How to Know Your Audience and Create Buyer Personas

Creating a buyer persona is a great way to get to know your audience.

In day-to-day life, we always know our audiences. You know your one friend is clueless about sports but is a Star Wars fanatic, so you don't talk to him about the NBA finals. Your girlfriend's sense of humor might revolve around sarcasm, so you won't get caught telling her knock knock jokes.

When we get to know people, we learn how to talk to them. As a content marketer, it's important to apply this same principle to your audience in writing or any other form of content that you create.

Know Your Audience

A common mistake I made when I was new to content creation was delivering the same message to everyone, regardless of who they were. If I was promoting a new faucet, I would be tempted to use the same messaging for both homeowners and contractors.

But that would never work. Homeowners would care about how the faucet looked and how water efficient is was. Contractors cared more about ease-of-installation. Writing for one audience was totally different than writing for another.

Writing for the wrong audience is like firing off target. It won't be effective in gaining their interest, and certainly won't convert them or drive them to action.

So how do you know your audience? Keyword: Personas.

Creating Personas

HubSpot defines buyer personas as "fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers." This is, of course, a marketing concept, but it applies to all content creators, even if you just like blogging as a hobby. Who is your ideal audience?

Brainstorm

The first part of knowing your audience is brainstorming who that audience might include. Suppose you sell basketball shoes. Who are you targeting? Are they male or female? Young or old? People from the city or the country? What other hobbies might they have? You probably wouldn't target people living in a rural retirement home.

Similarly, suppose you blog about science fiction. Would a basketball fan page on Facebook be the best place to promote that? Probably not.

Brainstorming can take you far in determining your audience, but you shouldn't base everything on speculation.

Research

You need to go out and talk to people. Start with existing customers or die-hard fans. Reach out to them and ask them about their hobbies, passions, occupations, goals and pain points.

The latter two items--goals and pain points--are particularly important because those are what your content will try and solve. To return to the basketball shoe example, suppose your interviewee wants to reduce slippage on the court. You might start promoting your shoes' traction in your content. What if one of your science fiction readers wants to see more about Star Trek in your content? You might film a video comparing Captain Picard to Captain Kirk!

Apply

The final step is synthesizing the results of your brainstorming and research to actually create a buyer persona. Make a list of the persona's background, demographics, goals and challenges. Then, have a section with ideas of how you can capitalize on this knowledge. HubSpot offers a free buyer persona template.

You can even name your persona. In our example, you might name him basketball player Blaine. The benefit of naming your persona is you can better visualize an imaginary person when creating your content.

Once you know your audience and have created your buyer personas, your content will automatically improve because it will be relevant and interesting to whichever audience you are courting.