Defining Your Content Personas

Personas are fictional people with very real needs that you design to serve as placeholders. Instead of thinking of “all brides-to-be,” for example, you begin thinking about “Sophie”—a persona that represents a collection of some of the common traits you have spotted among the audience at which you are aiming.

Content personas became my best friend seven years ago. I remember sitting in my cubicle at National Geographic headquarters, utterly confused and under-caffeinated. I barely had a boyfriend, but here I was, somehow pretending to relate to mommy bloggers and child-bearers everywhere on the globe. It was my responsibility to discover and package social content in a way that moms and dads would be delighted to sit with their toddlers and watch any of Natgeo Kids’ TV shows. Here I am, staring at baby elephants in the African savanna and a couple of globetrotting pigs. What on Earth could I do?

Here is what: analyze these followers up to the tiniest data point I could find and try to come up with a “human” character with whom I could actually talk. Many creators and managers fail to recognize that they cannot write, edit, or shoot in a vacuum. Have you have ever felt lonely when creating content? (I see you. Appreciate the honesty.) You are creating something that someone, somewhere will find and consume. Failing to design content personas makes it difficult to create something that resonates. It is like that aunt who keeps giving you ugly socks for your birthday. Not resonating, auntie. Not. Resonating.

I followed through on my approach until I eventually created two very concrete personas:

Sarah

The working, professional mom who places a premium on spending quality time with her toddler, and making everything related to his upbringing faster and easier.

Jessie

The super-invested, full-time mom who wants her son/daughter to be the best at absolutely everything, lead a healthy lifestyle, and develop every single talent.

Talking to Sarah and Jessie was significantly less painful than sitting there talking to myself. Content became more diverse and engaging. The brand’s voice became more genuine and KPIs trended positively. The lesson there is to avoid outsmarting or simplifying your audience. Human beings are complex information consumers: they have active needs, passions, and preferences. They lead different lifestyles—some that you will never be able to empathize with unless you dive deep in qualitative and quantitative data. And that is precisely the point of persona research.

How to Get Started with Content Persona Research

There is always a temptation to ignore persona research when you think that you either are a part of or know your target audience perfectly. I am sad to report that this is never the case.

Just because you are a designer, for example, that does not mean that your brand’s particular audience of designers is interested in your personal content needs. Assuming the opposite makes sense for lifestyle, opinion, fitness, and fashion bloggers, whose platforms are largely built on admiration for their individual personalities. Even then, personal brands should also make sure they are constantly monitoring their platform for emerging trends and tastes. They, too, need to prioritize content persona research.

If you are managing a corporate brand, please go beyond your individual perspective and engage in thorough persona research with an open mind. I am not saying that you should ignore your unique outlook, because that is probably why the company hired you in the first place. What I am saying is that it is dangerous to base an entire strategy on that single outlook, and robust content production processes are grounded on a profound knowledge of the brand’s audience.

B2B Versus B2C Content

As you go through the exercises in this chapter, it is important to understand that your business model will largely dictate the type of persona you will create:

B2B personas

These personas are appropriate for brands whose revenue model hinges on B2B transactions. Popular B2B personas include corporate buyers, managers at every level, and entrepreneurs. Because corporate purchase processes are often lengthier and involve more individuals, it is crucial that you identify who the key decision maker is. It is probable that the gatekeeper you have detected makes such decisions with collaborators’ inputs, but at the end of the day someone must pull the trigger. For the sake of B2B content personas, focus on the individual within the corporate chain that is most interested and entitled to acquire your offer.

B2C personas

These personas are developed when your business caters to end users directly; hence, they are described as a B2C model. B2C personas represent individuals who often make consumption decisions on their own. Because they act outside of the corporate ladder, consumers’ purchase processes are often swifter and less cumbersome.

Four Steps to Discover and Design Personas

Let us take a look at a few simple steps to begin your persona research. What I am going to share is a lean method that you can complete in-house. Feel free to explore independent vendors or consultants if this isn’t something that you can work on directly at the moment. If you do have the time and bandwidth, read on.

We arrive at personas only after looking at various sources of data. Both quantitative and qualitative information contribute to constructing personas.

Synthesizing Personas

If you have followed the preceding four steps correctly, you should be drowning in evidence. This is good; stay with me. What you will do now is 1) refine the raw data you have so that it isn’t nearly as overwhelming, and 2) find affinities/similarities in what you found so that we can design some actual personas.

Get Creative: Name and Design Reader Personas

Here comes the fun part. You get to name these newfound fictional people who have real needs. Experienced researchers suggest going for names that carry a certain connotation that fits the persona. Maria, for instance, points to a Hispanic ancestry. Charlotte carries a certain elite tone. Agnes sounds slightly older than Emily, and so on.

Naming them isn’t a petty suggestion. Whenever you are thinking about a potential reader for a specific piece, now you will imagine an actual being with needs and wants rather than sitting alone thinking about a group of sticky notes. Picking names humanizes these personas in a way that makes them useful for content ideation.

That being said, you will need a one-pager to remind yourself and other content creators who it is that you are all aiming for. Synthesize your personas using the template in Figure 3-1. This profile summary is what most people understand as personas. It is how you will keep track of the main data points collected and the most actionable traits of this hypothetical reader.

