How to Build a Buyer Persona and Why They Matter

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Even the best marketing strategies and tactics can only get you so far if you do not know who you’re marketing to. Creating a buyer persona is an integral part of marketing. Buyer personas help outdoor marketers and businesses understand the needs, desires, and habits of their customers while also predicting what triggers them to buy their product or service. 

What is a buyer persona?

The point of a buyer persona is to better understand who your ideal customer is and how to market to them. A buyer persona is your ideal customer avatar that represents one of your key target audiences. We recommend making more than one persona since often your data will be composed of a variety of people. Your personas will be created by assessing the demographic and psychographic data that you have accumulated since the start of your business. 

Follow this blog and learn the 6 steps to building your buyer persona.

1. Demographics

First let’s think about demographics. Demographic data is collected information used to inform researchers and outdoor marketers about the characteristics of your outdoor customers. While this may be surface level information, it is integral to understanding your audience and building your persona. Demographic data can help you answer the following questions: How old is your audience? What part of the world or country do they live in? How much money do they make per year? Do they have a family? Are they single or married? These high level questions are the first step in identifying the persona you will be building. 

Demographic data has helped us understand key features of this persona including income range, age, family, education, and location. We recommend choosing a photo for your persona that will embody these characteristics so you can better visualize who you are speaking to. 

2. Psychographics

Psychographic data is collected to better understand why the population buys and does the things they do through collecting data about their lifestyles, behaviors, and habits. Psychographic data is harder to get but is extremely helpful in building and validating buyer personas. The best way to collect psychographic data is to ask your audience directly through surveys and forms throughout your website. Psychographic data helps us build a bio for our personas as seen in this example:

Creating a bio for your persona unpacks the lifestyle, hobbies, and the interests of your outdoor customers and helps marketers understand the language to use while writing things like website copy or ads. 

3. Build a User Story

Once you understand who your persona is, build a user story for them. A user story describes what the persona is ideally looking for without necessarily identifying how your product or service can help. Building a user story helps outdoor marketers understand potential pain points and goals that their products or services can help ease or how they can fit into the personas lifestyle. 

user story example

The user story can be brief but should have enough information to help frame the goals and triggers of the persona. 

4. Identify Goals and Triggers

The goals of the persona should take into account the lifestyle and values they hold. Are they on a budget and looking to save money? Do they want to spend more time with family? Do they have time for a high maintenance project or product? Look back at your profile, bio, and user story to estimate what these goals will be. 

Triggers are the things that push your persona to finally purchase the product or service. Maybe they’re looking for a replacement for something they’ve had for years or are seeking a solution to a new problem they’ve been having. Understanding your persona’s triggers will come in handy when the customer is getting close to a purchasing decision. If you touch on their pain points in your ads or website copy, they will feel more inclined to buy. 

5. Understand Your Persona at Each Stage of the Buyer Journey

The buyer journey is broken down into awareness, self-educating, consideration, rationalizing, and decision. As your persona moves throughout these stages of the journey, the way you should interact with them will vary. In the awareness stage, they may not even know they have a problem or that your company exists. In this stage it is important to show them your brand and products without pushing sales too much. Once they realize your product and brand is right for them, your interactions are going to eventually lead to a sale. To understand this journey, map out potential questions your persona may have as they move through each stage and create landing pages and ads that help move them to the next stage.

6. Build the Persona

Once you’ve completed each of these steps, download our buyer persona template and fill out the document to build your persona. 

Creating buyer personas is the first step in transforming your outdoor content and marketing efforts. Humanizing your data this way will help your outdoor marketing team stay on track and be consistent with your messaging across all channels and generate more sales for your brand.

Are you interested in starting your content transformation? Contact us today for a consultation. 

8 Must-Have Content Marketing Skills!

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Content marketing skills are powerful, but only if done right.

It’s researching what your specific audience wants to know. It’s talking to them as a friend, in your own unique way and voice. It’s keeping up with current trends, so you can create valuable content that resonates with your audience. 

Follow along this blog and learn 8 skills to master and lift you to success in no time.

1. Research Your Audience

No matter how compelling your content is, you won’t convert anyone if you don’t know exactly who you’re speaking to.

