11 Steps to an Actionable Audience Persona

One of the most fun things we get to do as content strategists and creatives is to design user personas. It’s our opportunity to make “real” the hypothetical audience we’ve been talking to until now.

Developing an actionable audience persona is even better, because they lead to clear, data-backed content opportunities. Our thoughtful process usually takes a month or two, and includes team participation and buy-in along the way. 

Here are our 11 steps to create actionable personas:

1. Plan a hypothesis workshop: An audience hypothesis workshop allows teams to level-set assumptions about competitors, audiences, and opportunities. Get a range of representatives who interact with customers, from marketing executives to the product team to front-line workers. It’s an opportunity to get everyone in the same room to connect on what we know, what we think we know, and what we don’t know. For tips on holding successful online workshops, click here.

   Pro Tip: Plan the hypothesis workshop after performing desk research and a landscape analysis so you can bring initial findings to spark conversation.
   

2. Identify “jobs to be done”: There’s been a LOT written about jobs to be done, and for good reason. When we know what our audience is trying to accomplish, we can deliver better content experiences to meet those needs. Read the original HBR article describing how “jobs to be done” help you understand why your customers make the choices they do.

   Pro Tip: Your personas can absolutely work for teams beyond the marketing function – e.g., product or service design – and you should offer to share your findings with them. That said, you should make it clear that these personas are focused on content opportunities. 
   

3. Capture the gaps in knowledge: Your stakeholders likely know through data where people are coming from and what they’re clicking on, but the missing information is going to be the “why?” What triggered the search in the first place? What pain points do they want you to solve? Your team will likely have many questions about your audiences, and it’s your job to capture them.  
   Pro Tip: Asking questions like this in a workshop could feel uncomfortable — very few people are okay talking about what they don’t know. Here’s where an informal survey (via Google Forms) to a broad swath of stakeholders can be valuable - it’s an opportunity to explore what everyone WANTS to know, but may be afraid to ask in public.
   

4. Create a straw man persona: This list item can also be called, “begin with the end in mind.” When you have a sample persona, with all of the elements you’re seeking to know, it’s MUCH easier to design survey questions that will fill gaps in understanding. Refer to the research brief in number five to help identify which elements you may be interested in including for your strawman. 

   Pro Tip: You may alternately design “personal groupings.” With a grouping, you can effectively broaden your focus to audience psychographics or life stages (groupings we created for a tech client included Expert Ambassadors, Agnostic Pragmatists, and Non- Developer Enthusiasts, for example).
   

5. Perform research to fill the gaps: This sounds like, “Build a boat,” but here is where you’ll want to identify an expert to help you design a research approach that fits your needs and budget. That expert will also help you identify, source, and screen a representative audience that will serve as your “panel.” Our sample research brief may help you home in on the right partner. 

   Pro Tip: If you plan on conducting both a survey and focus groups (or one-on-one interviews), you’ll want to carefully weigh which you should perform first. Interviews with a representative customer audience can help you better design survey questions (and a survey panel can cost you thousands, so you want to have the right questions!). Alternatively, survey insights can reveal gaps in understanding that can be filled by interviews.
   

6. Share initial research insights with your colleagues: Once you’ve identified the internal stakeholders for the research data, create a topline synthesis and share these learnings. This helps bring people along on the journey and gives them an opportunity to ask questions that will help them use the research in their work. People love to both see a work in progress AND impact the outcomes. 
   Pro Tip: Share survey and interview questions with a broad swath of stakeholders before embarking on the research. Different groups have different questions they may want to add, and they’ll delight in seeing their questions addressed.
   

7. Be ready to follow up: As you’re reviewing and interpreting the data with your colleagues, seek the surprises in your respondents — is there a group you should target for follow-up questions or interviews? Is there an opportunity or white space that your brand can fill based on responses? After sharing out your initial takeaways, be prepared follow up with the questions that arise. 

   Pro Tip: During the quantitative survey process, offer an incentive for respondents who would be willing to be interviewed. This can serve as your qualitative panel and as your “follow-up” target list. The larger your survey audience, the more options you’ll have to tap into specific segments. 
   

8. Build out (now with data!) your persona: Here’s where you will plug in all of the information you’ve gleaned from your team stakeholders, surveys, interviews, and follow-up insight gathering. At the risk of sounding trite, this is both science and art – data charts accompanied by quotes plucked from interviews or open text fields from the survey (these are often called “verbatims”). Be sure to include messaging that will resonate with this persona. 

   Pro Tip: Aim to limit the personas to fewer than five. Some brands swear by just ONE hero persona that gets distributed to every employee as the exemplar customer that they are all serving.
   

9. Create a “key messages” chart: This chart should include themes that arose for that persona, priorities that relate to that theme, and messaging opportunities that meet those needs. Themes should be broad, and many can overlap from one persona to another. For example, every persona grouping for a dental franchise client included “Ease and convenience” as a theme, but only one had “No-nonsense care.” 

   Pro Tip: Use quotes from audience interviews to fill in the priorities section, as it brings to life people’s desires and pain points as it relates to the theme.
   

10. Create a content touchpoint list: A full user journey can have multiple potential pathways based on your ecosystem – online and offline – and can be a beautiful and complicated visual representation. This list is NOT meant to replace a user journey map, but is rather meant to illuminate all touchpoints, including surprising customer communication opportunities that are not vetted or brand aligned (e.g., customer billing statements). 

    Pro Tip: Here’s where data from your research will come in handy. If your respondents are telling you that they get information from a source,channel, or influencer that you don’t use for content, now’s the time to document that in a separate “opportunities” list.
    

11. Overlay content opportunities for each persona: This is where the term ACTIONABLE comes into play. You know from your research where your persona is going for information, and what their goals and pain points are. Now is your opportunity to map out, by touchpoint, content opportunities for each persona (or persona grouping). You’ll want to reference each persona’s themes and priorities in order to ensure that your content ideas align with their needs. This is going to be the most time-intensive part of your persona building, but it’s also the most rewarding! 

    Pro Tip: Take into account the capabilities and capacity of the team that would be creating the content for each touchpoint. If you are suggesting multiple blog posts per week, is this reasonable to expect?

Once you’ve created your personas and commensurate content opportunities, there are multiple ways to follow through. Here are three to help you get started:

1. Undergo a brand strategy exercise to understand your specific opportunities. What are your differentiators? What is your whitespace? This will help you define content unique to you, minimize content that is duplicative and redundant, and ensure that whatever you create is authentic to your brand.

2. Develop a content roadmap to help the team plan content creation and distribution.

3. If you are a larger organization, design workflows and decision trees that ensure content is planned, created, and reviewed for brand alignment and excellence as efficiently as possible.