Who Are You Talking To? Using Personas To Create Unified Content Experiences

Donna Barkson of State Farm is telling us about creating end-user personas. It's about humanizing who we're writing content for.

Personas are representations of user groups. Archetypes of customer segments--and they are not marketing personas. Based on data and research, they express user needs, define user goals, and highlight user expectations.

Personas help keep the focus on user goals. They help writers structure voice & tone.

Create personas by doing research about users, analyzing the data, and deciding what information is going to be important for them. Look for patterns in the data. How many personas you create depends not on the amount of your content or the size of the company or the number of your customers, but on what emerges from your analysis.

Use empathy mapping to learn about users. This can be used to discover customer pain points.

Things to include in personas:

• Quotes
• Demographics
• Motivators
• Goals
• Frustrations
• Preferred channels
• Favorite brands
• Influencers

If you know a customer has a certain frustration, you want to address it. It should always have motivations, goals, and frustrations.

From the personas, can prioritize content, avoid assumptions, create a better and persuasive content strategy, get buy-in from stakeholders.