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A Closer Look at Buyer Personas

As mentioned in our introductory post discussing the importance of creating buyer personas knowing your audience is critical to create killer content.  Think of the content you’re creating as the first step in building a relationship with a prospective customer.  While they are fictional people, these buyer personas are representations of your customers. To that aspect, your content should be shaped to reach these customers.

Let’s examine some of the ways you can design content specifically for your buyer personas.  For example, let’s look at a buyer persona that a retail clothing store created.  They decided to target a professional woman in her mid-30s, who loves to shop, goes to concerts frequently, and enjoys wining and dining with friends.  She’s attached to her smartphone and is proficient using social media, spending most of her time on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, which she uses to showcase her latest clothing and shoe purchases.  She shops frequently, always on the lookout for a good sale or bargain- and when she finds one, she’s ready to buy immediately (This does not sound like the author of this post at all.  Ahem.).

The clothing company knows a lot about this persona, and they create content designed for her through social media, blogs, and email alerts of sales or coupons.  To delve a little deeper into some of their ideas, let’s discuss, shall we?

• The company does their best to speak the language of this persona.  Their social media postings make the persona want to engage with them, whether they’re announcing an offer or a sale.  Since they know she is mainly on Facebook, they do most of their updating there. Along with the coupons and sale notices, they also “humanize” their brand by sharing tidbits or pictures that they know the persona would find entertaining or funny.  When blogging, they try to keep their articles relevant and easily shareable, writing content that seems more like a magazine article than a dry educational post.  They know this persona is busy and only has so much time in the day to read blogs, so they keep them short and sweet.

• In regards to language, the clothing company also customizes their SEO strategy to try to target the phrases this customer would be searching for on the search engines.  For example, using the term “purse” over the term “handbag”; knowing someone in their 30s would probably not refer to a purse as a handbag.  They optimize their website content based on the way their persona speaks and searches.

• They create offers that appeal to the persona.  These offers either solve a problem or assist in one of her needs- or more likely, one of her wants.  They follow through with these offers by optimizing their landing pages for the persona.  She knows if she clicks through to one of their offers, she’ll receive a discount or a coupon for future use after filling out a quick form.  She gets a discount, and the company gets another lead.  Win-win!

One of the most important things to remember is that different personas require different information to make their buying decisions, all at different stages in the buying cycle.   You need to make sure you have a firm grasp on the details and information your customers require before they decide to make a purchase from you, as well as how to say it and when to say it.

 Find out more how buyer personas are key to your content strategy in our free ebook: