Have more than one persona?

Photo by María Fernanda Pérez

How to Efficiently Reach Your Customer Base with Content When You Have More Than One Persona: A Guide for Startups

By Robin Anderson

Creating content that resonates with your audience is essential for any successful marketing strategy. For startups with small teams, the challenge of tailoring content to multiple personas is even greater. However, with the right strategies, you can efficiently and effectively reach each segment of your customer base. Here’s how:

1. Identify and Understand your Ideal Customers

For many marketing B2B, your target audience will consist of multiple personas. Before you can create content that will have the greatest impact, develop profiles for each persona. This includes their demographics, pain points from their perspective, how they think, which communications platforms are preferred, and what types of content they find most engaging.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses. It's essentially a definition of your ideal buyer presented in a way that sounds like it's talking about a specific person.

So what do you do if your target buyers are at different ends of the spectrum within the same industry?

2. Segment Your Audience

Once you have a clear understanding of your personas, segment your audience based on where they reside within the industry. Audience segmentation allows you to tailor your content more precisely to each group’s unique needs and preferences. One target’s strength may be the other target’s weakness. Because of this, your key messaging needs to be personalized for each segment.

3. Develop Tailored Content Strategies

Many times you will be able to create one core piece of content that is applicable to more than one segment. Where you need to personalize may be in the key messaging. This is where you customize your content to increase the likelihood of engagement for that segment. For each persona, define the key messaging that will drive engagement for each segment. This includes identifying the specific pain points and benefits that are important for each segment. Highlight your product’s value proposition in a way that applies to this audience. Your call-to-action (CTA) may be different for each segment or the same. What is important, is to ensure your CTA suits the segment’s preferences. 

The when/why/how a customer buys may be different for each segment. And therefore, it is important to map the buyer’s journey for each segment to clearly identify each touchpoint that is part of the critical path to purchase.

The buyer’s journey encompasses the path a customer takes, starting from the recognition of a problem or need, followed by the evaluation process, all the way to the acquisition of a suitable solution.

Understanding the buyer’s journey for each segment will enable you to deliver messages that align with each specific customer need and pain points, building trust, credibility and loyalty. This will also help you make data-driven decisions to further refine and target your marketing strategies to maximize results.

4. Measure and Optimize

To maximize your efforts, continuously measure the performance of your content across different segments and each channel you are targeting. Top metrics to track include:

• Engagement Rates: Likes, shares, comments, and time spent on content.

• Conversion Rates: Leads generated, sales, and other conversions.

• Feedback: Direct feedback through comments, surveys, and customer interactions.

Social media platforms include baseline analytics for free. Monitor those, analyze the data to understand what’s working and what’s not. Adjust your content strategy accordingly to improve effectiveness.

5. Leverage Automation

Automation can significantly enhance efficiency, especially for small teams. With market automation tools, personalization tools allow you to send tailored content to each segment efficiently. Running tailored ads on social media platforms allow you to target your ad specifically to each segment. In addition, for platforms such as LInkedIn, you can create Showcase pages that are specifically focused on a segment.

To take advantage of automation, start by using tools that are free. Once you find the tools that work best for you, consider upgrading your plan to enhance your efforts as many have great features that can make the job even easier.

For Social Media scheduling take a look at tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule posts across different platforms. Tools for email automation include features that allow you to send personalized messages at scale. See Mailchimp or Sendinblue. And for maximum efficiency with content delivery, Content Management Systems (CMS) from platforms like HubSpot or FreshWorks offer tools that can help automate various content tasks, from SEO optimization to social sharing.

Reaching a diverse customer base with multiple personas requires a strategic approach to content creation and delivery. For startups with small teams, efficiency and effectiveness are crucial. By understanding your personas, segmenting your audience, personalizing your content, knowing the touchpoints along the buyer’s journey for each, and keeping an eye on your performance, you can effectively engage each segment of your audience and drive better results for your business. Remember, the key is to stay flexible and adaptable, always ready to tweak your strategy based on feedback and performance data.

Need help with managing your content marketing? Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation. 

Fun Fact Friday

When personalizing for each of your segments, keep the messaging and experience positive:

Disney’s Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Florida, attracts millions of visitors yearly of all ages. For those on the older side, the Haunted Mansion attraction offers a more chilling, haunted-house-like experience. In 2016, an adjustment to the customer experience took that creepiness to a new level. Disney gave attendants personalized wristbands using their information to log entry into different points in the park. At the Haunted Mansion, the attraction took that technology and used customer names and even home states during a final animation sequence where that info was etched onto holographic tombstones. Although the creepiness factor is part of the sell for this ride, some audience members noted this might’ve taken things just a bit too far.