Defined Personas: Does your blog target the right personality?

Continuing our discussion on developing and executing a successful blog strategy, we mentioned that having defined personas is important to both your target audience and your blog writers. A persona is a description of your ideal target prospects and customer(s) for your offerings. In the old days, the idea would be to focus only on target markets and their requirements. However, that definition is too broad and does not include the wide diversity of audiences that can be accessed. It also is not responsive to today’s continually evolving digital economy.

Defining personas serves an important purpose; it informs marketing and sales professionals of important information such as age, gender and geography of target prospects and customers as well as their unique needs, modes of communication and preferences. Knowing these persona characteristics ensures that marketing efforts are suitably tailored. While many different templates for defining personas exist (just Google persona templates, and you will see), it is important for marketing teams to adjust personas for any given offering; the target personas for a navigation system will be much different than for a wind turbine, for example. As personalities are in a continuous state of change, personas, too, need to be refined and reviewed regularly to keep messaging and tactics fresh and entertaining.

Your understanding of each “persona” and communicating information that is directly of interest to each is very important to having a successful blog strategy. For example, a blog on the value of the latest Java programming standard is probably not going to capture the interest of an enterprise architect. While they both might be interested in Java, they probably wouldn’t be interested in the same aspects.

Key points to consider for blog personas:

1. Personas enable marketing professionals to refine the definition of target customers, thus ensuring that the offering and marketing content address specific needs and interests.
2. A successful blog strategy uses defined personas to reach a particular audience. It makes certain that the content is of interest to the audience and can be leveraged across digital channels.
3. Matching the personas of your writers to various blog audiences enables you to use the style and content that the persona will appreciate and identify with.
4. Include your social media and digital marketing professionals in discussions of target personas for your blog to ensure that the content and strategy can be leveraged across social media channels. Adding precision to your blog strategy through defined personas increases the value of its content so that it can become a cornerstone for your social media teams.

Stay tuned for our next installment on crafting a successful blog strategy.

 

We would appreciate your feedback!  Share your thoughts with Brian Silverman, Senior Marketing Strategist, at Brian@DeLaune.com or follow him on Twitter at @silverman_brian.