How to Create Buyer Personas for Content Marketing

At the core of any powerful content marketing strategy is being able to write for your target audience. But how do you know who your audience is? The answer: buyer personas. 

A well-crafted buyer persona lets you create highly targeted, relevant, unique, and engaging content that reads as if it speaks directly to your ideal customer precisely because you wrote it with them in mind. 

In this guide, we’ll go step-by-step through how to create buyer personas for content marketing so that all of your content is written in a way that’s powerful, persuasive and meaningful. 

By the end, you’ll have a clear, thorough process to create compelling buyer personas that help you drive real results in your content marketing. 

In This Article

• Learn what a buyer persona is and why they are an important consideration in content marketing
• Key factors to consider when creating a buyer persona
• A step-by-step guide to creating buyer personas for content marketing with examples

Looking for a best-in-class suite of tools for your content marketing strategy? Check out Originality.ai’s Predictive SEO Tool, AI Checker, Plagiarism Checker, and Grammar Checker.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. It’s typically based on market research and data. 

Buyer personas include various details about your target audience: 

• Demographics
• Behavior patterns
• Goals
• Pain points
• Buying habits

Creating a buyer persona goes beyond basic audience segmentation (for example, separating people by age, location, etc.) and dives deeper into people’s core motivations, challenges, and decision-making processes. 

Think of it as a guide for you to visualize your target customer so that you can create content that directly matches their needs. 

Why Do Buyer Personas Matter for Content Marketing? 

If you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re writing to, the end result will be bland, generic content that misses the mark for everyone. 

Creating a fictional persona that embodies your ideal customer may seem like an unnecessary extra step, but it’s the perfect tool for getting “inside the mind” of your target audience so that your content essentially feels as if it speaks directly to them. 

When customers engage with content more it translates to staying longer on your site and consuming more content. This longer time-on-page is just one factor that influences how Google and other search engines rank your site. 

When you’re sending all of the signals to search engines about high-quality content, it makes sense to invest some time in creating well-developed personas that continue to give it all of the indicators that this content is worth reading. 

Step 1: Research Your Target Audience

The first step in creating customer personas is to gather research on your current and potential customers. 

That means leveraging both online and offline tools such as surveys, customer interviews, website analytics, and social media signals to see how customers are engaging with your content currently. 

This is also the perfect time to consult with your sales team to learn what the most common customer objections and questions are. 

Take a look at support tickets as well to see where customers are having problems or what their pain points are. 

Step 2: Conduct a Detailed Competitor Analysis

See how your competitors are engaging with their audience as well by conducting a competitor analysis. 

Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs and BuzzSumo will tell you, for instance, how your competitor’s content is performing, what trends are worth researching, and more. 

These types of competitive insights can also help you uncover underserved topic areas that you can capitalize on. 

Alternatively, you can use the Originality.ai Predictive SEO Tool to identify top ranking competitors for a particular keyword and the optimization scores for the ranking content.

Step 3: Analyze Demographic Data

Once you have some basic information, it’s time to pull the demographic data. This may include:

• Age range
• Location (Can be divided into rural, suburban, urban, country, local)
• Education Level (high school diploma, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree)
• Job title and industry

Once you have these general details, you can put together a basic buyer persona. 

An example for a content marketer might look like this:

Jane is a 32-year old marketing manager living in Seattle. She has a master’s degree in digital marketing, she works in the SaaS industry, and handles her company’s content strategy. 

This establishes a starting point for tailoring your content, however, you need more details, especially if you want your content to really address pain points and convert customers. 

Step 4: Define User Behavior and Psychographics

Psychographics go beyond basic information about who your prospects are and covers their behavior and intent. For example: 

• What challenges are they facing? What frustrates them about a product, service or industry?
• What do they want to achieve? What drives them? What are their goals?
• Where do they typically look for solutions? Search engines? Asking friends for recommendations? Social media posts? AI tools?
• What type of content do they generally consume? Do they prefer videos, social media, blogs, or email newsletters?
• Who are the influencers and thought leaders that guide them? Whose opinions do they trust and follow? 

