Most PR and marketing teams in the AI, IoT, mobile, wireless and telecom industries have created buyer personas as part of their strategic marketing plan. What sometimes gets lost, however, is a reader persona that is used to specifically target content marketing materials, such as blog posts, to your selected audiences.
Buyer personas and reader personas are tightly linked. However, reader personas go beyond identifying a potential buyer’s top line characteristics and focus deeply on the challenges a persona faces – and how those challenges can be addressed with content you produce for them. Creating a reader persona means you’ll never forget who you’re writing for, and why you choose the topics you’ve chosen.
So, how do you get started creating reader personas and developing the perfect content for them to consume? Here are four things to keep in mind:
- Find your audience of one: The words of John Steinbeck from decades ago still hold true: “Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person—a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.” However, be careful of “imagined” readers – they can be misleading. Make it a priority to ask your potential customers what their challenges are and what type of content they need that can help them better address those challenges.
- Assess your audience’s biggest challenges. Once you have a list of challenges in hand, dig deeper. Is cutting costs their greatest goal? Is growing revenue? Is it retaining customers? These challenges may vary as you move up the chain of command, and this is where the buyer’s personas come in. Is your target the CEO or is it IT leaders? Determining the challenges that face your specific target within the company is critical – and these challenges need to be locked in before pen hits the paper.
- Understand how your reader consumes content. When developing content, it’s important to put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Some topics naturally lend themselves to 800-word blog posts, while others are best written as a 3,000-word white paper or a 5-minute video. There is a bounty of solutions that track how users move through websites, and how they interact with content. Utilize them to understand what types of content – and in what format – are most valuable to your readers.
- Repurpose popular content. There are bound to be topics that your readers naturally gravitate toward. Using content marketing tools, track these topics and revisit them frequently. Is a particular whitepaper striking a chord? Break it down into a series of blogs or even an infographic. Turn a popular blog into a video or expand it into an eBook. Use an executive interview to create a compelling Q&A. The options are endless for repurposing content.
Creating reader personas alongside all your buyer’s personas can really help you focus your efforts and develop content specifically designed to answer your customers’ biggest challenges. Need some ideas on how to develop reader personas and then use them to create and repurpose your best content? Calysto can help.