Understanding Your Audience For Better Content Creation and Marketing

  

Step 1: Know Audience

This step is everything, whatever you do don’t skip this. The best way to go about it is to fill out a buyer persona. Choose a buyer that you want to go after and give them a name. For example it could be Sales Manager Sally. Then, go down the list below and find out the following information to fill out your buyer persona. If you want a template to fill out while you're reading through this post, click here to download our buyer persona template!

BACKGROUND

  • Here is where you’ll figure out things that got this person to the role that they are at now.
  • Basic details about persona’s role
  • Key information about the persona’s company
  • Relevant background info, like education or hobbies

DEMOGRAPHICS

  • Gender
  • Age Range
  • Household Income (Consider a spouse’s income, if relevant)
  • Urbanicity (Is your persona urban, suburban, or rural?)

IDENTIFIERS

  • Buzz words/fears
  • Mannerisms

GOALS

  • Persona’s primary goal
  • Persona’s secondary goal

CHALLENGES

  • Primary challenge to persona’s success
  • Secondary challenge to persona’s success

COMMON OBJECTIONS

Identify the most common objections your persona will raise during the sales process.

COMMUNICATION GUIDELINES

  • Motivated by
  • Emotional Needs
  • Responds to
  • Environmental needs
  • Gathers info
  • Makes decisions
  • Uses time

HOW WE HELP

  • How you solve your persona’s challenges
  • How you help your persona achieve goals

MARKETING MESSAGING

How should you describe your solution to your persona?

ELEVATOR PITCH

Make describing your solution simple and consistent across everyone in your company.

Specific Questions

Here is where events and searches are really put to use. For each of the three, think of eight related questions. Provide a very short answer and note which product or service offered addresses that need. None of the questions should be specific to the business – just to the needs of a potential client.

Example: Question – How should I go about selling my house during a divorce? Answer – (Your answer) Service-  We can buy your house so your divorce doesn’t drag out.

  • Event/Information Search #1
  • Event/Information Search #2
  • Event/Information Search #3

Step 2: Choose a tone

Now that you know your customer it’s time to choose a tone. If your buyer persona is a stay at home parent your tone is going to vary from a business who’s buyer persona is the IT director. You always want to keep your content informative yet fun but the balance of informative and fun is going to vary on the persona.

You also need to know how they’re going to respond to jargon. A lot of times in the content we create we speak our own language so it’s heavy with jargon. But our audience doesn’t always respond to that very well, so when you understand your buyer persona, their level of education, and their communication preferences you can figure this out before you begin creating the content.

Step 3: Choose a method

Knowing your persona will help you choose a way to present the information. Business owners are extremely busy people so if you’re trying to attract them, videos might be the easiest way because they’re quick to consume, easy to understand, and very visual. Not many CEO’s have the time to sit down and read a 30 page eBook right? So instead, a series of short 2 minute videos delivered right to their inbox might be a much better idea. It all depends on how your buyer prefers to consume their information.

Takeaway

Never create content just to create it for Google’s benefit. Create content that speaks to your audience and will benefit them in a way that no other company can. Don't forget to download our buyer persona template here! 

Find the Holes in Your Marketing

 

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Your buyer persona can make or break your content. If you don't lay out exactly the types of things your buyer wants to see and how they might want to see it, your content isn't going to perform as well as it would if it had a strategy behind it. Let's dig in to the steps it takes to create one of these buyer personas.