Why are marketing personas important for SEO?

Marketing people often make the mistake of setting the scene for a story idea by asking, “Would I be interested in this?” But content marketing is not about what your brand wants or what you’re interested in, it’s about what your target customers or audience are interested in or care about. 

Understanding what your customer wants from your service will drive a faster, greater return on investment in your SEO.

Upwards of 80% of all marketing fails because it doesn’t have a focused or differentiated value proposition and in order to achieve this, you need to explicitly know and understand; what it is you sell, to whom, off what emotional platform.

In this article, we explain why marketing personas are important

1. What Are Marketing Persona / Avatars?
2. Why creating Personas / Avatars Help in marketing
3. The three elements that make a good Persona / Avatar
4. Simple steps to creating Marketing Persona / Avatars
5. People build brands

You need to identify who your target audience is, and what it is that makes them tick in relation to the products and services you offer.

Otherwise you’re simply sending content into the ether with the blind hope that someone somewhere will come across it and like it. And that is a clear waste of marketing spend.

So you need to create meaningful, useful, and valuable content for your SEO, that your prospects really care about. And to do this you need to define marketing Persona / Avatars that help you intimately understand your audience by discovering exactly:

• Who they are
• What challenges they’re facing, and
• How your offering can help them solve their problems.

1 - What Are Marketing Persona / Avatars?

A marketing persona can be defined as a list of features that make up individual customers, such as age, gender and personal circumstance etc.

By creating a map of your audience's attributes you can start to understand their perspective and then you define the people that you want to attract and work with.

2 - Why creating Personas / Avatars Help in marketing

If you are in the business of building a brand then having a clear understanding of the people who will support your efforts in the longer term is incredibly important. Attract the right people and they will not only take your business from being a mere commodity to the point where you have a brand with a convincing story, but put you well on your way to creating an embedded brand.

It will also help you improve the content that reaches your target audience and this is why marketing Persona / Avatars matter.

“44% of marketing agencies do not use marketing Personas to influence their content.” - Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 B2B Content Marketing Report.

So if you take the time to understand your customers in this way, you will almost certainly have the advantage on your competitors!

3 - The three elements that make a good persona / avatar

Make sure they are accurate

This will require some good and indepth research which means talking to existing customers to understand why they use your products and service already

Keep it simple

Don’t get lost in so much data that you lose the point or wander down rabbit holes that take you away from the key information relative to your products and services.

Do not hide or archive the information

Once you have established the information and created the personas / avatars you should be constantly referring back to them, especially when creating new content and even in your day to day communications with existing and potential customers.

In fact you should have them outlined in your brand guidelines.

4  - Simple steps to creating Marketing Persona / Avatars

An internet search will give you an overwhelming list of ways and means to create the perfect person / avatar for your marketing. However, we have identified the following 4 simple steps that you should start with.

Research

Talk to your customers and to people who have either interacted with you or your products and services.

If you have a well established client database already it may be a good opportunity to reconnect with some of these people.

The sort of information that you want to gather is:

• Name
• Age
• Gender (if applicable)
• Job title (if applicable)
• Channels where you can connect with them
• Pain points and the barriers to what they want or need
• How your product/service helps solve their specific problems
  

This is the basic information required to build the persona / avatar and of course it might vary from business to business depending on what it is you are offering and you may wish to add a couple of more specific questions.

TIP The key as always is to keep it simple.

Review your data

Once you have polled as many people as possible and have loads of good quality data, (the key here is more is more!) then you should start to categorise and organise your findings.

Divide your audiences into sectors maybe by age or by job role depending on what specific data you have obtained and look for emerging patterns and similarities as well as key phrases that might re-occur. From this information you can also identify a list of all the customer pain points which will help inform your content and the kind of questions that they may be entering into search engines.

Define key personas in a draft

At this point and depending on how much information you have collated, you should decide how many key personas that you want to work with, normally it’s between 3 and 5. To do this you will need to look at the data and start to identify segments in your audience.

These segments will be relevant to the types of data you collected so you might segment them via age for instance or even job role depending on what you are selling.

Finalize your Persona / Avatars

Now that you have all the information to hand and you have a clear picture of who your perfect customers are, write a short description that highlights them, their pain points and how your product or service solves their problems. Imagine the situation that they are in and find a specific issue that stands out as the key moment when you or your business might interact with them.

Once you have 3 to 5 of these Persona / Avatars written down you will have a clear picture of exactly what you are selling, who you are really selling it to and what emotions they are going through in the buying process. You’ll have a clear idea of what they will be searching for and your marketing strategy can be built directly around this critical information.

5 - People build brands

Knowing these Personas will also guide you through the brand positioning process as well as informing you how to interact with them and how to create further content that will attract similar prospects who will in turn, help you build your brand.

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