Dear Persona: Writing Content for Your Buyer Personas

Dear Persona,

Today we are writing a blog post on how to write to your buyer personas.

It can be a tricky thing, because every persona is different. Just like in high school English, there are a few things you should focus on:

Word Choice, Tone, Format, Media, Length

Word Choice

When your buyers talk to you, how do they do it? Professional, casual, a little humorous, a little technical? That’s how you choose your wording.

If your buyers are more educated, they could find a more advanced vocabulary appealing. If they’re really easygoing, some humor might tickle their fancy.

Word choice is a big reason we advocate recording the interviews from the persona creation process. You’ll have your buyers’ authentic speaking voice on demand, and you can pick out specific words they like. Recordings also help with our next writing technique, which is…

Tone

Tone is the quality of your buyers’ voice. It works a lot like word choice: professional, humorous, serious, etc. Your word choice will influence the tone of the article.

The biggest difference is that tone is crafted over an entire piece of content, rather than targeting specific words.

Format

There are many different ways to layout your content, and lots of formats to consider.

Some are more professional, some are more eye-catching, some invite interaction… From all your buyer persona research, you’ll be able to ascertain some of their content type preferences.

Media

Media is important! Pictures, infographics, and videos can all grab the attention of your buyers and educate them just as effectively as writing.

So, you slip media INTO your writing so your buyers can look at pretty pictures while they read.

Length

This is definitely a problem for a lot of businesses. Often, companies have so much they want to say about themselves that they end up posting a 5,000-word essay as a blog post.

Don’t do that.

First of all, the length of your content should be appropriate for the location to which it’s being posted.

Secondly, and more importantly, pay attention to how much reading your buyers like to do in one sitting.

Are they really busy running their own businesses and living their lives?Cut the fluff and give them the straight facts so they can get on with their day. Do they prefer in-depth articles written more like prose? Get to it, Hemingway.

We hope this blog post will help you better understand how to write to your personas.

It takes a lot of practice and a little bit of skill, so be patient if you’re doing it on your own.

If you need some more information on buyer personas, check out this short post on what makes a great persona.

Good luck!