How well do you know your audiences? Meeting and exceeding your audience’s needs and understanding their journey is critical to your website’s success. This presentation covers best practices for creating personas and journey maps as well as how, when and why to apply them when making content decisions.

1. Building a foundation for strong content:
Defining your audiences and their journeys

2. Hello!
@amnicyoung
Kanopi Studios
A full-service WordPress (and Drupal) website agency specializing in:
• Strategy • Design • Development • Support
www.kanopistudios.com

3. ● How well you know your audiences?
● Why it's important
● Getting started with research
● Building personas and journey maps
● Planning your content
What we’ll discuss

4. 4
How much do you
truly know about
your audiences?

5. ● Conduct audience research?
● Regularly check in with your donor services or volunteer team for insights?
● Have systems in place for collecting feedback?
● Have personas or journey maps?
● Use your personas and journey maps when making decisions?
● Revisit your personas and journey maps as new information comes in to
ensure that they stay fresh and relevant?
Do you:

6. 6
Why it’s important

7. Do you want to build on this?
A solid foundation is critical to
your success.

8. Knowledge is
power.

9. ● Communicate effectively
● Set priorities
● Make informed decisions
● Increase engagement, donations and advocacy
Understanding your audience
can help you:

10. Start with
research

12. Any research is better than
none. The more you can do,
the better.

13. 13
Quick tips
● Start with any existing data,
including website analytics
● Talk with volunteer coordinators
and donor relations staff to get
their insights
● Add a survey to your site
● Reach out to conduct interviews
or focus groups
● Build in as many feedback
methods as you can and make
feedback a part of your regular
operation

14. Keep your questions relevant to what you need to learn to improve your
content. Focus on how users interact with your brand.
● What do they enjoy about your existing experience?
● What is challenging?
● What is their motivation for interacting with you?
● What problems are they trying to solve?
● What tasks do they need to complete on your website?
Don’t underestimate the power of digging deeper by asking WHY.
Building an interview script

15. Identify themes and patterns, as well as edge cases.
Look for what is:
● New or surprising
● Actionable
● Inspiring
● A problem you can tackle that is not currently being solved
Think about how you would categorize types of users.
Distill your insights

17. ●
Key elements
Create your
personas

18. 18
A persona
describes a
type of user
● Know who you are talking to
● Analyze your current experience
against user needs
● Identify gaps
● Create targeted content
● Prioritize features
Personas can help you

19. 1. Represent a core user group for your website.
2. Describe real people with backgrounds, goals, and values, based on research.
3. Focus on the major needs and expectations of the most important user
groups (three to five is a good guideline).
4. Describe users expectations and how they're likely to interact with the site.
5. Express common concerns, objections or barriers to completing tasks.
Tips for Effective Personas

20. 20
Focus your
efforts
● Mindset
● Key tasks and needs from YOU
● Hopes and fears
Important:
● Name
● Image
● Demographic details that aren’t
relevant to how the user interacts
with your organization
Less important:

21. ● It’s the insights that matter most
● You can create a persona without a designer
● There are tools out there to help!
○ Xtensio.com
○ Smaply.com
Function over fancy

22. ● Bio
● Frustrations
● Motivating factors
● Statement
● Demographics
● Goals
● Needs
● Channels
Key elements

23. ●
Key elements
Map their
journeys

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Journey maps
show your users
interactions with
your organization
● Understand the path users take to
accomplish their goals
● Identify existing friction in the
process
● Plan for an ideal future state
Journey maps can help you

25. Identify your marketing funnel
Awareness
Interest
Desire
Action
Advocacy

26. 1. Apply what you know about your persona to identify their most likely path
and emotional state at each touchpoint
2. Consider all touchpoints, including offline interactions
3. Don’t get too overwhelmed by all possibilities. Map the most likely current
state.
4. Now consider the ideal future state. Where are the gaps?
5. Focus in on points of frustration and build a plan for how to improve them
Tips for Effective Journeys

27. ● The persona
● Journey stages
● Touchpoints
● Goals
● Emotions
● Barriers
● Recommendations
Key elements

28. ●
Build your
content plan

30. Conduct a content audit
Key considerations when evaluating content:
● Which pages are most relevant to each persona? Does the content
address their concerns and meet their needs?
● Does each persona have the right information to help them move through
each stage of your marketing funnel?
● Does the content have the right voice and tone for the primary persona?
● How can content address issues or frustrations that you identified in your
journey maps?

31. Break out your spreadsheets!
● Use a tool like Screaming Frog (www.screamingfrog.co) to get an export of all
of the URLs on your website.
● Add columns to the spreadsheet to include:
○ Page title
○ Primary persona
○ Key task
○ Journey stage
○ Existing page content
○ Comments
○ Opportunities
● Get to work on filling it in!

32. Prioritize your efforts
Quick wins first!
● Are there places where existing content needs a tweak to better address
your personas?
Then plan in order of importance.
● Address critical gaps to lead your personas through your marketing
funnel
● Make sure that there is an easy path for next steps. Put calls to action in
context.
● Then move on to additional enhancements or nice to haves

33. Build a content calendar
● Topic
● Persona(s)
● Journey Stage
● Priority
● Timing
● Author
● Status
● Sources
(SMEs, existing content, etc)
● Keywords
● Call to action
● Internal links
● Channels
● KPIs
(key performance indicators)
Be sure to include:

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35. 35
Test, analyze, adjust, revisit

36. Thank You!
Any questions?