How to Develop Buyer Personas to Create Powerful Content

buyer personas

When it comes to targeting your content to the right potential customers or clients, developing buyer personas is an essential step. In fact, a full 63 percent of savvy marketers create their content with specific buy personas in mind.

Without well-defined buyer personas, your writers and content developers are left guessing who their audiences are. By developing a detailed sketch of your ideal customer, you ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding content creation, and you make it more likely that your content actually reaches the intended market. Fortunately, developing buyer personas is fairly simple.

Understanding Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are imaginary characters that embody the traits of your most desirable consumer groups. In essence, each individual buyer persona embodies a different subset of your customer base, and the buyer personas you create are specific to your industry and business.

A sporting goods company might create a buyer persona depicting a 30-year-old mother of two boys who lives in a suburb in the Midwest and whose children participate in soccer, basketball and baseball. A hip, modern office furniture company might have a buyer persona depicting a single 25 year old who just got promoted into a junior leadership position at an urban tech company and deals directly with both upper management and clients. The more specific your description is, the more effectively you can target your buyer.

Most companies who use buyer personas create documents describing each of these buying groups. A buyer persona document might include demographic information, interests, purchasing motivations and specific concerns of the imaginary customer.

It should be specific, not overly general, and should take up about a full page. Writing the buyer persona in first person can help you clarify the challenges and issues your imaginary customer faces.

Steps for Developing Buyer Personas

buyer persona

The first step to developing a buyer persona is to define the most general characteristics of that customer group. Start broad and narrow down the details as you work on each persona. Some specific things to include in your first rough buyer sketch include:

  • Age
  • Geographic location
  • Specific industry
  • Job title and duties
  • Typical activities she does throughout her day

Once you have a general sketch of your buyer, dive into more details, such as:

  • Her objectives and goals
  • Her place in the decision chain for purchases
  • Problems or obstacles she typically encounters
  • Challenges and frustrations she deals with frequently
  • Where she is in the consideration process with regard to purchasing your product or service

After developing a cohesive buyer persona that gives your team a good grasp of who this customer is and what they need from your company, you can also flip the script to address specific ways you might want to target her as a customer. Things you might add onto a buyer persona to give it more value include:

  • Individual and long-tail keywords that directly target this specific buyer persona
  • Engagement patterns, such as social media use, device preferences and who she trusts for recommendations or advice
  • Media consumption habits, including where she gets her news
  • The types of content she responds best to, such as informational articles, entertaining videos or highly visual infographics
  • Specific questions she might have about your specific company and its offerings

Contact us to help you develop buyer personas for crowd-based content creation and ensure a coordinated brand identity tailored to your specific customer base.

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Bridget Coila is a professional writer with specific expertise in marketing, SEO, and online content. Her work has been published in newsstand magazines, on corporate websites and in trade journals. She focuses on producing written content that is both engaging and informative.

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