What is a persona in content marketing and what is its utility?

Do you know whom you’re selling to and, by extension, whom you’re targeting in your content marketing? If you’re building a content strategy, you probably have done audience research to figure those figures out. And, if you‘ve done audience research, you’ve probably heard of personas, too. A persona is a content strategy tool used to understand your audience on a deeper level and position all of your content so it speaks to them effectively. A persona is incredibly useful because it represents the conglomeration of a lot of thought, research, conversations, data, and insights on the most important consideration in content marketing- your brand's specific audience. That means yes-personas do matter in content marketing. Let’s explore deeper.

What is a persona in content marketing?

So we’ve already said a persona is a content strategy tool. How does it work? A persona is a representation of your target audience. Their main commonalities, including defining traits, preferences, habits, demographics, goals, challenges, and more, are combined and distilled to create a fictional character or avatar representing your ideal customer. This puts a face and a personality to your audience, who can easily become a faceless mass to people on your teams who work disconnected from the customer experience (like content creators, who ironically have little direct interaction with your audience but are in charge of the bulk of communications). And, if you have multiple target audience segments, you can create multiple personas to represent them and refer to as you create, publish, and distribute content. As you can see, a persona can get extremely detailed.

The thing is, all of these details must be backed by research and actual data. These aren’t made-up attributes. Instead, they come from studying members of your target audience, interacting with them surveying them, and looking at data. None of it should come from assumptions or guesses. The more you know about your ideal customer and persona, the better you can speak to them in your content, target their exact needs and concerns, emphasize with them, and solve their problems. And that’s powerful.

Why do personas matter in content marketing? Key reasons to use them

A content marketing strategy that includes targeted personas can improve your results drastically. One case study found with this strategy, website traffic grew by 210% and leads increased by 97%. Using personas can make your website 2-5x more effective and lift e-mail click-through rates by 14%.

Why do personas work? Here are three reasons

If you’re creating personas the right way, they should be based entirely on data, insights, research, and real customer interactions-not assumptions. That means a persona represents real data you’ve learned about your customers. A good persona can represent hours and hours of research, months of social listening, and countless interactions with your customers. This is the only way a person is valuable. But that value is undeniable to your content marketing.

Personas are the manifestation of real data

If you’re creating personas the right way, they should be entirely based on data, insights, research, and real customer interaction-not assumptions. That means a persona represents real data you’ve learned about your customers. A good persona can represent hours and hours of research, months of social listening, and countless interactions with your customers. This is the only way a person is valuable. But that value is undeniable to your content marketing

Personas capture the true spirit of your customers (when done right)

Since personas are the distillation of mountains of customer research, they have the unique ability to capture the true essence of your audience. This is invaluable when trying to target your messaging and customize your content. How? When you use and refer to personas to create content, you’re far more likely to hit your audience in the heart or punch them in the gut with impactful content.

Personas are an ultra-useful marketing tool

Personas are a useful tool for marketing and your entire business. They can align how you can approach your customer and talk to them throughout your brand. Sharing personas with different teams (such as sales and customer services) can inspire a better understanding of your customers and thus, better interactions with them.

Reference site- Search Engine Land

*For more content-based updates, follow Jamtion.