You won’t reach your target market if you don’t tailor your content to your audience. You’ll either miss the mark completely or cast your net so wide that people won’t know what you’re trying to do. Creating an audience persona before you start writing can help solve this problem.
Before you even begin to put your fingers on the keyboard to create the first blog post for your company, you need to know who you are trying to attract. How you write and what you write about will be different if you’re targeting Gen Z than if you’re targeting mid-forties professionals.
Creating Audience Personas
Once you’ve researched your market, it’s worth it to create an audience persona. An audience persona is a profile of a fictional person who could be in your target market. You’ll want to include obvious demographics as well as psychographic ones. Tiller Digital writes, “Psychographics encompass the emotional and human side of your customer.” This includes your reader’s fears, hopes, pain points, and needs.
You should have at least one audience persona, and many companies and publications have more than one. What you shouldn’t do is try to create a dozen. That’s too many, and again, it leads to the problem of casting your net too wide.
Speak to Just One Persona Per Post.
You can please some of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time – or something like that. When it’s time to create content, you’re going to want to visualize which member of your audience you’re speaking to – and talk to that person. What problem does this individual have that your post will help to solve? The persona will help you determine what type of voice to use when writing. Should you be formal or informal? What sorts of slang should you embrace or avoid? If you’re making pop culture references, will they go over your reader’s head?
By speaking to one, you make things easier on yourself. You’re not trying to appeal to the twenty-something start-up owner and the forty-year-old business veteran. While your business may serve both, they have different pain points and needs. Trying to talk to both can make you seem scattered in your post, and both may bounce back off your site.
Brainstorm Post Ideas for Each Audience Persona
Having audience personas makes it easier for you to brainstorm content ideas. Take any topic, and now tweak your content for different audience members. Your content isn’t the only thing that should shift when you do this. Potential titles and keywords for your posts may be different. You might have two people needing the same app, but how they search for and find that app could be radically different.
By taking the time to research your target audience and create a persona for each demographic and psychographic you want to attract to your business, you will find that your content marketing efforts are much more effective.
