It’s easy to get caught up in the hub bub surrounding content marketing. But, before you start churning out content, make sure you know if your video, white paper, blog post, Tweet, etc. will really be valuable to your customers. Or, as The Guardian put it in a recent article, “…for content marketing to succeed, brands need to produce authentic content that clearly resonates with the consumer.”
Like your marketing strategy, your content marketing strategy should be backed by data and research about your customers. To do this, more and more brands are scrapping their demographics in favor of creating buyer personas – detailed descriptions of who buys your product or service. These personas are examples of people you’d like to influence that you can turn to again and again when you are considering what content to create and how to distribute it.
Creating buyer personas is a complex process that involves bringing together customer and non-customer interviews, as well as internal and external research and analytics. Of those companies that have taken the time to tackle their brand personas, many are using them for their overall brand strategies and to determine the success of individual campaigns. The smart marketers are also using them to make sure their content aligns with their customers needs.
For more information on brand personas:
NBC News Kills The Demographic, Personifies Its Viewers Instead