Figure 3-1. Use this template to help create your personas

Buyer Personas Versus Reader Personas

Now that you understand the importance of conducting rigorous persona research, I have one more note of caution. There is a difference between content as a means to close a sale versus content as the product itself. This distinction is crucial at the outset of your persona research study. Although amusing, nobody cares about your one million unique visitors if none of them would ever be willing to pay for what you sell.

When your content is serving as a bridge to close the sale of a different product, you might find that the characteristics of those reading you differ from those who buy from you. One of your goals as a strategic content manager is to minimize this discrepancy. Think about it: do you want to spend countless hours and resources creating content for readers who are not going to sustain your business in the long run? Nailing down your buyer personas involves figuring out who this ideal user is, and then going for that user with everything you have.

Similarly, when your content is the actual product, you might find that those who consume your free pieces are not necessarily interested in your paid pieces. In this case, try to understand who those buyers actually are. Who is willing to leave money on the table after they have benefited from your free content? After you determine that buyer profile, she should become your main objective when creating content—your convertible reader persona. Let’s stop on the word convertible for a second; that is, someone you are able to convert. You want to craft content that attracts consumers within that profile and encourages them on to the next stage, such as purchasing your product.

Convertible Reader Personas

Your reader won’t always be at the exact point in time at which the need for your product is most active. Sometimes, you must nurture this persona over time in order to convert him when the time comes. Other times, this persona isn’t directly the purchaser; he is a “gatekeeper” to certain communities. Gatekeepers are convertible reader personas because they, too, are potential purchase drivers.

The goal of designing convertible reader personas is to find people whose demographic and psychographic characteristics make them potential buyers, whether that is now, in a few weeks, or even months, and whether they are buying directly or strongly influencing someone else’s decision.

Every business identifies one or more activities that lie at the core of its survival. These positive conversion actions are completed by users (visitors, readers, viewers) during their experience with your product (site, content, app). Figure 3-2 illustrates how a content piece like an article could become a step within your visitors’ larger conversion funnel.

Figure 3-2. Sample content conversion funnel

Every time you are producing content, you are betting on a certain reader to complete a specific action at some point in time. All sales funnels are different. You need to understand yours and connect it to your content production process. This is the only way to connect content production with a true return on investment.

As you begin developing new content for the personas you are targeting, it is important to realize that not all of them are created equal. Even within a group of individuals that share certain affinities (i.e., your fictional persona), there are levels of engagement that dictate how they interact with your content. You should plan for both low- and high-engagement readers by offering content in various formats in order to maximize success. We discuss how to achieve this in the next sections.

Low-Involvement and High-Involvement Readers

Put simply, a reader won’t experience content the same way when completely distracted in scrolling mode as they do when being utterly immersed in research mode. The first kind of user is passively waiting for a shiny object to catch his attention, whereas the second—more proactive—user is laser-focused on an issue that needs solving.

The first user is under a condition typically known in marketing as low involvement. He isn’t particularly invested in any kind of decision-making process. When presented with the type of content you are offering, he will react (click, like, or comment) based on impulse. There is no complex, time-consuming evaluation of alternatives in which he checks out other sites for the information you are supplying. You just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

The second user has an active need that has put him in a more invested content research mode. He requires a specific kind of information, and bases his conscious decision to consume on clear criteria like length, quality, and reputation of the content pieces at hand. When analyzing buying behavior, marketers label this condition as high involvement. The reality is no different when looking at the content consumption experience: some users are actively searching for information, whereas others are passively ingesting it.

Why is this important? Because depending on their level of involvement, your audience members will be interested in different types of content. Those in a condition of low involvement will be drawn to you because of something we call peripheral cues:¹ pictures, music, shiny objects. Meanwhile, those who are highly involved will be persuaded by more central cues: factual information, long-form articles, in-depth analysis. Whenever you are pitching a content piece to your audience, you will always need to rely on either a peripheral or central route to persuasion. Sometimes it is both.

As you read this, it is highly probable that you have already arrived at a mental image of what these two types of users look like for your case. Understanding the difference between these two content consumers will affect your strategy in powerful ways. It is the first step in succeeding both in short- and long-term content production. No longer will you become frustrated when someone hurts your bounce rate with a two-second visit, or wonder why someone else spent 10 minutes looking at that one article.

Table 3-1 outlines a few of the key differences between the two ends of what is, essentially, a spectrum of possibilities. Your content consumers will sometimes start from a condition of low involvement and gradually become so captivated by the content that the experience migrates toward the other end of the spectrum. In other words, readers who were not really into it consumed it, and are now suddenly obsessed—with the topic, the content piece, and conducting further research. At any given point in time, most users will fall somewhere between those two ends of the spectrum.

It is crucial to consider both low- and high-involvement users when you are creating the pieces with which they will interact. With low-involvement content consumers, the challenge is capturing their interest so that they can spend longer periods of time exploring your content. With high-involvement content consumers, it is all about serving the type of depth they are after in a way that satisfies their needs and triggers repeat visits.