Learn more about the first step in content marketing, discovering your audience personas. This slide will give you the steps to get started with your content marketing strategy.

1. Content Marketing
Develop your strategy – or fail.
Part 1: Develop Personas

2. How To Develop a
Customer Persona
Studies suggest demographic data alone,
especially age, should not be used to make large
marketing decisions.
Create A Focus Group
To Get to Know Your Audience

3. Focus Group Questions
• Who are you?
• How do you use the Internet?
• What are your needs?
• Do you care about our brand and products?
• Are our products unique?

4. Who are you?
• Who are your close friends and what
are their personalities like?
• What is your family life like?
• What is your sense of humor?
• What are your political views?
• How did your career develop?
• What are you passionate about?
• What are your favorite things?
• What do you do on the weekend?
• What are some of your hobbies?

5. What are your needs?
• What are your daily struggles in life?
• How do those struggles make you feel?
• What content could you absorb to help with your
struggles?
• What format should this content come in (video,
blog, podcast etc)?
o How do you usually solve your struggles?
o Where do you look for help and why?
o Would you benefit from our product emotionally?
• Would your social life improve after using our product?
• Would your self-confidence improve after using our product?

6. Do you care about our
brand and products?
• Do you “like” brands on Facebook?
o Which ones?
• Why did you “like” them?
o Would you want to be our Facebook Fan?
o What type of content would you want to see us share?

7. How do you use
the Internet?
• How many hours do you spend on the Internet in
a given week?
• What are your favorite websites?
• What is the first thing you do when going online?
• Do you access the Internet on your phone or
tablet?

8. Are our products unique?
• Do we offer anything
different than our
competitors?
• Do you feel differently when
buying our products when
compared to competitors?

9. Focus Group
How can you conduct a focus group?
Well, it depends on your budget.
Paid online services ($30,000-plus)
• Netbase.com
• Radian6.com
• Converseon.com
Research firms or marketing professionals can conduct extensive in-person
focus groups.
If budgets are tight, consider doing an online focus group using Google +
Hangout.
If budgets are even tighter than that, ask friends on social media to complete
a short survey. You can use Survey Monkey or Google Consumer Surveys to
host the survey.

10. Developing Personas
Summary
Writing a persona without first understanding your
customer could and most likely will mislead you down
the road.
Assumptions get you nowhere – especially in
marketing. Ask questions until your customers stop
answering. And then, ask their friends.

11. More on this topic Check out the blog