How to create a buyer persona that informs your content strategy

In this episode, Matt Tomlinson from Red-fern joins us to discuss all things buyer personas.

Perhaps you're new to the topic, you're working on a rebrand or maybe you're just refreshing your marketing strategy. Whatever you're doing, the buyer persona is a central part of your journey.

We'll uncover:
✔ What a buyer persona is
✔ How to create a buyer persona
✔ What questions you need to ask your audience
✔ How you can create the ultimate content strategy for every part of your persona's journey

Interviewer: Amy Burchill  https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-burchill-64b53361/

Guest speaker: Matt Tomlinson  https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-tomlinson-44ab2a152/ from Red-fern 

Podcast produced by Let’s Talk Video Production: https://letstalkvideoproduction.com

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Big Bright Podcast. I'm Amy, the marketing executive at Bright and today we're going to be talking about buyer personas and how you can build your content strategy around them.
 
Perhaps you're new to the topic or you're working on a rebrand or maybe you're just refreshing your marketing strategy. Whatever you're doing, the buyer persona is a central part of your journey.
 
I've invited the wonderful Matt Tomlinson onto the podcast. He is a digital marketing manager at the digital agency Red-fern based in Manchester. Matt is responsible for all things content and strategy. We'll be discussing how you build a buyer persona, what questions you need to be asking yourself and how you can create a detailed content strategy that meets your audience at every stage of the funnel. So welcome, Matt!

Thanks for having me.

I'm very excited to have you here to start. Can you tell us a little bit about Red-fern, and your role there?

Yeah, so I've been at Redfern for just over two years. At Redfern, I'm the digital marketing manager, so it's my responsibility to oversee the marketing department and ensure that all deliverables for ourselves and our clients are being carried out on time and to a high standard.

I also support the different marketing channels within the team, and assist when needed. With regards to content and strategy, I'm the final point of authority for all content that leaves us so again, that's for both ourselves and our clients. So it's my responsibility to outline the strategy across the different channels, then ensure that all content produced meets the agreed brief, is informative and is in line with brand styling and tone of voice. With regards to discovery. So where the buyer personas are outlined, this is a process I lead for new clients, where we'll hold a series of workshops that allow our team to get to know the client, the industry that they operate in, their goals and objectives in more depth.

Fantastic. So for anyone who hasn't come across a buyer persona before, tell us exactly what it is and why it's important for businesses.

So HubSpot actually gives a lot better definition of a buyer persona than I do. "So a buyer persona is a semi fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. So, when creating buyer personas you should consider to include customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better they provide tremendous structure and insert for your company, a detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, it will guide product development, and it'll also allow for alignment across the whole organisation, which is important. So you're pulling in the right direction altogether.

Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, I think. Where do you begin researching the buyer persona for a client?

With new clients, our research will always begin with obviously the client itself, we carry out a thorough discovery process, which we hold a series of workshops to allow us to better understand them any goals that they have, and their overall vision as well.

We start with the client, because who knows their customers better than them themselves? Our research is very in depth. So once we've held the discovery sessions, we'll go away and dissect all the information. We'll then look at the competitors closely as well to see their approach and how we can further build on that. Obviously, we can't see the competitors buyer personas, but by looking at their marketing efforts, we can definitely identify some clear trends. So yeah, that's where we begin.

What sort of questions do you ask clients then? So you can dig into these personas?

We don't try and make the questions too clever at all. We ask a wide variety of broad ranging questions that allow us to get a true feel for the audience. We asked him a mix of professional and personal questions that allow us to get a grip of their overall behaviour, that way we can more effectively target them. So it can range from anything from hobbies and interests to what they want to get from your product or service. So the more we know about them, the more relevant content we can produce and pinpoint them a lot more accurately in our efforts.

So how in depth do you need to go? For example, I know you did a bit of work for us on our buyer persona, we sort of covered lots of different areas such as goals, their problems, their skills, as you mentioned, like hobbies, whihc obviously goes very in depth. Do you think that's important every time?

Yeah, I think the best personas are very detailed. However, it's personal preference to however you want to lay it out really. Ourselves, we like to drill down into the nitty gritty just to get the best feel of the customer possible, which I think is definitely the best practice and what a lot of businesses do try and practice themselves.

