In all-things marketing, your content should aim to reach the “mind-eye” of the reader, helping them visualize an object, a problem, or situation without the thing being present to the senses.
Creating an emotional, fantastic, or believable image in the reader’s mind is what defines great literature. This, too, can transform your marketing content from good to great.
Enter the persona.
Marketing personas” also known as audience persona or persona buyer”, act as the framework for targeting your marketing material.
You give that persona buyer a name, demographic, interest, and behavioral traits. You will also understand their pain points, goals, and buying patterns.
You can even give them a face by using stock photography. Some companies have gone so far as to create cardboard cutouts of their marketing persona to make them a real presence within the office.
The intention is to think and speak to this customer as if they were a real person. This allows you to create marketing messages targeted specifically to them. Your customer persona will guide everything from product development to your brand voice to the social media platforms you use.
Your customer persona is a semi-fictional portrayal of your ideal buyer/reader, based on market research and real data about your existing customer that will help you shape your content to better appeal to them.
Whether it’s for website copy, eBooks, blogs, emails, or social media posts, personas are a guide covering all the details you need to shape your content to your audience and reach their collective mind’s eye.
How Your Business Should Use Audience or Buyer Personas?
After making an initial marketing evaluation, determining your customer personas is the next logical step in determining the product, marketing and the overall business strategy. After all, product and business development and your marketing pursuits all stream from knowledge about the target audience. Whether it’s for an international audience or a local audience, your customer personas will help your business decide:
- How to follow up on leads;
- Where to guide service/product development;
- What kind of content to create;
- How to tackle issues related to customer retention or acquisition.
The end result of defining your persona audience is to get a share of attention from valuable visitors, attract relevant leads, and streamline their conversion and retention process.
You can create an audience persona to represent each segment of your customer base and use it to:
Reframe Your Work from the Buyer’s Perspective
Way too often, marketers use corporate-speak and a lot of buzzwords that don’t really mean anything. Creating a detailed customer avatar or a buyer persona will help you avoid traps like that by reminding you to think about real people who read your posts and engage in your content.
That’s where a customer persona intervenes. It keeps you focused on addressing buyer priorities instead of your own.
Ask yourself. Does the new campaign address the goals and needs of at least one of your customer personas? If not, you have a good reason to rethink your plan, regardless of how exciting it may be.
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Target Your Social Ads More Efficiently
Today’s advertising offers incredibly complete targeting options. If you’ve defined your customer personas, you can create social media ads that speak directly to the audience you have defined.
Social advertising allows you to create ad content for each of your defined personal. Such an advanced level of targeting improves social ad campaigns and increases conversion rates.
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Increase ROI with the Customer Persona Spring
The customer persona spring is a model that will connect your business objectives to your customer persona. It’s called so because it involves three distinct loops:
- Content: What kind of content will voice your customer persona?
- Channels: What social media channels does your audience use the most?
- Data: Good data allows you to monitor your efforts, report on your success, and revise your strategy as you need.
A word on style
Once you’ve completed your persona outlining, it’s wise to begin your research on the style. What you can do immediately upon completing work on your personas is find some of what’s already being written for or by similar people online. By understanding your personas, industries, and job titles, you can identify real people online who are aligned with them. With a bit of luck, you can find those who have published some writing themselves.
Even if they haven’t, you can always find others writing with these people in mind. Whether it’s marketing materials, industry blogs, or something else, that writing will give you a peek into the style of your new personas.
Study the style they use. Is it fun, conservative, technical, or solution orientated? Do they use in-depth, short paragraphs or long journalistic ones? All of this will help you mature a writing style appropriate for your new audience personas. The next step is deciding what exactly you should write.
How Can AI Help You Improve Your Buying Persona?
The customer personas seem to work so great that nobody ever bothers to change them. However, AI can transform personas into a marketing instrument even more efficient, more comfortable to work with, on a larger scale, and endlessly updated, with way less human work needed.
AI can evolve customer persona towards personalization. Today, businesses must tailor their promotional materials and outreach to personal characteristics, not just models.
By processing behavioral and transactional data from the consumer who shares common traits with a customer persona, AI is able to determine what methods and messages of outreach should work best for that particular persona.
The knowledge that AI can give marketers leads them to create better promotional materials, and, thanks to the high level of automation, the software is able to aid the content creation and delivery processes.
With AI, marketing professionals can create models and content as close as possible to full personalization, with a lot more data, by automating the process and improving relevance to customers and prospects.
