Content marketing and buyer personas are intimately connected. Your content will probably not get the buyer nurturing job done unless it appeals to real people with real needs.
But how to do that? As Lindsay Kolowich of HubSpot says, “But once you sit down to create your buyer personas, you may find yourself staring blankly at a white screen for some time, wondering where on earth you’re supposed to begin.” Check her article out here.
Should you pay for research? Do you have the time to launch a full-on research project? (Particularly when your colleagues wanted fleshed-out personas yesterday.) Do you even have a budget?
Ms. Kolowich advocates asking yourself 20 questions and capturing the answers. These questions provide a coherent structure that, to me, almost guarantees that you won’t be looking at a blank screen for long. At the very least, once you get going, you’ll know where the holes in your knowledge are.
Ms. Kolowich groups questions into seven categories: personal background, company, role, challenges, goals, watering holes, and shopping preferences.
Here are a few sample questions for each:
- Personal background: Is your persona male or female? Married or single? What age range? What educational level? What has their career path been like? Have they stayed in the same industry or switched? Tip: Be as specific as you can, even down to college name.
- Company: In what industry or industries does you persona work? How large is the company? How many employees does it have? Is it publically traded? Tip: This information can help you when you build landing page forms.
- Role: (This is a biggie.) What’s your persona’s title, and how long have they held the role? Who do they report to? Who are their direct reports? How are they evaluated? What’s a typical day like? What skills are required to do their job, and how did they learn them? What apps do they use? Tip: As with personal background, be as specific as you can. The more richness and depth you can add here, the better. For example, how much time do they spend at work and where would they rather be?
- Challenges: What are your persona’s biggest challenges, and how do they affect daily work life? Tip: Go into detail and focus on the nuances. Can you come up with a quote from your persona?
- Goals: What is your persona’s primary and secondary work goal? What is does success look like? Tip: What can you do to make your persona look good? This will affect sales and marketing communications.
- Watering holes: Where does your persona go for information? Online? In-person, good old-fashioned newspapers and magazines? What specific publications (online or paper) do they read? What social networks do they participate in? What professional associations do they belong to? Tip: Work on establishing presence and credibility there.
- Shopping preferences: How does your persona like to interact with vendors? In person, online, by phone? What kind of sales experience are they expecting? Tip: The more information you capture, the more you can align the purchase experience with your persona’s expectations.
Human beings are, by nature, imaginative. Even those who claim not to be. I’m guessing that once you sit down at your keyboard or start talking into the voice recording app on your phone, you’ll be off and running and deep into the process of creating identities that will help your company—whatever size it may be—sell more effectively.
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