What Is a content marketing Persona?

You’ve probably heard of “customer personas.” It’s the kind of phrase that gets tossed around easily in marketing meetings, often by people who have never actually used  one. Customer personas are fictional portrayals of your ideal customer. They’re based on real data and they reflect the ideal customer’s needs and wants. While a target market represents a segment of a population, a persona stands for the individuals who make up that segment.

Personas help businesses to better understand their customers: their priorities, their habits, their personalities and the choices that will lead them to purchase. While statistics and customer research may seem more important, personas (fictional representations of your customers) don’t replace research data or analysis; they supplement them by adding a human face to the patterns the research uncovers. The better your customer persona, the easier you’ll find it to engage your customer.

Personas Are Everywhere!

The concept isn’t entirely new. Personas have been used by UX designers since the nineties but they were soon taken up eagerly by branding firms, designers, retail stores, B2B companies, service providers, online business, manufacturers, TV and radio shows, and more. Anyone, in short, who wants to reach a customer and build a relationship with them.

BBC Radio hosts, for example, imagine that they’re talking to just two people.  Procter and Gamble, which produces a range of household items, focuses on a persona based on mothers because they’re often the key buyer. During the 2012 Olympics, they were able to create content that touched on the mother’s role in raising an athlete - and went straight to the heart of their customer persona.

Why Content Marketing Needs Customer Personas

Similarly, content marketers need to keep in mind the persona who will be watching, reading, sharing and returning to the content that we’re publishing. Whenever we create content, we keep that persona in mind and we imagine how that persona will react when they see a video that we’re preparing, an infographic that we’re designing or a blog post that we’re putting together. We produce the content in a language that appeals to them, in a format that they enjoy consuming and filled with information that we know they need and will find valuable.

What we look for in creating a persona is clear. An accurate customer persona, tells us:

• Who to address;

• What they want to know;

• The language they speak;

• The digital devices they use;

• And where and when to communicate with them.

It provides all the information we need to engage with customers in a way they find relevant and appealing and at a time and place they find convenient.

All products, all services, all companies, have a very specific audience. It’s a restricted audience. It’s restricted to the kind of person who has the need that  product was created to answer. Not everyone has that need. But if we can identify those people, create content that appeals specifically to them- you will engage and create a meaningful one on one relationship with them.

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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