How to Meet Your Persona in Person
Creating a customer persona is one of  the very  first stages of creating a content marketing strategy. After all, we can’t start a conversation with someone if there is nobody to talk to.

Stage #1 - Create the persona
Personas allow businesses to fully identify their customers. They let them refine their products and services to match their customers’ very specific needs — and they allow content marketers to speak in a language the audience can totally relate and respond to.

Step #2 - Locate your persona on its customer journey
As mentioned before,  creating the persona is just the first step. Next, we need to have a communication plan to match the persona. Having the identity of the customer persona helps  in knowing what, when, where and how to speak to it. In order to create an effective communication plan we need to locate where on the client’s journey this persona is located, is it:
1. A potential customer we need to interest?
2. A prospect we need to hunt?
3. A customer we need to sell up or sell to?
4. An existing customer we need to engage?
5. A customer we need to retain?

Your persona can be at any one of these points, or at a few at same time. For example:
John is an existing life insurance customer. We need to retain him but his persona is also someone who could buy add ons to the policy as well as house and car  insurance.
Our mission as content strategists is to build a content infrastructure that would give John the feeling that all these points we mentioned on the journey are all part of the same experience and not communicated in different schemes. A solid content strategy will give him one tone of voice that is familiar during every stage of his customer journey.

Step #3 - What does your persona need at this point?
Knowing where your persona stands is great because then you know what kind of content John might be looking for and is relevant to his life. Next, we  go deeper. We look into his needs and define his conscious desires - the ones he knows or thinks he knows he wants. We go even further and look at  the subconscious needs that run his life and directly relate to the solution your brand can offer.

Step #4 - What does your persona expect at this point?
Now we want to look into John’s world of expectations and learn all we can about his perception of how things should be. Fulfilling his world of conscious and subconscious expectations is a very important part in the relationship because who really stays in a relationship that doesn’t answer expectations?

Step #5 - What do you have to offer this persona?
We’re almost done. We now know so many things about our customer persona that we are ready to actually have a meaningful relationship with it. We know where our persona is in its customer journey, what are the needs and expectations that bring it back to our own brand world in order to find answers. So we ask: What do we have to offer this persona? How can we meet this persona’s needs?

Having answers to these questions will define key messages, content schedule program and the best, most effective means of communication.
Every content marketing project then begins with an understanding of the audience of personas. We draw up pictures of all the different personas who may be consuming the content we plan and produce. We choose the personas most important to us— because not all personas are created equal — and we produce a strategy that turns as many of those personas as possible into engaged and satisfied customers.

For content marketers, personas are essential tools that allow us to engage, persuade, and connect with our audience. So next time you see a marketing professional talking to himself and there’s no bluetooth device in sight, consider that he's not going crazy; he’s just having a chat with one of his personas.

If you have any questions or want to meet your brand’s persona, just drop us a line at contact@astelo.com.

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