YOU WILL NEVER STRUGGLE WITH USER PERSONA AFTER READING THIS!

"The true delight is in the finding out rather in the knowing"

Keep on repeating this sentence only then you will realize that you are not the target of your content.

Your Content Audience is not the same as your Buying Audience

Most of the time, product marketers think that their content audiences are the same as their buying audiences. Let's use a university as an example. It has many audiences: some are buyers, some are influencers, and some are stakeholders. The first, most likely audience, are the students. But there are also parents, who help support and fund the students. And there are alumni. Don't forget the teachers. What about local, state, and federal government?

Depending on the goal of your content program, you could target dozens of different audiences. So before you start any content program, you need to have a clear understanding of who the audience is and ultimately what you want them to do.

WHY ARE AUDIENCE PERSONAS IMPORTANT?

?At any one time, you may have employees, freelance writers, agencies, and even outside bloggers creating product content for you. The persona keeps everyone on the same page with who is being talked to and why the communication matters for the business.

?MULTIPLE PERSONAS

?You're going to need one persona for every group for whom you create content. In other words, if one person goes through a different buying process than another, you need a different persona for each one. Is that process different for a man than a woman? That depends: if you are selling jewelry, the answer is yes; if you are selling marketing automation software, the answer is no.

COMMON MISTAKES WHEN CREATING PERSONAS

MISTAKE NUMBER 1: MAKING UP STUFF ABOUT BUYERS

Marketers typically gather facts about buyers by talking to a sales representative, meeting with a product expert, or conducting online research. It shouldn't be surprising that these sources don't have the information that marketers really need. Sales reps will readily admit that buyers mislead or even lie about how they compare and choose one solution over another. Moreover, even product experts are unlikely to be buyer experts, since they interact mostly with current customers as well as a select few big prospects.

?How to fix this mistake?

• The only way to gather clear, unexpected insights about how your buyers make decisions is to have a conversation with them.
• Make it a goal to spend a few hours a month interviewing recent buyers, including those who chose you and those who did not.
• Ask buyers to walk you through their decision, starting with the moment they decided to solve this problem.
• Each in-depth conversation should take 20 or 30 minutes, but the time it will save you in planning, writing, and revising content will be immeasurable.

MISTAKE NUMBER 2: GETTING SIDETRACKED BY IRRELEVANT TRIVIA

Marketers sometimes make the mistake of gathering buyer information that doesn't really help them deliver more effective content or campaigns. If your marketing team is debating whether your buyer persona is a man or a woman, or if you are bogged down finding just the right stock image of your persona, then you are focusing on the wrong things.

Unless you're a business-to-consumer (B2C) marketer, the buyer's gen- der, marital status, and hobbies are rarely relevant.

How to fix this mistake? The Five Rings of Insight!

You may decide to include other data in your buyer personas, but content marketers really need only five insights:

1. Priority initiatives. What are the three to five problems to which your buyer persona dedicates time, budget, and political capital?
2. Success factors. What are the tangible or intangible metrics or rewards that the buyer associates with success, such as "grow revenue by X" or a promotion?
3. Perceived barriers. What factors can prompt the buyer to question whether your company and its solution can help with achieving his or her success factors? This is when you begin to uncover unseen factors, such as competing interests, politics, or prior experiences with your company or a similar company.
4. Buying process. What process does this persona follow in exploring and selecting a solution that can overcome the perceived barriers and achieve his or her success factors?
5. Decision criteria. What aspects of each product will the buyer assess in evaluating the alternative solutions available? To be useful, the decision criteria should include insights from both a buyer who chose a competitor and one who decided not to buy a solution at all.

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MISTAKE NUMBER 3:DEVELOPING TOO MANY BUYER PERSONAS

?This mistake happens when marketers layer buyer personas onto their existing market segments, frequently defined by demographics such as? industry or company size. Many people think they should create a new buyer persona for each of the relevant job titles in each of these segments. Not so.

One company I worked with initially planned to build 24 different buyer personas. Ambitious? Yes. Necessary? No. When they started interviewing their buyers, they were able to pare that list down to 11. Because their marketers are continually conducting new buyer interviews and gaining new insights, they expect to consolidate that list even further.

How to fix this mistake?

When you have captured the Five Rings of Insight about buyers, you will see that differences in job titles, company size, and industry do not necessarily relate to differences in your insights.

For product content marketing and most other marketing decisions, you only need a separate persona when there is a significant difference on several of those findings.

For example, you may find that buyers of your RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology in both the hospitality and consumer products industries have nearly identical priority initiatives (a mandate to be more competitive) and perceived barriers (an incremental approach is needed). If you have a strong story to communicate on each of these points, one persona may be the best way to ensure effective messaging and content marketing.

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MISTAKE NUMBER 4: CONDUCTING SCRIPTED QUESTION-AND-ANSWER INTERVIEWS WITH BUYERS

Using a telephone script or online survey to learn about your buyers won't reveal anything you don't already know-inevitably, your buyer's first answer to any question is something obvious, high level, and not particularly useful. The structure imposed by surveys and scripts leads to nice charts, but it fails to reveal the new insights that you need.

How to fix this mistake?

It takes a bit of practice, but you can learn how to have the unscripted, agenda-driven conversations that will lead recent buyers to tell you, in incredible detail, exactly how they weighed their options and compared your solutions with your competitors' offerings.

• The key to success is asking probing questions based on your buyers' answers. For example, if buyers tell you they chose you because your solution is easy to use, you might ask follow-up questions to understand why the solution needed to be so.
• Or you might ask about what training the buyers expect to attend before the solution is considered to be "easy" in their minds.
• Another follow-up question might seek perspectives on the resources the buyers will consult, or steps they will take, to compare your solution's ease of use to their other options.

When you avoid these four mistakes, your buyers' needs will be the focus of your marketing strategies and tactics. You'll become so attuned to your buyers' perspective that you will consistently impress them, confidently delivering content that answers their questions and persuades them to choose you.

Please share your feedback, opinions and comments if you agree or disagree with the approach. ??