Content Marketing Strategies For Dummies
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Creating personas for your content marketing strategy is not easy. There are several mistakes that you and your team can make along the way. Here are six common ones:

  • Mistaking themselves for the customer. This may have happened to you. You begin telling your manager or colleague about a solution to your customer's problem. You have researched the data and the marketplace and believe that this information should be added to your persona. Your manager shoots down your idea because he doesn't believe that you are right.

    He bases his opinion on the fact that it's not how he thinks about the problem. He forgets that he's not the customer. This is a very common problem. People who work closely with products begin to think that they are the customers. In reality, they would never be a purchaser of the product.

  • Listening to what someone's relative thinks is a good idea. This happens frequently. Someone's relative has a strong feeling about something, and your colleague is swayed by their opinion and wants to make it part of the persona. Remember that "favorite" features should not be based on what your colleague's cousin likes.

  • Forgetting to collect data about the customers who didn't complete their purchase. You can often learn just as much from customers who didn't complete the purchase of your product as you can from those who did. You need to know why your customers abandoned their shopping cart in mid-buy. This is extremely helpful because you want to know where you are falling short and what you can do to plug that leak. This data should be included in persona information.

  • Thinking that understanding the features and benefits that personas prefer is the whole picture. Most product managers love their products. That's a good thing. But customers unknowingly want you to appeal to their emotions. When you don't understand how the product makes them feel, you miss out on an opportunity to grab their imagination and create a customer for life.

  • Not understanding what entertains your customer. You spend time collecting information, but you don't find out what your customer finds entertaining. If you know more about this, you can create great content pieces that will engage your prospects. You also need to know where they consume information and in what format.

  • Ignoring what people don't like about your product. Obviously, you focus on what they do like so that you can appeal to prospect. But you also want to know what they don't like so that you can fix it and retain customers.

According to Adele Revella, the founder of Buyer Persona Institute, a study from ITSMA says that 44 percent of marketers surveyed say that they have personas but 85 percent of them don't believe they are using them effectively. It's important that you take the time to integrate your buyer personas into your content marketing efforts.

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Stephanie Diamond is a marketing professional with more than 20 years of experience building profits in over 75 different industries. A strategic thinker, she has worked with solopreneurs, small business owners, and multibillion-dollar corporations. Follow her blog at Contentmarketingtoolbox.com/blog.

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