How Personas Makes Creating Content Easier

Content marketing can be a time-consuming endeavor, especially for small business owners or marketing teams that only include a few people. While compiling personas is a vital part of the process, many people choose to skip this step because they don’t see the value. This can save time in the long run, but the content you produce isn’t likely to drive the kind of conversions you’re hoping to see. With so much content constantly being posted, anything that doesn’t connect with your potential consumer and address their pain points is likely to get lost in the shuffle.

Personas can help you identify key points about your potential customers, like the topics they are interested in and the issues that you need to address to help them convert into customers.  Once they are completed, you can use them in the long term to come up with content ideas and create a roadmap to bring more people in and get them to convert.

Here are some of the ways personas make editorial calendar and content creation easier.

What are Personas and Why Are They Important?

Personas are a kind of snapshot of fictional people based on the target consumers who might use your product or service. Each persona represents a different potential consumer with unique pain points, preferences, and interests. Some personas are centered around the potential customer’s job title, while others focus more on their goals and how your product or service can help achieve them. Marketers typically use data from multiple sources to come up with a full persona.

Some popular sources of data for marketing personas include:

• Government based research, like employment data or salary figures for a particular job title
• Social media groups, which can offer insight into the questions and issues facing your personas and other people in their field
• Analytics data, like how current visitors to your site are finding you and what content they spend the most time reading

You can add details to each persona like what other products or services they are likely to be loyal to, what social media networks they are active on, and their personal and professional goals for the next few years.  As you build out the personas, you’ll begin to learn more about each type of target consumer and the unique concerns they may have about the product.

How Do Personas Make It Easier to Create Content?

Personas make it easier to identify the unique pain points stopping each target consumer from purchasing your product or signing up for your service. You can then create content that addresses these specific concerns and helps the potential customer overcome those objections.

For example, if you identify that one of your personas has limited disposable income, the price of your product or service might be holding them back. You can then create a content piece that explains why your product or service is worth the extra money, or how it can replace several other competing products or services the potential customer is already using. This kind of content is more likely to connect with them and help them progress down the sales funnel. By contrast, general content pieces that highlight how great your product or service is might increase the potential customer’s interest, but it will not prompt them to take an action towards buying for you.

Using Personas to Help Fill Your Editorial Calendar

Personas can be a great help when it comes to one of the hardest tasks for any content team: filling up the editorial calendar. Each persona should get their own content pieces often enough to keep them engaged with your brand and help them progress naturally down the funnel towards a conversion. If you have multiple personas and you write pieces for each one every month, suddenly your editorial calendar fills up pretty quickly. To fill any holes that remain, take stock of the content you have for each persona and what parts of the sales process they address. Create new content pieces that speak to prospects in the stages of the process you haven’t yet covered.

Once you have personas in place, you might be surprised by how much easier they make the process of coming up with content ideas and producing pieces that really connect with your target consumers.

Do you use personas in your content creation strategy? Tell me about your best practices in the comments.