So, for example, by knowing any goals and problems that they have, we can then draw on these pain points in our content and show the reader how we'll help them achieve these goals and overcome any pain points that they have, and overcome the problems and any hurdles for them to overcome. Whereas if we didn't have much detail at all, we're casting a wide net and basing our content on assumptions. So rather than leaving it to guesswork, a detailed persona is the best strategic approach to maximise the best chances of engagement.

So what kind of industries do you work with Red-fern? Do you see much difference across these industries? Or is it all kind of the same personas that you see every single time?

So at Red-fern, we predominantly work within the manufacturing industry, however, we still see a lot of data throughout the industry regarding to personas. So within the manufacturing industry, we could be working with food manufacturers, or floor cleaning machine suppliers. Because of the stark difference in the subject area, the personas and the customer behaviour within them will always be so different as well. It doesn't really matter about what industry, so even businesses within the same industry will have different needs and requirements. There's no one size fits all that works for each business. That's why it takes time and careful attention to put together accurate buyer personas for businesses.

Are there any instances where you're working with a client or a business, and they just don't have enough information to build a persona. You mentioned that you start with the client and the client knows their buyer personas best, but are there times when they're literally just like, I have no idea what I'm doing or who I'm going after?

I think the closest thing to that is working with startups or offshoots of different businesses, which is what we have worked with in the past. I'd say, having worked with these, their buyer personas are based on estimations and competitor customers. So with this type of customer, I wouldn't say they don't necessarily have enough information. But it's vital to closely monitor customer behaviour as time evolves. So you should always address the personas with any adaptations and behaviour and trends that you recognise. That way, you're constantly updating your approach and making sure it's as relevant as it can be. When starting out, they may not have the information to build such a detailed persona. So that's where the rest of the market research will come in. And it's not just reliant on the client alone, we actually start with the client, and then also go away and do our own research off the back of it.

Right. So let's talk about content strategy. Why is it important to have a strategy in place in the first instance?

So without a strategy, your efforts will be aimless and unrelated. By outlining a strategy, you're highlighting a clear path to achieving your long term goals and objectives. So within the strategy itself, you're weaving all the different channels and ensure that they're all pulling in the same direction, rather than producing things off the fly, and then being counterproductive against one another. A clear strategy is the foundation of success.

Where do you begin building strategy? And how do you align it with your personas?

So one of the main sections within our personas are interesting topics of content for that individual persona. So that grants us with an ideal opportunity to start creating ideas. So by looking at these interesting areas, by using the pain points, the goals and challenges, we've got a starting area for us to start forming our ideas of what kind of content will be best suited.
Our team all sit down and have a brainstorming session in ideation meetings. These need to happen before we outline the strategy. That way we include the full department. So it's not just one mind on it, it's not just one channel approach on it, we've actually got ideas from content, from social, from a paid aspect. That we've got a broad scope of ideas that we can put the best ones from.

Also looking at industry news, competitive efforts, popular topics, we can use these and apply them to the most eligible personas. With competitive efforts, it's always good to keep tabs on what the rest of the industry are doing. However, that doesn't mean to say that we're just going to copy exactly what they're doing, we'll check what they've been doing, look at what there is they've been covering, and see how we can then improve that further.
I think the ideas always come first. And then keyword research comes into it. We like to abide by the stance that keyword research should never stand in the way of creativity. Because if it's a good piece of content, but it doesn't meet the search volume, or is too difficult to rank on Google, then still produce it because it's still valuable to your readers. And it can just be distributed in a different way.

Yeah. I love that. That's such good advice. There's obviously a lot of things you're looking at when you're building that strategy.  Do you have any tools to help you?

With the tools, it's mainly for the keyword research, really. So we'll use Hrefs and Google Trends that'll show us what people are actually searching for. So it'll just validate our ideas that they are relevant to the persona. We also use SEMrush for any technical SEO improvements that we can make with our clients. But that usually comes a little bit further down the line. And then we use just a general idea generation tool like Answer the Public. Just, again, to validate any ideas that we're having, to make sure there's actually people searching for it.

So it's sort of like your sort of initial instincts first, and then you go and validate it through different tools and websites.

I think from just speaking to the client in the discovery workshops, and actually sitting down and outlining the personas, you get a good feel of what kind of content that clients are keen to produce because they obviously can guide you with their own customer knowledge. But then when you're outlining the actual personas you get a feel of what topics are actually relevant to that set audience.

So how can you ensure that your content is reaching the right audience once you've written it?

