Strategies for Creating Personas

Bear in mind the following when creating personas. It’s vital to develop your personas based on your audience’s content and information needs. You can then position your brand or business as the solution to their requirements. You can gather a lot of information from social media and search and website analytics. But some of the more specific questions may require you to conduct some primary research like interviews, focus groups, or surveys. Objectives. What are your ideal customers looking to achieve by interacting with your business? How many competitors will they consider? What information is pertinent to their decision? Location. Where are your personas from? Where are they based? This will include cultural considerations. Demographic. What age group are they in?

What is their marital status? What is their gender? Job details. What’s their economic position or job role? Platforms. Which online platforms do they use? Where’s the conversation happening with your target audience? Devices. What devices do your personas primarily use to access the internet? What kind of connection do they have? For example, is it high-speed broadband? Purchasing behaviors. What steps do they take when considering a purchase? Interests. What topics are they interested in? What issues are they trying to solve? And how do these issues impact on their lives? How can your brand help? And how will solving these issues benefit them and your brand? Best practices for using buyer personas in your content strategy. Prioritize.

You can prioritize your persona in terms of how easy it is to reach them, or you may consider their value to your business. You could use a reach value matrix to help visualize this. Budget and resources. Use your prioritization to help set budgets for production and allocate resources. Creative messaging. Develop creative messaging and assets that align to their needs, solve their problems, and showcase your business in a useful authentic way. Content distribution. Distribute your content to the channels and devices they use, and align your content production outputs to the requirement of these channels. Purchase journey. Create the types of content they need at key stages of their purchase journey. Internal expectations and KPIs.

Manage internal expectations, and set KPIs for conversion outcomes by understanding the typical conversion journey as detailed in your persona research. You can use a persona prioritization matrix like this one to prioritize personas in terms of how easy it is to reach them and their value to your business.