For instance, look at this content from Pond King’s email campaign.

The email holds enticing promise to readers who want to purchase in the near future. But what makes it compelling isn’t fancy wording or clever phrases. It’s simply that we knew his audience’s pain and need before writing it.

When we are identifying our target customer’s pain we use these five powerful methods to dig up clues about our audience so we can find them a solution. Here are a 5 powerful ways to put on your detective’s cap and dig up clues about your audience:

  • Use Google Analytics to find out who’s visiting your website. Analytics gives you information like the names, ages, and genders of your site visitors.
  • Go on Answer The Public and research topics around your niche. What are people saying? What are their fears/desires/dreams? Reading what they talk about will help you understand them on a deeper level.
  • Take note of how users respond to your content. With a tool like Moz , you can learn how people are reacting to what you write. Analyze your top engaged posts and discover what made them appealing to your audience.
  • Ask your users through surveys (with incentives like free downloads – an e-book).
  • Engage with people in the comment section of your blog and social media. Listen to what they’re saying and respond personally and directly.

Remember, speaking to your audience should be like conversing with a friend. The better you know this friend, the more personal and appealing your message will be.

2. Become an Expert Interviewer

To write amazing content, you need to be an expert on your topic. When you master the art of conducting subject matter interviews, you can produce authority content even if you are not an expert in the niche you write in.

But you can’t just jump into an interview with an expert and ask any question that comes to your mind. Remember, the value of the information you get depends on the quality of your questions.

Here are 5 tips to make your interviews seamless.

  1. Be prepared. You don’t want to come to an interview with absolutely no idea on the topic. Rather, you want the interview to be a deep dive into the topic. So, before you start the interview, do as much research as you can. From your research, make a list of questions you can’t find the answers for online.
  2. Skip open-ended questions. You want your interviewee to gush over the topic. You want them to feel excited. To do that, intrigue them with unusual questions. For instance, instead of asking, “Is your product great?” you can ask, “Can you give me some facts most people don’t know about your product?”
  3. Bring your content outline with you when you interview. Asking a bunch of random, unrelated questions wastes time. To avoid this, base your questions on the outline you prepare for your content. This will help you ask specific, driven questions you can use in your writing. 
  4. Record your conversation. Later on, you’ll want to go back over the exact words your interviewee said during the interview. Then you can write notes later without disrupting the interview process.  If your interview is through zoom we love using Otter. It takes notes for you so you can save them for later and spend more time focusing on your content outlines.  
  5. Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification. If there’s something you don’t understand during the interview, ask! This can open doors for an even deeper dive into the topic.

When you approach interviews with a genuine passion for your topic, there’s nothing you can’t dig up from the experts’ knowledge banks.

3. Fine Tune Your Keywords

So, how do you choose keywords to use in your content? Keywords don’t only help you rank higher on Google, they act as the spine of your content. Keywords direct what you say and allow you to stay relevant with what people want to read.

  • Go for long-tail keywords. For example, instead of choosing “dress,” go for “Walt Disney princess dresses for kids.” Keywords like this help direct quality traffic to your site.
  • Choose low competition keywords. If you go for a keyword like “shoes,” you’ll find yourself up against content from huge brands like Adidas and Nike. As a rule of thumb, go for keywords with a score below 50.
  • It’s OK to select a keyword with low search volume. As long as there are people searching for this keyword, creating content around it will get you results.

To help you find the best keywords for your content, you can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.

Did you know?

76% of marketers use organic traffic as a measure of content success

4. Planning and Time Management

So, how do you choose keywords to use in your content? Keywords don’t only help you rank higher on Google, they act as the spine of your content. Keywords direct what you say and allow you to stay relevant with what people want to read.

You don’t want to wake up one morning panicking because you have to produce content but have no idea what to write. To avoid this, create a content calendar.

With a content calendar, you’ll avoid problems like repetitive content and stay up-to-date with events like holidays and special occasions.

Always remember, to leave room for spontaneity. For example, if a relevant question from one of your followers suddenly pops up on your social feed, why not address it at length in a blog?

After you’ve solidified your idea and did your research next comes your outline. 

