Before you jump into creating a content plan for your business, we recommend creating customer personas. Personas are a critical piece of the concept of understanding your target audience so that you can create content that resonates with real people.
Personas can guide your messaging, tone, and other aspects of your content strategy. So, where do you begin when your team is ready to sketch out customer personas for your brand?
One approach to customer personas is through research to uncover different shared demographics, hobbies, or interests of your existing customer or client base. You can pull data from surveys, customer reviews, and demographic data from advertising or paid social media campaigns.
Your customer base is not monolithic. Imagine that you’re simply trying to create five examples of people who really could benefit from your product or service and who resemble your current customers.
Looking at your company’s marketing data, you can begin to harness quantitative information about your business to tell a story about different individuals you think could represent your customer base.
Develop three to five personas and give each persona a name. You can even pull a stock photo of a person who you want to represent each persona and make your customers feel like real people who you can speak to directly.
For each persona, answer the questions:
Where does this person live?
What is their gender?
What do they do for work?
What do they do for fun?
What do they value?
What are their personal goals?
How do they interact with your brand?
What do they value about their life?
What are their needs?
What motivates them?
How do they build relationships?
Who influences them?
One or multiple members of your team can brainstorm answers to these questions and then return to your responses to edit and home in on a precise persona. Repeat this process with your following customer personas, each time imagining a different demographic of customer from the first.
When you’re done with this process, you’ll have your first five customer personas. It’s smart to revisit this process routinely, conducting user/customer research and harnessing marketing data to build a better understanding of key insights about your customers.
In the next installment of our Marketing Your Business 101 series, we’ll cover how to create a strong content strategy for your brand based on your customer personas.