Supplementing Your Persona-Building for Content Strategy

Marketers jumping in the content strategy world face a hard truth.

For the majority of content development projects you will work on, you are not a part of the intended audience. This is not a bad thing, but the quicker one realizes this, the better.

One must build personas and really understand the target audience and how they consume content before even getting started.

These truth goes well beyond content (and into all user experience and interfacing), but for the purposes of content strategy and eventually marketing, one should never infer or assume what your persona is, does or wants or that your previous experience is going to help.

Persona-building is hard. But that’s OK because it makes it all the more relevant when your content and hard work nails it. And that’s really the goal: to be as relevant as possible to prospective clients, customers and users.

So how does one build a persona for content strategy and marketing, especially when you’re not commissioning a $100,000 study? Below, I’ve listed some shortcuts that marketers can use to get started with their personas or to validate existing persona-building research.

Go to the trade publications.

This is an oldie, but goodie to get a headstart on demographic data. While publications in consumer markets are declining, many industries in the BtoB marketplace still exist as though the internets never existed, and they still rely on advertising and subscriptions to stay afloat. This means that they probably have a decent media kit in which you can glean very important information about their users. After all, the pubs want advertisers that match their demographics, so they are quite happy to tip their hand. Even better, just ask them what content on their publication website gets the most traffic.

Website behavior.

While heat mapping, existing content performance and are all par for the course nowadays, even without those tools, one can look at Google Analytics and quickly determine the most visited pages, most landed on pages, most exited pages, pages with best time on site, bounce rates, etc. You can also determine pathways and funnels very quickly to determine if existing content is being accessed in the way you originally intended. If not, it’s back to the content marketing drawing board.

Keyword research.

There are plenty of tools out there to determine the relative frequency in which people are searching specific terms. That’s not hard, and should be a given. But the a-ha moment comes when you use the tools to determine if certain searches are going up and preparing your content appropriately.

Benchmark studies.

You may not be able to commission a study, but there are plenty of organizations that have done the work on chefs, building products, architects, doctors, moms, and Russian mimes. Get. That. Data. Research shops and data warehouses are very good at what they do, and better at this than most.

Customer service representatives.

If you or a client has a customer service department, it should not be too difficult to determine the top 20 questions customers routinely ask. Help the department out by getting and optimizing your content around these questions. Heck, use them as individual blog posts or videos and plaster them across the social sphere.

Facebook demographics.

Using social media for research purposes should be old hat. But specifically Facebook’s ad serving tool is actually a great way to determine sub-segments of existing personas, validate age ranges, the size of a certain demographic and understanding the things they like to read, eat, listen to, or even their political leanings. Aggregating this data can be difficult, and may be more so if Facebook starts locking it down for advertisers, but the tool remains at this moment.

As mentioned above, these types of tactics are to be performed in addition or supplementing the hard work of persona-building, or after the types have been identified. But because content strategy and marketing is so specific, adding additional ways to validate data never hurts.