Imagine you’re thinking about making a change. Maybe you’re in the throes of a mid-life crisis, and you want to upgrade your wardrobe and spice up your style.
Maybe you’re tired of long hair and feel you’re finally ready to chop it all off.
Or maybe you have three cats and you’re worried what adding ten more will do to your image.
When you consider how people might react, do you consider the opinions of thousands of random strangers, or do you think about what specific people in your life might say?
If you said the former, you might want to consider therapy. But almost certainly it’s the opinions of individual friends and family members that preoccupy your decision-making process.
That’s because we humans are far better at expressing ourselves to people we know, than to the faceless masses. When we know how someone will react, and what they might be looking for, we can craft more effective communications.
This is why using buyer personas can help you create better content. When you write with a specific person in mind you can personalize your messages, talk to the points that matter most to them, and create more convincing arguments.
And it really doesn’t matter if that person actually exists.
What Are Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas are semi-fictionalized representations of ideal customers, created from market research and experiences with actual customers. They can include the envisioned customer’s:
- Name
- Age
- Background
- Income
- Education level
- Hobbies
- Political leanings
- Family status (single/married/children)
- Motivations
- Goals
- Beliefs
- Desires
- Questions they might be concerned about
As an example, let’s say you sell pet supplies. You might create a persona named Linda. Linda has a bachelor’s degree and works in office administration. She’s an animal lover, with two cats, some tropical fish, and an iguana. But her favorite pet is her teacup chihuahua, Lemondrop.
Linda takes Lemondrop with her everywhere she goes. She’s single and childless and treats her pets like they were her children. She uses words like, “fur babies” to refer to her animals. She believes animals make better companions than people. She supports a number of animal-related charities and spends a great deal of time researching animal-related issues online. While Linda has an average income, she doesn’t skimp when making purchases for her fur babies.
The more detailed your buyer personas are, the more useful they are, because the more you know about these fictional people, the more you know about your ideal customers.
As you grow your customer list, you can glean insight from your actual customers and update the fictional buyer persona you created.
How This Helps Create Better Content
To be the most effective, content should be targeted at the audiences that are most likely to respond favorably to it.
Content that’s crafted to appeal to a mass market is broader because it has to appeal to a wide range of desires and opinions.
This limits its ability to speak powerfully to the people that you have a good shot at converting into customers.
When you create content with specific personas in mind, you can zero in on messages that will resonate strongly with the types of people that your persona represents.
You can write compelling arguments that address the specific questions your buyer personas are most worried about.
Content is frequently created to champion all the great things an organization is doing. This makes the company the focus of the content, instead of the people reading it.
Creating content as if you’re writing to specific personas contextualizes your achievements in meaningful ways for your customers, and keeps the spotlight on their needs.
This is a far better approach and will bring you better results.
In an ideal world, all of the content you create would be sticky, pulling people back to your brand while motivating them to share your content with their friends and family.
Building content that speaks directly to things that are important to your audience gives you the best chance of accomplishing this.
If you can make a strong emotional or intellectual connection with your audience, they’ll become brand champions, and reward you with greater engagement and word-of-mouth advertising.
We’re experts at crafting detailed personas that effectively represent real-world customers and help businesses reach their ideal audience.
This article, in fact, has been written for Tanya, a smart, self-assured small business owner interested in growing her market share, while maintaining the personal customer service she’s known for.
If you’re our Tanya (or Tony) and want some help building personas of your own, contact us at Six Degrees Digital Media today. We can help you create content that resonates with your ideal audience and draw them to you like Lemondrop to her favorite chew toy!
