Understanding Digital Buyers Personas in Content Marketing Journey

If you are going to succeed with content marketing, you have to know and understand your audience. Content, when done right, leads to continued customer engagement. The key to effective and meaningful customer engagement is knowing to whom you’re speaking.

In the marketing world, determining that is called developing buyer personas. It’s an important part of the marketing strategy – it tells you exactly who your target audience is.  

“It is simply not productive or cost-efficient to begin the design process before you’ve attempted to get to know who your ideal customers might be. This is true of creating almost anything, but it is especially important for executives to remember as they invest valuable time and funds into developing their brand.” – Forbes

Let’s take a look at how digital buyer personas are developed.

How to Develop Digital Buyer Personas

Generally speaking, a buyer persona is a combination of attributes and habits of a key segment of your business’s audience. When it comes to the area of marketing, you have to have buyer personas to help you determine the most relevant and useful type of content for your specific audience. 

Why is developing buyer personas so important? Well, it’s key to determining the following:

• What type of content you should create
• What style, tone, and delivery strategies are going to work best for you
• Which topics are going to be the most relevant for your audience
• Who, within your company, needs to be part of specific marketing campaigns to make those campaigns successful (for example, sales department, customer service department, IT department, etc.)

It’s recommended that you develop three to five personas so the majority of your customers are represented. Keeping the number of personas under five will allow you to cover most of your audience, while still making it possible to be specific with each persona. Additionally, you have to keep in mind, the more buyer personas you create, the more you will end up spending on marketing.

As you’re developing buyer personas, the information you may want to consider includes:

• Demographics – customer location, age, income, etc.
• Customer background – family, job, education, etc.
• Customer key household responsibilities – are they head of household, primary buyer, decision-maker, etc.?
• Main purchase drivers – necessity, pleasure, impulse, research, etc.
• Pain points – what problems will your product solve for this persona?
• Where they get their information – word-of-mouth, social proof, etc.
• What types of content they prefer – videos, blog posts, guides, e-books, social media posts, etc.

You certainly don’t have to include all of this information in your personas, or you may find that you need to add more. It boils down to how you can best segment your customer base so that enough of it is covered, but that marketing to the different segments isn’t cost-prohibitive for your business.

One of the main points to be aware of as you create your buyer personas is that you have to make sure that your personas are as accurate as possible. When you build marketing content strategies on faulty personas, it will likely fail, making all of your time and expenses a waste.

How do you ensure that you are creating accurate personas? Where do you get your information? There are many ways to do it – from the information that customers enter when they visit or buy from your site to having conversations with actual customers. You can also consider the following sources:

• Direct questioning – Using interviews, polls, and surveys with your audience are all ways that you can gain insights about the information that you need for your personas.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) information – Data that is collected for SEO can be a valuable resource for developing your key buyer personas.
• Analytics and reporting – Using analytics tools like Google Analytics can help you drill down customer demographics and the topics that your audience is most interested in. Analyzing key metrics will tell you about your customers’ buying habits and preferences.
• Social media – What your audience says in comments, conversations that they have with other users, and what they share from your social media pages can be gold mines for finding out what makes them tick. You will undoubtedly find significant information on social media that you won’t find elsewhere.
• Internal marketing team – Your company’s marketing team will have insights into who your target audience is and how to reach them.

Final Thoughts on Buyer Personas

When you have accurate buyer personas, you know who your target audience is and that is the first step to creating marketing campaigns that work for your company. At Kiss PR Story, we can help you develop digital buyer personas and create effective marketing to increase the visibility of your website. Visit our storytelling website, and let us help you with all your digital marketing needs. Get started by calling at Story.Kisspr.com Dallas best content marketing press release agency today at (239) 373-5255! 

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