Why You Need Content Personas

Photo by Ryan Holloway on Unsplash

Before you start planning and creating content, having a crystallized understanding of your audience is a must. Personas - a profile of your target customer - serve the purpose of keeping your customer in mind when planning relevant and useful content for your audience. They bring your audience to life and also help different teams across your organization envision your audience as a real, living, breathing person.

Depending on how they are created, personas can quickly become a powerful tool or a useless document since they only as good as the quality of work that goes into them.

To make sure that content personas won't just sit on a shelf gathering dust, here are three important tips when developing them:

Talk to real people

The goal of personas is to create empathy for your audience within your organization, so personas should feel real. In order for them to feel real, they need to be inspired and created from real people which is why talking to your customer is so important. If research doesn't exist already, it's time for you to address it. 

Whether it's gathering insights via video diaries or social listening, it's crucial to get a baseline understanding of who your audience. Content personas should include a big picture view of your customer in terms of who they are and what they care about when it comes to your industry as well as specific characteristics that set them apart from other audiences or personas.

At the very least, content personas should include:

• Overview (Occupation, life stage, etc)
• Challenges (What are their top frustrations?)
• Behavior (How and where do they seek out information or solutions?)
• Motivations (What prompts them to engage?)
• Influences (Who or what influences them to engage?)
• Interests (What topics and types of content do they enjoy?)

These questions are a good starting point but you'll definitely want to aim for a more comprehensive list of your own questions specific to your company's needs and audience. If you currently have content personas, take a look and identify anything that feels flat or any missing areas.

Get specific

When it comes to personas, the devil is in the details. As mentioned above, specific examples like topics and articles this audience cares about are really important because it provides a jumping off point when it comes to ideating content ideas for your audience.

If specific questions around content weren't originally included during your research, it can be supplemented using performance data or through social listening. Often times I will include top performing blog posts or podcasts to give a better understanding of the person. A day in the life can also be a great way to visualize the unique behaviors of your audience. For instance, highlighting which sites, apps and media they engage with during the day is helpful as we connect the dots between their motivations and behaviors. 

Having specifics will also help future content brainstorms if your team can see examples themes and topics that the audience cares about. It will be that much easier to develop a content strategy that is relevant and effective.

Treat personas as iterative

People change and so should your personas. Not to mention your industry, social media, cultural influences or perhaps your audience's life stage may have changed over time. I recommend evaluating your content personas at least once a year to make sure they stay relevant and in touch with your audience.

Refreshing personas can be done a variety of ways. For instance you could have a few quick discussions with your customers, a short survey or use social data. Another important task is taking a look at what has worked with your own content and incorporating those findings into the personas. For instance, did you learn that podcasts are a preferred channel for your audience? Then move podcasts up as a top media behavior.

When done right, content personas can be a powerful tool.  Personas highlight your customer's needs, motivations and behaviors in order to create empathy and also serve as a springboard to winning content and media plans. With these tips in mind, you'll keep your content personas from sitting on the shelf and instead they'll become a crucial part of your planning process.