by focusing efforts on what a fictional customer would like.
A typical business (that creates personas at least…many don’t) creates 3-5 personas.
A company isn’t just going to look through its database of customers, pick one at random, anoint them, and then start creating content for that single person. No, they’re actually going to create personas that represent typical customer types. The key is that you’re going to have more than one persona because your business will likely have a number of key customer types.
Let’s look at a process a firm can use to integrate personas.
Understand who your typical customers are
First, we need to understand who our typical customers are. You can do this by analyzing your customer database and doing cluster analysis to see what types of customer demographics or psychographics group together. You can also look at your website analytics and find similar information.
Speaking of demographics and psychographics. Here are the types of information used to create personas that a travel company might use. Different industries would likely have very different variables that matter to them.
Create your personas
Next we create our personas. But how many personas do we need? Well that depends on your customer base and your resources. If your business sells to only a specific type of clientele, then you may not need more than one persona. Which means your content needs will be more limited.
If your customer base is very diverse, you may need multiple personas. If you have say, 5 different personas, that means you’re likely going to want to appeal to each with specific content. That’s a lot of content to create. So, customer clusters and resources (time and money) are going to let you know how many personas need to be created, and how granular you want to get with your content. If you have somewhat limited resources, then you might want to think about creating content that’s going to appeal to a broad audience, but perhaps organize the content so it can be easily accessed by the personas you create.
Here’s an example of a persona created for a shoe company.
Notice how this person really seems real. There’s a picture and everything. This is to give the marketing & content teams the idea that this IS a real person. That they are creating content just for her. Because if they can succeed in creating content that’s going to resonate with this persona, then the large number of people this persona actually represents will probably enjoy that content too.
Evaluate & Refine our Personas
Finally, we evaluate and refine our personas. Now we need to determine how the content we’ve created is resonating with our audience.
If the customers we have developed content for seem to engage with some content, but not others, it’s probably time to re-evaluate the types of content you need to develop for those personas.
If the content is popular, but not by the personas you anticipated, well then you’ve learned something new about your customers. And now you can figure out how to engage with them even better.