5. Creating Strategic Outlines

An outline is your roadmap to the content you create. It not only helps you with your work but also shows the client what to expect. Put as much detail into your outline as possible. Take a look at our example outline below. 

6.Writing Value-rich Content

When you write, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Ask yourself, would I read this? Did I learn from what I just read? Was it a user friendly experience? The content you write is the solution to your audience’s pain point.

74.2% of companies saying that content marketing is increasing their marketing teams’ lead quality and quantity.

If you want to improve your content here are 4 simple steps to follow: 

Step 1: Understand what data-rich content entails.

When writing a data-rich blog post, every key point that you make should be backed by a credible data source. The more legitimate your source is, the more authoritative your content will be.

Step 2: Firm up your content marketing strategy. 

Firming up your content marketing strategy and what you want to accomplish with your content, most specifically, will allow you to cut out the guesswork and get consistent results.

Each content you write needs to have a clear purpose. Understand who your audience is and the information that they want to gain from reading your blog post.

Step 3: Come up with engaging headlines.

While most people will read your headlines, few will commit to actually reading the blog post. You have less than 3 seconds to grab your reader’s attention, and a data-driven headline will leave your audience wanting more.

Step 4: Develop data-driven outlines.

Do you create outlines for your blog posts? Whether you’re writing a data-driven post or sharing your unique perspective about a relevant topic, developing an outline will speed up the blog writing process and keep you organized and on track.

7. Editing

Engaging content can be powerful enough to persuade hesitant prospects to buy. And, on the flip side, messy, error-prone writing could cause the end-user to abandon your site entirely.

In short, the ability to edit is the difference between mediocre writing and compelling, engaging, high-converting content.

We love using grammarly.com, it helps whip your content in shape and checks for things like:

  • Proofreading
  • Revising
  • Drafting
  • Spelling
  • Structure
  • Style
  • Punctuation
  • Strong Vocabulary
  • Using the Rhetorical Triangle
  • Devise Structure
  • Establish Tone
  • Forming a Thesis

8. Measuring Your Content’s Success

Analyzing data is the key to knowing if your content performed well and if you need to make changes. Attaching metrics to your content will help you determine whether the content is successful or needs improvement. Here are three great ways to measure content success:

  • Email click-through rate. If people are clicking the links in your email campaigns, take note of what makes this email different from others.
  • Bounce rate. Do people leave your site without clicking through to other pages? The rate at which they do so is your bounce rate. If people click away more than 70% of the time, you need to improve your content.
  • Scroll depth. Do people read your intro and then leave the page? Or do they scroll all the way to the bottom? At what point do they stop reading? When you analyze what’s working and what’s not, you’ll be able to improve your content.

Marketers need to constantly learn new skills and adapt to online changes. As online behavior and algorithms shift, so do marketing tactics – and therefore marketing best practices. Marketers that thrive on this change and are eager to learn new techniques will succeed. 

Once you hone in on these skills it’s only up from here. Your content will improve and so will you as a professional. 

Do’s and Dont’s of Content Marketing in the Outdoor Industry

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Much of our approach to content involves building a story for your outdoor brand. There are a few key foundational ideas in building this story which led us to produce a list of do’s and dont’s of content marketing in the outdoor industry.

Have a Content Marketing Strategy

A content strategy unifies your content marketing efforts across many avenues. While developing this strategy is definitely important, sticking to it is even more so. A well-built strategy will have exact deadlines and be closely monitored to quickly determine when things have moved out of the timeline. Often, communication can break down across team lines. But having a comprehensive content strategy ensures everyone is writing for the same goal. No matter the topic or client.

Make Your Customer The Hero Of Your Content Marketing

Painting your user as the hero places them as a protagonist. Maybe your customer sees you as Yoda, but more importantly, they see themselves as Luke Skywalker. Understanding the desires of your potential consumers, and positioning yourself as a guide with solutions is key to content creation that converts.

Have a Content Marketing Checklist

Creating and sticking to a content marketing checklist ensures your valuable content is being spread across vital channels quickly and efficiently. For example, as you post your blog to your website, you can have it auto-upload to your facebook wall or story. Confirm it was posted properly, and check it off the list.

