Why are customer personas important?
Customer personas provide tremendous value to your content marketing operation (see our earlier post). For example, they can help everyone on your team develop a deeper understanding of who specifically they are creating editorial calendar content for. This is important for several reasons:
- First, the nature of your content will shift depending on the persona you are marketing to. A senior engineer will not appreciate a blog post titled “Five Pitfalls First-Year Engineers Should Avoid.” But that might be a great post for a junior engineering technician.
- Second, the tone of your content may differ from persona to persona. For example if your product or service is aimed at a general audience, you may not use the same language for a female millennial and a male senior.
- Third, different customers may have different pain points or challenges that your product and service may help. Creating content that revolves around the specific pain points of different personas makes your content more relevant. Relevant content is helpful to people and they develop a sense that you are trying to actually help them. Not just get them to buy.
- Fourth, defining the factors in purchasing decisions by persona will focus writers on the most important things that people need to have covered off before they buy. There’s less guesswork for a content creator when they know exactly what makes a person buy – based on a persona.
- Finally, if you know where each persona gets their information online, or where they hang out, you can target your content to those channels, using scarce resources more wisely.
Develop personas and you’ll be better equipped to attract potential customers and deliver a superior content-driven experience that keeps them coming back for more. If you don’t nail down your personas, every aspect of your content marketing process will suffer from a lack of relevance to your most important audiences.
So where should you start? With your existing customers, of course. Who are they, really?
In our graphic below, you’ll see 9 ways to flesh out your customer into a real human being.
