← Back to docs

“Oh, we have a pretty good idea of who our audience is.”

Says every marketer ever.

But is it true? Not in my experience!

Typically, when I ask a new client to share their audience personas, they give me titles and firmographics.

Oh, and everyone is targeting the C-suite.

You need more than this for great content!

You need to understand your audience. At a minimum, you need insights into what they’re trying to accomplish and what’s keeping them from getting there.

As Dan Kennedy explains in The Ultimate Sales Letter, "To persuade someone, to motivate someone, to sell someone, you really need to understand that person."

If all you have is that you’re targeting CMOs in the technology space, your content will sound just like everyone else’s.

That’s why the first step in documenting your content strategy is documenting your audience.

In this lesson, we’ll explain:

By the end of this lesson, you’ll have:

Let’s get started.

There’s lots of information you could collect about your audience. The more you know about these people, the better off you’ll be.

But when you’re just getting started, it’s most important to have a firm grasp on:

When you have these insights, you can use them to create content that helps your audience:

At its simplest, that’s what content marketing is all about—helping your audience to overcome their challenges to achieve something they’re looking to accomplish.

We’ve created an easy template to help you document all of this audience information in one place. (We’ve filled out an example based on our example of a content marketing agency that’s looking to engage marketing roles.)

Here’s how it breaks down.

What’s in a name? When it comes to content, not much. But it’s important to be able to describe the kinds of people you’re creating content for. This will help in your information gathering, as well as your distribution efforts (if you get into paid advertising or anything else that requires targeting).

One logical place to start is common job titles for each persona. What kind of professional roles does your product or service serve?

For example, if you’re an agency selling content marketing services, the roles that might be interested in your services (and your content) may be VP of Marketing, Director of Marketing, and Director of Content Marketing.

If your business offers a global payroll service, you might be looking to engage Human Resources, Payroll or Finance roles. Don’t forget to nail down what level these people work at—a CFO has much different needs than a controller, for example.

This is also a good place to specify the industries your audience works in. That content marketing agency, for example, may focus specifically on creating content for B2B SaaS companies, or they may offer services more suited for consumer-facing brands in retail and CPG.

We’re talking B2B here—in all likelihood, there’s more than one person/function involved in making a buying decision for your product or service.

But you have limited focus, resources, budget, etc., so it’s important to note which personas are a primary focus for your content efforts, and which are secondary. Ask yourself:

These people should be your primary focus. People that have to approve the purchase (e.g. bosses, IT, procurement, etc.) are important but typically secondary to your primary audience.

People buy products and services to get things done. These “things” are sometimes called their “jobs-to-be-done” (or “jobs” for short).

When it comes to your personas, what are they trying to accomplish in their roles that your offering helps them with?

For an agency selling content marketing services, jobs may include:

Jobs-to-be-done for a recruiting manager may include:

The content you create for your various personas should ladder up to what they’re trying to accomplish—the jobs they’re trying to complete.

Don’t forget—these jobs should be related to something you offer. It doesn’t help much to know that your VP of Marketing struggles with paid advertising if your content marketing agency is only focused on content production.

While a job-to-be-done is something your persona is trying to accomplish or complete, a pain point is a specific friction that gets in the way.

That Director of Marketing that’s trying to generate pipeline might face pain points like:

You’ve probably uncovered a variety of topics your personas care about in the previous few sections. Use your personas’ jobs-to-be-done and pain points to document the kinds of topics they’d like to learn about.

For example, your Director of Marketing is probably interested in topics like:

These topics are going to feed directly into some of your ideas about building your topic strategy.

Everybody gets information from organic search. But are your target personas on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter? Are there specific forums they hang out in? Slack communities? Do they read industry publications? Which ones?

For example, Marketing Directors responsible for content often consume information in channels like:

You’ll publish most of your content on your website, but you need to consider how you will distribute it—so your audience will actually see it. Understanding where they get their information will help you decide where to focus your distribution efforts.

Hint: Trolling these sources can also be a great source of information about your audience, what they’re struggling with, and what topics they’re interested in. Get familiar with them!

Template filled out for our example audience:

As a writer or content marketer, you should treat filling out this template as a data-gathering exercise. You don’t need to pull everything from your head (in fact, that’s a good way to get it wrong).

Instead, look to these sources for the information you need.

The best information about your customers will come from customers themselves. I strongly recommend interviewing some customers. I know, it can feel scary at first. But the rewards are huge and the time commitment is relatively small.

If you can only ask a prospect or customer one thing, ask this:

What was going on in your day that brought you to this product or service?

It places them back in that moment and prompts them to think about their struggle—and that’s super valuable for your content. Remember, you want to produce content that helps your audience to overcome their challenges, so you need to really understand these challenges.

Here are some other good questions to ask in your customer interviews.

If you can’t get customers on the line to chat (or don’t feel comfortable doing so), the next best option is to find existing sources where these people are sharing information and expressing their concerns, such as:

There may be people in your company that have already collected some of this data from customers. Consider talking to people on your team like:

Ideally, you’ll validate this internal information with external sources, as well. You know what they say about assumptions…

Fill out the Audience Template for your own personas.

Aim for 3 personas, max.

I know this might feel daunting. But now you know exactly what you’re going after and where to get it—you just need to take action. If you spend the time to clearly document your audience now, your content strategy will be about 100X more likely to support your goals.

All set? Proceed to