To effectively reach the right audience it’s essential to have your buyer personas established and a part of your business's internet marketing strategy. Knowing who your ideal customers are will help you tremendously with your marketing efforts. Many businesses leave this part out or don't realize how important this aspect really is.
Personas go beyond the normal demographic information of different customers. When you are establishing your buyer personas you need to be asking much more in depth questions. Questions that if you knew the answer to, would make you feel as if you almost knew this individual personally.
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. They are based on real data about customer demographics and online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal histories, motivations, and concerns.
Type of questions you need to be asking:
- What are their goals?
- What are their challenges?
- What are their primary duties while at work?
- What do they do when they are not working?
An example of a persona:
You want to make sure that you can envision an actual person once that persona is created. Also, make sure you put an actual picture with their profile so that they really do seem like a human being and not just a made up character (even though they are!). The more you can relate to your persona the better your internet marketing campaign will be.
I suggest you take a look at this blog post by Jeff Bullas that outlines why creating personas is so important for not only your interent marketing campaign but also your business as a whole.
Posted by Jeff Bullas
Is your content created for machines or humans?
Content marketing faces the constant tension between writing for search engines or crafting it for people. But there is also another challenge that comes from decades of formal marketing education and training.
Overcoming the blind spot that demographic data sometimes imposes on marketers that has been collated and sifted by computers.
Marketers and business for a long time have often distilled their typical customer down to a range of demographic data points.
If you really want to spell it out, according to Wikipedia ”Demographics is the quantifiable statistics of a given population“. This means cold hard metrics and data such as gender, age, home ownership, employment and geographical location. This is data that marketers have used for decades to create and craft content, advertising and marketing messages.
These quantifiable statistics are a good start to understanding your target audience as a business or organization but they are missing something.
A human face.
Why personas?
Personas have emerged in the past few years as a means to put a human face to the soulless and faceless stats of the demographic data scientist. The problem is that just considering a demographic profile misses that human element. So personas were invented to help the new breed of marketer understand the human side of the data.
Personas have problems, challenges and aspirations both as an individual and as an employee of a company.
Newspapers have understood this at a primal layer for a long time in what news they published on the front page. Editors and journalists have known for a long time that “If it bleeds it leads“. Fear sells newspapers.
Personas have personalities, they have fears, wants and passions. Demographics have ages, an assigned gender and even a college degree.
So it doesn’t matter whether you are a blogger, a brand or social media marketer, You need to make your content human.
[Read The Rest of The Article: Is Your Content Created for Machines or Humans?]
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