How To Use Buyer Personas to Generate Content

There’s a new goal in town for websites: Focus on the end user. Is this the goal of your website too, or are you focusing solely on search engine optimization? Don’t get me wrong, SEO is extremely important, but your visitors are even more important. 

Since SEO has transitioned to CEO (customer experience optimization), the need for creating content based on your buyer personas (or target audience) is vital to help generate leads. Determining and understanding your buyer personas is the first step to writing amazing valuable content for your visitors.

So, how do you determine your buyer personas?

Start by building a buyer persona profile checklist.

• Determine the persona detail by asking some of these questions:
  • Role
    • Job role and title?
    • Typical day?
    • Required skills?
    • Tools and knowledge used?
• Company
  • Industry?
  • Company size (revenue, employees)?
• Goals
  • Responsibilities?
• Challenges
  • Biggest challenges?
• Watering holes
  • Publications or blogs read?
  • Associations and social network connections?
• Personal background
  • Age, family (married, children) education
• Shopping preferences
  • Vendor interaction preference? (email, phone, in person)
  • Internet research on vendors or products? – If yes, how is information searched?
  • All of these questions can be asked through phone interviews or by meeting in person. When complete, the buyer persona profiles will represent your ideal customers.

As you’re developing your buyer personas, it is important to follow these 5 key principles:

1. Focus on the behaviors and find commonalities
2. Keep it fictional – don’t use real names (i.e Retired Ralf, Marketing Mary, Director Dave, etc.)
3. Use pictures with your names – images can be easier to remember and help with associating the profile information
4. Tell stories – bring the profile to life by giving it a story to describe the persona
5. Focus on one persona when creating content – target specific behaviors 

When you’ve completed these steps, you should have somewhere between 3-5 main buyer persona profile. And as you continue building your customer base, add the new customers to the different buyer personas you’ve already created. Find the commonalities and create categories for them to help you keep your customers organized.

Developing buyer personas will help you craft compelling content for your users, which will then help you generate leads. So, what are you waiting for? Build your buyer personas now, Marketing Mary is waiting!

To get started, HubSpot has provided a useful template to help you create your buyer personas.