I think not only do you have to make sure it's meeting the needs of your personas, but you need to ensure that it's distributed on the right channel. For example, there's no point in sharing the content on a social media platform that you personas don't use for the research. If you post any content in the wrong place or in an incorrect format, you're  going to reach the wrong audience. So that's a key reason why we ask personal questions within the persona research.

So another example, if somebody doesn't have a lot of time on their hands, they're really busy, they're not gonna have the time to sit down and read through a 3000-word ebook. They could benefit from a quick win infographic that is super informative, but it's quick and easy to skim read, and you can pick out key stats. Also, a strategic distribution strategy and the correct content-type are the best ways to ensure that your content is in front of the right audience at the right time.

I think a lot of people get this idea that you sort of need to share your content everywhere possible across all the platforms. Would you suggest sometimes just cutting back on certain platforms that are just not working for you? Or do you think you should need to keep pushing on?

There's no point using platforms, personas just aren't use, it's just wasted effort. We have various clients on board that just focus on LinkedIn.

For e commerce clients, they will focus on Instagram, whereas b2b manufacturers don't really benefit from an Instagram account, because it's more of a longer investment that needs in depth content. So that will be shared through blogs on LinkedIn, rather than just quick graphics on Instagram. So yeah, I don't really see the point in scattering everything everywhere if you don't need to.

Also, a big mistake that a lot of people make as well is sharing the same content across all the different platforms. Obviously, each platform has different user behaviours. So LinkedIn is a far more professional playground than the likes of Facebook. I think changing the messaging up and being strategic within the approach for social media is definitely the way to go.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I guess in the same sort of topic area, then why can't we just send out our content to anyone and everyone and who listen? Why do you need to be specific about our personas?

This is especially important within content, because if you're trying to meet the needs of too many people, it will ultimately fail. Not only will it lose all direction, and become unrelatable, but the quality of content will also drop too. Obviously, all of the aforementioned things are far from ideal for content marketing. Plus, rather than trying to cast a wide net with content marketing and targeted buyer personas, you have the ability to push more qualified leads through the content journey then. Otherwise, if you're casting that wide net that we mentioned about, you're going to attract the wrong type of customer to your business.

Overall, your conversion rates will be dramatically lower because you're not attracting the right people. And you won't have the same overall success ultimately. Whereas if you target the right people with the right content at the right time, you've given yourself so much more potential for success and growth.

So what are your thoughts on buyer personas once they have actually purchased your product or service. How they use the product may be different from their original intentions. Should people consider adjusting their persona to the customer, once they've purchased it?

I think in truth, the buyer persona journey never ends. These are live documents that obviously have to be updated constantly. So you can continue to target the audience effectively at all times. So whether it's proactive or reactive, customer behaviours are constantly changing.

So I think the main example of that recently is obviously, sorry to bring it up, COVID again, it's drastically tightened up the purse strings of people and a lot of businesses. So if you're continuing to target your audience, like they were pre COVID, as opposed to now you're going to be targeting a completely different customer. So you should always revisit your personas to ensure that they're up to date with the latest trends and customer behaviour.

Once they purchase your product or service. That's great. But again, that's not the end of the journey. In fact, it's the start of a new one really,so then it becomes a matter of how you can target them to ensure that they become repeat purchasers. And further down the line, how can we turn these into loyal brand advocates that you don't need to continuously target, they  come to you no matter what. Once you've actually bought the product or come to you for your service, it actually starts on a new journey then of how we can turn these into loyal brand people.

We have a tech product, the person who buys the product might not be the same as the person using it. So how do you tackle that?

The IT manager is taking on the needs and requirements of the whole business. So obviously with your buyer persona bible with the IT manager persona, it's all about meeting his or hers personal needs and requirements first, because then if you can convince them and actually target them effectively, they'll have the business's best needs in their mind. Convince them, then they can actually roll that out within the business and get the key decision makers on board then to actually invest in your service.

Thank you so much, Matt. That's been really really helpful and informative. If anyone wants to get in touch with you or Red-fern. Where can people go?

Yeah, so you can find us on manufacturing.redfern.co.uk. That's our manufacturing microsite that explores our manufacturing agency specialism. Also you can find us on LinkedIn. Just Red-fern on LinkedIn.

Great. I will put it in the notes. Well yeah, thank you so much and speak soon.

Brilliant. Thanks for having me again. Cheers.

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