Track All the Data

The amount of data we are able to collect using Google is staggering, so customizing it and honing it down to 2-3 key performance indicators can keep you out of the tall grass when looking at the data itself. Determining the metrics you want your users to hit helps you to understand what it is you want your customers to do when they interact with your website or product.

Don’t Get Tunnel Vision

We get so consumed in our own brands and own identity that we forget to see what others are doing. This may be in the form of competition research or simply browsing the web. Analyzing specific assets you like on other websites and finding ways to incorporate them into your strategy (the right way) can set up your business for success. A tool like evernote can easily snap, store, and organize all of your findings into something manageable and shareable. Paying attention to outdoor industry trends leads to more creativity and fresh ideas.

Don’t Talk About Yourself

Explaining your offering and gloating are two different things. You should stay far away from gloating about your brand. One, it doesn’t paint the user as the hero (as mentioned above). And two, it really doesn’t do much for the user if you aren’t engaging and offering a solution. Stay away from words like “we” or “our company” and try to limit the “since 19xx” quotes.

Don’t Be Too Hard on Yourself

Content strategy is complex and always changing. You should not get down if your blogs are not converting like you originally thought. Look at all of this as a work in progress to educate yourself and your potential customers. Authority is built over time. Taking the step to simply DO it is just half the battle. Keep it up!

5 Reasons to Increase Your Content Marketing Efforts

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We all build content intended to convert traffic into leads and then into customers. Each company with a desire to be successful wants to establish itself as a knowledge source in the space. We write blogs such as this one to try to establish some of that trust and authoritativeness, as well as expertise.

Most companies know they need to increase their content marketing efforts, but many don’t know where to start. Here are a few reasons to start today.

Brand Reputation

As you produce more and more content, you become a one-stop resource for your users. The typical user wants to learn about your company and investigate your service or product. Building content intended to inform, engage, convert and create trust with your users is how a successful company gains a supportive following. An excellent experience centered around your content will keep them coming back for more.

As your brand reputation and awareness increases, so does a return on the investment. Content is becoming the way you establish and nurture the relationships with your customers.

Conversions

Conversions are the lifeblood of your business and the overall reason to engage in paid media advertisements, content marketing, and SEO. However not all conversions are created equal. There may be leads that need to be nurtured over time to produce the kind of traction you are looking for. 

Purpose-driven content builds a user flow you want your users to follow when they engage with your product. Giving direct calls to action and trying to inform the periphery about your product while not having to be as hands-on can help you produce better results more quickly. A good content marketing plan puts the tools in the hands of your users to spend money with you in some way. Whether this is through donations, product purchases, or newsletter sign-ups, we know how to convert your readers into paying customers with outdoor content marketing.

SEO

SEO is an attempt to build out web pages with the intention of ranking higher on Google. The first step to a comprehensive SEO campaign is research. Identify what people are searching for to find your product or service. If you build your brand according to the building a story brand guide, and include specific keywords you think will convert users, you will start to see more organic traffic rolling in. 

Organic traffic should be easier to convert since these potential customers are actively seeking a solution. We all go straight to Google to find the services and products we need. The user interface and user experience on your website will eventually become your success or downfall.

Cost Effectiveness

An engaging content marketing plan for the outdoor industry is extremely cost-effective. Many companies build their services or products on paid advertisements. But this route can just lead to frustrations down the road if you don’t keep it up. If 70% of your traffic comes from paid ads, you are heavily relying on those paid ads to perform.

We understand you are an expert in your field. And every piece of content you produce is going to develop the trust with your users to understand your business. Content is a much more natural way for you to engage with your users.

Many times paid ads are built to convert quickly. You have an ad running, and a landing page used to collect information. But giving them the option to deep dive into your content will leave them feeling knowledgeable. And if they would like to reach out, making it an easy and positive experience is imperative to converting that traffic.

Traffic

Using content marketing to generate trust with your users leads to higher traffic and more eyes on your product or service. Therefore, creating unique, insightful and engaging content will improve the “first impression” your new users receive. And then greatly contributes to nurturing your returning visitors as they progress through your website. 

