How to Build a Persona: The Easy Way
Creating personas for content marketing can be a very tedious and time-consuming process. You have to gather data from multiple sources, then use that data to create a persona that's representative of the audience you want to reach. That can be hard work!
Unless, of course, you make it not hard work.
Super Space Robot Tip: There are no shortcuts to persona development, unless, of course, you have a secret door in your bookcase. Then you have to take it.
There Are No Shortcuts...Right?
You can't cut corners everywhere and expect to make content that accomplishes your goals, but there are some areas where you can take the corners a little faster - particularly when it comes to developing personas.
This guide will provide you with a step-by-step guide to make creating user personas simpler.
What is a Persona, Anyway?
The persona carries many names. , you might hear user persona or buyer persona. Sometimes people like to pretend they invented a new thing and call them avatars. Whatever you call it, it’s simply a target to aim your content at. It’s a tool that allows content creators to garner understanding about their audience. They can then use that understanding to create content that engages and resonates.
User Personas are the Backbone of Good Content
You have to have an accurate target to aim at to ensure you reach your content goals. Simply put, a persona is a profile of your perfect audience member, or more likely, a segment of audience members. You will create all of your content with this “person” or these “people” in mind. Personas will help keep you on track and ensure you aren’t wasting your time creating stuff that nobody wants. To make a good persona, you have to do it right…right?
Let’s explore that.
What Makes a Good User Persona?
How do you define “good”? Furthermore, what makes a persona “good”? Content marketing is designed to reach people and build audience through content. To do that you have to create something that they’re going to want - and it can't just be any old thing. You can't just take a shot in the dark (except for when you can, and we'll talk about that in a bit). There has to be a specific audience for your message or else the whole notion will fall flat.
Super Space Robot Tip: Know your audience. Is your audience this woman, who appears to either be about to fall through a sewer grate or get run over by a cyclist?
Know Your Audience
To make content work properly for real people, you have to know them inside and out. You have to understand the people behind those fingers and eyeballs (gross) and how they tick. A good persona can help you with that.
So, What Should Go Into a Good Persona?
Primarily:
Personas should be easy to understand by the content creator (or across the team so that your content is consistent)
Personas should represent a common type of audience member or market segment
A persona doesn't have to be a definitive portrait of your audience. Your content marketing persona can include both demographic and psychographic information.
Create a Persona to Reach the Right People
A persona should simply allow content marketers to create messages that reach the right people. The important thing is that it represents someone who would be interested in your message - whether that’s a person, a group of people or a segment is up to you.
Personas are Content Marketing Templates
The persona becomes, in essence, a content marketing template or cheat sheet. Content creators should use it to ensure that what they’re creating is on point and has the highest chance of reaching their target. It provides insight into what messages are most likely to resonate.
If you know your personas inside and out, you know what content is most likely to resonate. Content creators can use personas to craft messages that are on target and have a high success rate of being well-received.
Be Transparent About Assumptions When Creating Personas
User personas aren't hard science, and to get them right, it helps to be transparent about the assumptions you make. What in the world does that mean? It means that content creators should share their user personas with everyone who will be working on content marketing in their company. That might include other writers, designers, company decision makers, and even sales people. That way, you can all work together to create messages that are optimized for your target users, and real-life results can be tested against those assumptions. Now, if you’re a team of one or two people this becomes much easier. As you grow, communication and transparency across your team is vital to ensure success.
Super Space Robot Tip: Be realistic about persona development. Just because you get something wrong doesn't mean you'll get it ALL wrong. Take this guy here. Sure, he can’t do math, but his chalkboard writing skills are impeccable for a sheep.
Be Realistic When Creating Personas
You have to be realistic when you create a persona. They're never going to be 100% accurate. Total accuracy is not their purpose. Content marketers should use them as a guide or a template. Personas are about telling the right story to the right people. Personas help you get there, for sure, which leads us to the big question:
What if You Get Your Persona Wrong?
Chaos ensues. You might as well burn it all to the ground and go do something else. Have you tried needlepoint? I hear that’s relaxing.
No. If you get your persona wrong, then you get it wrong. I recently saw a post on social media where a marketing expert asked something to the effect of, "can you imagine basing your entire year's content strategy on incorrect data because you didn't take the time to get your persona right?"
The answer to that is no, I can't imagine that. How far off would your assumptions have to be that you completely and totally missed your target? If that's the case you probably need to reexamine everything you do. The odds of your persona being so wrong that you ruin your content strategy for the whole year just isn’t likely. We’re not in the print business anymore where, if you get a major assumption a little wrong you’ll have to wait until the next reprint to get it right. Digital content can be changed. If it's not working, just fix it. It's not the end of the world. You’ll be fine.
There's data and there's research involved in getting your persona right. That's for sure. But you have to start with some sort of assumption to build off of. Be realistic and don't worry so much if you get it a little wrong the first time. Go with your…
Create Content Marketing personas by Using Your Gut
Do you know the thing in Star Trek where Spock made decisions with logic and reason, and Kirk made decisions based on his instinct and risk-taking nature? That’s why they worked together so well. You need data. You need science. You need reason. But you probably also have some pretty good instincts too. Use them both when creating personas. Despite creating my whole brand about robots, we’re not robots. We’re human. Everything that I use an A.I. for, I make sure to run through my human filter to make sure it feels real and human. Your personas should be human, not just data. People are irrational sometimes. That’s why it’s ok if you don’t get something totally right. You just might stumble into something new and unexpected.
I Don’t Like Making Generalizations When Building Personas
I agree. This is the part of building content personas that feels a little strange and uncomfortable if you're a good person. You might start to feel like you're using stereotypes and generalizations about people when creating your personas.
So don’t.
Making assumptions about people based on demographic data is not something we want to engage in necessarily. The good thing is that there are any number of ways you can design a persona. Demographic data is just one factor, and it might not even be important at all, depending on the kind of content you create. Education level, interests, location, shopping preferences, and, of course, search data should be things to consider. If you’re creating B2B content, maybe you want to build some data based on job title. There are all kinds of options you can use to build your persona that don’t put people in boxes. .
You can use data to build a profile of a real-life human being that doesn't make you feel uneasy every time you look at it. In other words, build your persona using the factors you believe will resonate most and create personas around those assumptions.
"Hey! You’re Doing It Backwards!"
I have studied the content marketing experts. I learned from them. I have designed personas the “right” way. You know what? My personas came out fine. I still had to revise them later based on new information I got about my audience. That got me thinking. Why not just start there? I’ll take what I already know about my audience and use that to build a proto-persona, then just start using it and updating as I learn more about my audience.
By doing it backwards, I saved a ton of time upfront, and I still ended up in the same place in the end. That’s what I want to share with you.
Super Space Robot Tip: Unlike other websites who charge hundreds of millions of dollars for their persona guides, this one is absolutely free. What have you got to lose?
Free Tactical Guide: How to Build a Persona The Easy Way
The Super Space Robot Persona Development Method helps you create personas the easy way using what you already know about your audience, then using data to fill in the blanks. Scientists use a similar process all the time, in a sense, making educated guesses, called hypotheses, then finding the evidence to support those hypotheses.
This is not a persona template. You can get templates all over the web by Googling "persona template." This is a tactical guide to designing, testing, and perfecting personas more quickly, easily, and efficiently by doing it exactly the wrong way! Well, not exactly the wrong way - just doing things in a different order than conventional wisdom would tell you. .
It's 7 pages long, including a 1-page chart on page 7 that you can keep handy when you start creating your own real-life personas. It's also absolutely free. Just fill out the quick form below and get right into it.