Designing your content plan involves a lot of moving parts. A customer persona is among the most important. How you decide to approach your strategy relies quite heavily on your target market and objectives. Tools such as personas are a great way to keep yourself on the right track.
Forming the Plan
A well-built persona serves as a building block for content strategies in the sense that it focuses the content itself to stay in line with the target audience.
Without a persona, it’s very possible that your content won’t resonate with your ideal customers.
Interestingly enough, 93% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals segment their database by customer persona.
A solid customer persona helps to keep this misalignment in check for all business units and sales teams. Ultimately, the unified attention strengthens your value proposition.
Understanding Your Customers
Creating a customer persona means knowing your ideal customer inside out, and your content should reflect that. Discovery interviews are a good way to get some foundational knowledge, followed by some deeper insights on the buying process.
The Buying Process
Customers often have a fairly routine set of steps when working their way through the buying process. In theory they’re pretty straightforward, but important to keep in mind.
- Needs Recognition
- Information Search
- Evaluation of Alternatives
- Purchase Decision
- Post-Purchase Evaluation
You can learn more about these here.
Developing your persona will serve as a benchmark for aligning your content with these steps, so you can be sure you’re properly positioned at each touchpoint. Mapping to the buying cycle also helps create a better customer experience, which is crucial – 87% of consumers surveyed say that personally relevant branded content positively influences how they feel about a brand.
Mapping the Journey
The buying process plays into the idea of visualizing the journey a customer goes through when making a decision. Your content plan should cater to each step of the plan and highlight the pain points each would experience.
An anti-persona can also introduce a new point of view that can be handy. An anti-persona is exactly what you think it is, someone who doesn’t want to use your product or service. It’s useful to create this persona to expose audiences that you won’t be able to satisfy. After all, you can’t serve everyone, and not everyone wants your product. Promising clients that you can perform in areas you simply can’t is a recipe for a mess.
Get the Ball Rolling
So, how do you get started with your customer persona and content plan?
First off, you need to assess your current plan and personas. Are they outdated? Accurate? Dishonest personas will be useless in practice. Interview customers and non-buyers and identify what’s working. Use those results to craft personas that align with the interviewees responses.
It sounds like a lot, but with some good organization and layout it’s easy to get a grip on. We’ve put together a customer persona development kit that includes worksheets for what we just discussed. It’s an easy way to put everything together, and it’s free.
You can download your kit for free here, and get started on crafting your personas for your content plan.