Google understands how users interact with your website. Establishing your brand as an educational resource in your space keeps them coming back for more. If you pair this with a monthly newsletter for people to sign up and receive updates, you will have an easier time offering valuable resources to your website traffic over time.

Mapping Content to the Buyer’s Journey

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As potential customers consider a purchase or service, they likely research the various market options. They’ll make an informed decision based on quality, price and other factors. In most circumstances, they don’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision without evaluation. Instead, a potential buyer – regardless of product – goes through something called the buyer’s journey.

This consists of different steps prior to making a purchase. These steps could include visiting your website, reading your blog, subscribing to your email list and speaking to a salesperson.

Using content marketing to deliver specific content to potential buyers based their inbound marketing journey can be a valuable tool for businesses. But not understanding your potential customers and delivering content that doesn’t relate to them could result in losing a sale.

Whether you do the writing yourself or outsource the job, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Think about their potential pain points and deliver some potential solutions.

Avoid complex or sales language and try to connect with the audience. Whether you’re B2B or B2C, inbound marketing is largely about P2P: person-to-person.

Before you start writing, let’s break down the buyer’s journey and how to approach the content development process.

Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

The Buyer’s Journey can be broken down into three stages: Awareness, Evaluation and Intent. Each stage requires a specific type of content to help move the customer to the next stage.

During the awareness stage, potential customers are seeking answers to a problem. They’re looking for resources, education and data to help with the solution. Next, in the evaluation stage, potential customers examine whether or not a particular product or service is right for them. And finally, during the Purchase stage, they take steps toward becoming a customer.

The Buyer's Journey Inbound Stages
Stages of a Buyer’s Journey

Based on your particular business or industry, your targets may require more engagement. This is particularly true for companies whose products require significant investment and tend to have a longer sales cycles.

But what content should you produce for each stage and what should it look like? Let’s take a closer look.

Mapping Content for the Awareness Stage

Developing content for potential customers in the awareness stage should focus on education. This content could include blog posts, social media posts and ebooks. The content you develop shouldn’t necessarily speak to brand-specific benefits, but instead introduce why a product or service like yours could offer a solution. The payoff is readers who find your content useful could move down the buyer’s journey to the next stage.

As a writer, strive to ensure the awareness stage content is accessible. In fact, the blog posts you write for in the awareness stage could introduce buyer’s to a problem they don’t even know they have. It’s easy to get caught up in technical language, especially in the outdoor space, but try as much as you can to generate content that connects with readers on a personal level. Once you convert the user, using a form, they can now move into the next stage of their journey. 

Mapping Content for the Evaluation Stage

If you’ve successfully moved a potential customer to the evaluation stage, it means your awareness content was suitably informative and captured the reader’s attention. You’ve now begun to accomplish the steps of what we call: Building A Story for your brand.

During the evaluation stage, you can discuss what potential solutions exist for the customer’s problem, and carefully start to introduce why your particular product or service offers the right solution for a potential customer. Now is a great opportunity to emphasize your expertise in your industry with content like expert guides, webinars and whitepapers.

It can be beneficial for writers to bring in subject-matter experts at every stage of the content development process but especially during the evaluation stage. The content delivered here can gain value from direct involvement from those closest to the subject. It can make your job as a writer much easier.

Mapping Content for the Intent Stage

The purchase stage is the time to clearly outline and offer the benefits of your product or service. You’ve likely seen multiple offers online for demos and trials but without the previous two stages, these offers don’t provide much value. However, if you’ve successfully educated the potential customers in the other stages, these offers are more likely to result in a sale.

In addition to trials and demos, other potential forms of content include case studies and product descriptions. Case studies can provide particular value, proving your solution in a real-life scenario.

When writing case studies, it can be easy to get caught up in the numbers. While showing how revenue increased by X% after implementing a certain solution is important, try to tell the story of how efficiencies were created or how an organization can give more time to their customers or their employees by implementing it.

While content can offer tremendous value to your business, it needs to be delivered as part of a comprehensive inbound and content marketing strategy. If you’d like to learn more about how the right content for the right person, at the right time can help your business, we’re here to help.

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