How to Write Marketing Personas

Updated January 13, 2023

For Engaging Content That Converts

We’ve found that using content marketing personas — fictional characters that represent your idea client with regard to demographics, attitudes and behavior — help create content that resonates and converts.  According to a HubSpot study, using marketing personas in email campaigns improved click-through rates by 16 percent. Coming up with specific marketing personas is only helpful if you know how to create appropriate content for those personas.

Marketing Personas are not People

Remember that you aren’t speaking to a single person, but a theoretical range of people with common demographics and interests. Consider a business-to-business example: Marketing accounting software to mid-sized companies. You could come up with several personas for this endeavor, such as:

• Company leadership interested efficiencies and accuracy,
• IT leaders tasked with finding proper solutions to business needs, or
• Professionals in accounting offices.

When creating content for the IT-based persona above, you want to avoid writing to a single person who has knowledge of specific software products, runs an IT department that exactly fits your specs, and has a four-year degree from your local college in computer science. Instead, create more general definitions that are still specific to the niche. For example, you might create marketing persona that:

• Has a two-year or higher degree in any IT field
• Is involved in software-based decision-making or evaluating processes for his company
• Has a basic understanding of financial matters, but is unlikely to be versed in technical accounting terms.

Write to Educate

Once you have your marketing personas in mind, write to educate each audience. To teach, you have to understand what the audience knows, what they don’t know, and why your information may be of interest to them. That message is going to change depending on the marketing persona you address.

Consider the example above. When writing to accounting staff, you would use professional-level financial vocabulary and speak to specific accounting needs that your software meets. When writing to company leaders or IT professionals, you still address the company needs, but you do so in a more general way that doesn’t involve discussing technical accounting processes.

Avoid Building Fences

You can target content to draw the attention of people who fit the marketing personas you create, but you don’t want to turn off readers who come to your webpage or content via search engines or links. Don’t dilute content by trying to speak to everyone. For example avoid making statements such as, “as a clinical healthcare worker, you may have to deal with the ignorance of office staff. . .” on a blog targeted toward nurses. Speak to the nurse, yet don’t forget that an administrative staff member might also be in a position to make decisions about your product or service.

Do you use marketing personas to develop engaging content?