How to Deconstruct Your Target Persona to Refine Your Content Strategy

Your target audience may be more diverse today than ever before. This is because people have increasingly more needs and wants, and there are so many different ways to satisfy them. There are also many more channels to utilize than before, including Facebook, YouTube and even digital signage.

The increase in diversity has made marketing more complex, which makes it more challenging for marketers to get the desired results. With such a rise in complexity, marketers have had to adapt and make their campaigns more sophisticated than ever, and powerful marketing tools are here to help meet that challenge.

However, marketers still use some traditional sales methodologies, such as creating buyer personas.

Buyer personas may not be a new marketing concept, but they have evolved as we’ve learned more about what makes people tick. They have become increasingly sophisticated, helped by technological developments, and remain one of the most effective tools available to marketers.

Here are some ways to deconstruct your target persona so you can refine your content strategy.

1. Define pain points

Your target audience will have different pain points, and you will need to address each pain point if a sale is to be made. To do this, you first need to identify which problems your product will solve.

Once you've done this, you can focus your content creation far more effectively. You will be able to create content that helps demonstrate to potential customers how your product will make their lives easier, making them more open to a sale.

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2. Use standard demographics

Standard demographics can tell us a great deal about how we should approach our target audience. Using demographics like income or age might sound old-school, but it's still very effective.

For example, those in a certain income bracket might be looking for great deals to make a product more affordable, while those in another bracket might be looking to upgrade to get the best product available. Armed with this information, you can adapt your content strategy to resonate better with the people you are targeting.

3. Utilize psychographics

Demographics like age, income, job role and educational background can give you valuable information about your target audience. However, such information doesn't help you get deep into your audience's psyche.

Psychographics is a tool that helps you learn more about the psychological characteristics of your target audience. Such characteristics include their values, desires and attitudes, all of which can impact how your audience reacts to your content.

Armed with this information, you can market your product far more effectively, especially when combined with demographics such as age or income.

4. Single out buying decisions

There's another layer to your target audience that's not necessarily covered by demographics and psychographics: the reason why they choose to buy a product.

If you can single out reasons why people buy certain products, you can adapt your content so it appeals to those reasons.

For example, if your target audience buys your product because it's easy to use, your content can demonstrate its easy-to-use nature. You can also tie reasons people buy a product into your content alongside demographics and psychographics.

5. Consider the sales funnel

Another key factor that you need to consider is where your prospects are in your sales funnel. They will begin at the awareness stage in most cases, meaning they have just discovered your product and need to learn more about it.

If you were to send an offer to them at this stage, they would likely reject it, and you might lose them altogether.

At the other end of the sales funnel, you have people ready at the conversion stage. These people might have been new prospects already prepared to buy, or they might have joined at the discovery stage or in the other sales cycle stages.

Regardless, when someone is ready to buy, you need to act quickly to close the sale, otherwise a competitor might sell to them instead.

6. Segment your audience

A blanket approach to marketing is likely to be ineffective. You will need to interact with each prospect individually and personalize the experience, which will be all but impossible to achieve when working with a large database.

However, there is a solution to the problem: segmentation.

Segmentation involves creating numerous categories into which you can place your audience according to their demographics, psychographics, and so on.

Segmentation makes it easy for you to place potential buyers into categories, after which it becomes easier to interact with them effectively and nurture your prospects.

Lead nurturing is the process of taking their hand and leading them through your sales funnel. The process helps answer their questions and build their trust until they're in a position to buy from you.

Although segmentation helps make your database more manageable, there’s still a significant amount of work to do. However, a lot of this work can be taken over by automation tools.

How to collect audience data

The pointers above will help you set up buyer personas to make your marketing efforts more effective. However, you will need to gather the correct data in the first place to achieve the best results.

Here's how to collect the data you need without wasting time and resources:

1. Collect data from sales teams

Your sales teams are on the front line when it comes to working with prospects. They understand what makes your prospects tick better than any other department.

Work with your sales teams to get the information they need. Ask your team which demographics your target audience typically belongs to, what drives them emotionally and why they choose to buy. Collect as much data as you can to start putting the pieces of your buyer personas together.

2. Look at your existing customers

The customers you already have are an ideal source of information on your target audience. After all, they've already bought from you. Gather what data you can on your existing clients and collate it so it can be used alongside the information from your sales team.

Remember that you need as much data as possible for an accurate picture.

3. Research your competitors

Spying on competitors can be an effective way to gather information on your target audience. This method can be particularly useful for smaller businesses because it helps them ride on the coattails of larger marketing departments with more resources and larger budgets.

4. Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most effective tools among online marketers, and for good reason. For starters, the platform gives you a wealth of information about the people who have visited your website, such as:

• Where your visitors are located
• Which devices they are using
• What their interests are
• Which online channels drive the most traffic to your site
• How your visitors navigate your site

Google Analytics is easy to use, and the information is clearly presented in charts, graphs and other data types that make it easy to understand. Perhaps best of all is that Google Analytics is completely free to use.

Note that the information may not be accurate until enough data has been gathered. This makes it a good idea to set up a Google Analytics account if you haven't done so already so you can start gathering data right away.

5. Leverage social media

Social media is another platform that gives you access to a huge amount of data. For example, while Facebook Analytics has been discontinued, other tools can provide you with a vast amount of information on your audience, such as their:

• Age
• Gender
• Country
• City
• Relationship status
• Which device they are using

In addition to demographics, you can see how your audience reacted to certain posts and other content. This information will give you insights into what type of content pushes the right buttons for them and what content is less likely to have the desired effect.

Knowing these details will help you craft your marketing content in the future.

Tap into the power of buyer personas

Buyer personas have been used for a long time for a simple reason—they work. They help you understand your audience in a way that lets you craft content that hits the right spot. With the right content, you can grab your target audience's attention, keep their interest, educate them, build their trust and lead them toward the sale.

Getting the data you need to create buyer personas is not necessarily difficult, either. Chances are, you already have the data available to you. To access it, speak with the people on your team who work closely with your prospect.

You can also use Google Analytics, social media analytics tools and other platforms that will give you a wealth of information.

It's also important to segment your audience so you can work with them in more manageable groups and interact with them on a personal level. Doing so with the right information about your prospects can make your marketing campaigns far more effective.