To succeed in content marketing, you need to create the right content for the right audience. Defining buyer personas is a critical step in developing content that is truly targeted.
Copywriting becomes much easier after you’ve built your buyer personas. By putting together a composite sketch of your customer, you can adapt your content strategy to address your audience’s challenges.
What are personas?
Personas are detailed profiles of your customers. Building a persona is like putting together an exhaustive dossier on the demographics, as well as needs, wants, goals, fears and challenges of your target customer.
What are their likes? How old are they? What is their job? Where do they live? How do they shop? What do they want to achieve?
Knowing everything about your personas will help you understand how your customers will behave throughout the buying cycle.
Most businesses have at least two personas. Some may have many more. For instance, a huge e-commerce outfit may have many different personas as each product can be targeted at different segments of consumers.
Personas for B2B and B2C marketing will also differ. In B2B copywriting, it is important to consider the persona’s job in the organization and his or her role in the decision making process.
You might even want to name your personas. Visualizing them as real people will help you to vary the tone and style of writing for each persona and tailor your messages accordingly.
Why should you map out your buyer personas?
The number one reason for sketching out a composite of your buyer persona is to understand what they want so that you can adapt and tailor your content and message to address their needs or pain points.
Mapping out your buyer personas will help you to determine the type of content you need to create, the topics you should write about, as well as the tone of voice and delivery style that will make a greater impact with your audience.
You need to consider the different types of personalities who may be interested in your product and service. Each persona has different desires and challenges. So you would not necessarily provide the same content or write in the same style for each of them.
When you target the right people and give them content which they will find relevant and interesting, this will align yourself with your buyers’ goals or priorities.
For instance, potential buyers of a new condominium project could include couples with no kids, young families or multi-generational families. Each of these segments would have different objectives in buying a home. So you’ll need to adjust your sales copy accordingly.
Another good example of persona targeting is in movie marketing. Have you noticed that there are usually a few versions of movie trailers and posters? This is to appeal to different segments of moviegoers.
Build your copywriting and content strategy around your personas. This will help you to better answer your audience’s questions and express your message more effectively.
Coming up: How can you create buyer personas and what questions should you ask?
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