Going back to our previous example, our research might tell us:

Jane struggles with SEO updates and changes in the algorithm. She wants to create content that’s easy for readers to understand and follow while still providing information that her readers can put into practice easily. She follows digital marketing trends and prefers LinkedIn for industry news and updates. She often watches thought leadership YouTube videos on marketing trends to keep her skills sharp. 

Step 5: Create an Example Buyer Persona Template

Now that you’ve got both the demographics and psychographics, organize them into a clear and structured persona with categories such as: 

• Demographics
• Goals and motivations
• Pain points and challenges
• Content preferences
• Preferred platforms

Building on our previous example you could create a template table with details about the fictional buyer persona for Jane the content marketer:

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Going Beyond Basic Buyer Personas

At this stage, you have a well-rounded buyer persona that ticks all of the boxes for creating valuable, insightful, and impactful content. But what if you could go even further? 

Here are some more points you can incorporate to make your buyer persona for content marketing truly outstanding. 

Communication preferences

We know how our audience prefers to receive their information, but how do they communicate with others? 

• Do they prefer emails or social media direct messages? 
• Do they respond better to in-depth, long-form content or do they prefer more bite-sized information? 

For instance, a busy CEO might want bite-sized email updates to keep up-to-speed, while a customer might prefer Instagram or TikTok videos. 

How do they make decisions?

Knowing how your prospect makes decisions can help you improve your marketing funnel and better understand your customer journey. 

• Do they tend to make impulse decisions?
• Do they conduct a great deal of research before they take action? 
• Are they considerably influenced by recommendations and reviews?
• Are they more value-driven or price-sensitive?

For example, a B2B buyer is considerably different from a B2C buyer in that they often need to go through several layers of approval before they can make a purchase. 

They often look at whitepapers, case studies, or other reports. By keeping this in mind when tailoring your content to a B2B buyer, you’ll be able to convert more of them because you understand the process they go through. 

Barriers to purchase

Identify what might prevent them from buying.

• Are they worried that the product is too complex or difficult? 
• Do they have trouble getting support when they need it? 
• Are they purchasing from the latest startups and new brands?
• Do they prefer established companies? 

In cases like these, knowing the things that prevent them from taking action can help you plan out a strategy to convert them. It may be as simple as offering a free trial, offering a comparative pricing guide, or a free demo version of a product. 

What encourages a purchase?

Understanding why and when your prospect is most likely to purchase can help you with the timing of your content and how you market it. 

For example, they may be more influenced by things like sales events or promotions, or they may only purchase after reading several reviews. 

Beyond these points, knowing what stage they’re at as part of the customer journey and understanding their buying intent as they make their way through your sales funnel is vital to creating content that drives them to act. 

Use Buyer Personas to Create Targeted Content

Once you have your in-depth buyer persona mapped out, it’s time to create targeted content for them. 

You’ll know from taking the steps above, for instance:

• What type of blog posts they prefer
• What kind of videos they tend to watch
• What social networks they use

You’ll also know what types of content to specifically center on and whether or not you should, for instance, create an email newsletter, spend time working on case studies, and so on. 

Buyer Personas: Final Thoughts

Keep in mind that it’s not a matter of if customer behaviors and trends will change, but when. 

Buyer personas for content marketing aren’t set in stone; they adapt and change with time, and it’s a good idea to periodically update them once or twice each year. 

Creating these types of in-depth buyer personas not only helps you personalize your content marketing, but it helps you attract the right kind of customer at the right time, using the right channels. 

By understanding features such as your customer’s pain points, goals and motivations, and how they prefer to consume content, you can tailor your posts, videos and more to better compel and convert them to act. 

Discover a best-in-class suite of tools for your content marketing strategy with Originality.ai’s Predictive SEO Tool, AI Checker, Plagiarism Checker, and Grammar Checker.

Then, learn more content marketing best practices in our top guides:

• How to Create an SEO Content Brief in 10 Steps
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• How to Outline Quality Standards in a Content Brief in 4 Steps
• How to Create Pillar Content Pages