Without having a defined target persona, your content marketing program will not perform as well as it should.
Before you start your content marketing program, you need to identify who your target audience is and how you’re going to communicate with them. Developing a persona is a formalized way of identifying and articulating who your target buyer is. If you start your content marketing program without a defined target persona, your program is going to drift and may not hit the mark.
What should be included in target persona?
Personas vary between B2B and B2C campaigns. For this article, we’re going to focus on B2B personas.
In this example, let’s identify the types of companies that your organization is trying to work with. The parameters that you’ll look at will be:
- Geography
- Industry
- Number of employees
- Revenue
- Target decision-maker
The next part assumes answers to the following questions:
- What are the buying intentions of this target audience?
- Why do they need your service?
- What are their pain points that you are trying to solve?
- What are the benefits of your solution that goes with it?
The final part of the target persona is going to relate to your voice. This is how you go about communicating with your audience:
- Are you using first-, second- or third-person perspective?
- What kind of tone are you using?
- What approach are you using for your content? Will you be using certain content types or formats to deliver your message?
All this information will make it much easier for your content marketing team to be able to quickly and easily write the content that fits your objectives.
What is the difference between target persona and target market?
A target market is viewed more at a macro level. A target persona, on the other hand, is more at a micro level.
Macro level means that you may be talking about the industries your company serves along with the types of companies you serve. At the micro level, a target persona is going to incorporate some of that information, but it’s also going to go much deeper.
It’s going to be focused on the target buyers within the target companies and how you wish to communicate with them.
What impact does a target persona have on my content marketing?
You need to have one or more target personas in place to make your content marketing program successful. Otherwise, your content won’t be focused on your target audience. This is because you don’t know who you’re targeting and who’s going to be reading your content. When your content is not focused, you won’t be able to effectively advance your business objectives.
We often see this with new content marketing programs. It’s better to hold off on launching your content marketing and develop your target persona first. If not, you’ll waste the costs associated with developing the content.
In summary
Establish a buyer persona before you launch your content marketing program. Doing so will make your content marketing program focused, efficient and cost-effective. Without it, your program is liable to drift, miss the metrics and objectives, and, more importantly, confuse your potential buyers.
Need help?
If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our ebook 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.
This ebook will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.
