For 80% of consumers, customer experience is essential to their buyer’s journey, and they will choose a brand for its attention to their needs throughout their interactions with the business. Giving your target audience a positive experience requires knowing what they want and need when engaging with your content.
Publishing content that casts a wide net often leads to lackluster performance results. However, if you don’t have a solid strategy for building audience personas, you will still likely experience disappointing outcomes.
We’re going deep, revealing how to construct personas that drive results. We aim to provide a game plan that helps you maximize your audience-targeting efforts.
Understanding Why Building Audience Personas Is Essential
While it’s hard to remember sometimes, the user’s experience is behind Google’s almighty algorithms, including the seemingly endless updates. The company uses search quality raters to assess how well search engines meet the needs of their users.
These raters receive a nearly 200-page document explaining what the company considers useful, spammy, malicious, or useless content. High-quality pages have the following characteristics relevant to building audience personas:
- A clear purpose
- Original or unique content
- High user engagement
- Topical expertise
- High trust levels
- Authority
It isn’t easy to craft content that meets these criteria without considering who you are creating the content for. If your content doesn’t adhere to high-quality standards, your rankings will suffer.
Constructing audience personas helps you tailor your content to specific segments, potentially boosting your ratings and moving you up the search engine results pages. Personas aren’t static, so you’ll also need to track performance and adjust your strategies regularly. Fortunately, DivvyHQ can help you with these tasks.
Source: Brightedge Research
Defining an Audience Persona?
The makeup of your audience isn’t homogenous, no matter how niched your product or service is. Individuals have different defining characteristics that relate to your brand and the information you offer. They also aren’t all at the same stage of the buyer’s journey.
Building audience personas requires you to combine various characteristics that audience members have in common, creating a composite sketch based on relevant and valid target market identifiers. Individuals seeking information often belong to multiple personas throughout their buyer’s journey and may have unique characteristics that set them apart.
However, when you create personas that capture similarities, you can craft content that meets a segment’s needs. Though finding a unique quality in one buyer is exciting, if you focus on the unique aspects of any individual, you risk missing the mark with too many others. DivvyHQ’s platform has the tools to help you plan, schedule, and assess your content for each audience persona, making it easier to manage content according to your targeted audience.
Creating Audience Personas
If you haven’t created your personas yet, it’s time to start! Even if you already have them, you might want to revisit them and determine whether they are still valid and relevant.
Before building audience personas, you need to do some research to help you understand what common characteristics bind segments of your target audience. Gather information from:
- Sales data: Examine the data from your customer relationship management system and sales team.
- Performance data: Analyze existing content to discover what topics hit home with which audience segments and why.
- Market research: Assess trending topics within your industry to determine customer preferences, interests, and needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Customer interviews and surveys: Talk directly to your customers or send a survey to learn what they want from your content.
When you work with Divvy, you can access everything you need from a central hub. Our platform integrates easily with CRMs, allowing you to pull the information you need for building audience personas without bouncing around multiple platforms and tools.
Our analytics module simplifies performance analyses. With Divvy’s platform, you can aggregate data from all sources, drilling down on key performance indicators to help you create performance-driven personas. You can also share reports with any internal and external shareholders you desire.
Characteristics To Consider
While demographics are easy and obvious defining characteristics to use when creating your audience personas, they aren’t the only ones. You should also consider:
- Emotional characteristics
- Personality traits
- Industry, job, and role
- Communication preferences
- Goals and obstacles
- Search habits
You should also incorporate the buyer’s journey stage for each feature when building audience personas and create a customer journey map to visualize when and how audience segments might come across and engage with your content. Pull your team into this process. Divvy’s platform allows your team to collaborate without waiting for the stars to align for the right time to schedule a meeting.
Planning With Personas in Mind
Once you flesh out your personas, incorporate them into your content strategy to ensure your team generates topics and crafts content that speaks to one or more personas. We offer one-on-one expert assistance to help your team hone a strategy that meets your needs and those of your target audiences.
You can fold your strategy into your Divvy environment to create filters for visualizing content density for different audiences, ensuring you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time, and finding content gaps.
DivvyHQ Calendar Filters
Auditing Content According to Audience Personas
Building audience personas isn’t a one-time event. You will need to revisit them regularly. Though you may maintain core personas over time, some defining features will likely evolve, including challenges, interests, and communication preferences.
Conducting content audits is imperative if you want to keep up with your audience and outrank your competitors. Our content audit template simplifies the auditing process, allowing you to focus your analyses on KPIs that measure content performance.
Each time you audit your content, re-evaluate your personas based on the results to determine if you need to make any changes. You should also ensure your content strategy continues to align with your audience personas.
Building Audience Personas With DivvyHQ
While DivvyHQ can’t do the legwork needed for building audience personas, we do provide the tools you need to streamline the process. After you create your personas, we can help you design a strategy that delivers results and customize your account to meet your needs. Request a demo to see Divvy in action!
