Here’s what to do now that you have audience personas

• Krystle Kopacz
• Jul 21, 2021

Your target audiences and buyer personas are defined, and they’re already helping your organization connect its work and communications to buyer goals. Congratulations — it takes a lot of legwork to detail and segment this group, and after it’s done (if it’s done right), it all seems obvious in hindsight. That’s how you know the process worked.

But importantly, the process of studying your audience isn’t over.

For companies to build strength in connecting with their target audiences, what you do after developing audience persona definitions is the most important. It’s critical to not only understand but actively follow what’s influencing your audience target. To do that, you need to set up a system for monitoring and analyzing media consumption patterns. Here’s how:

 

1. First, consider how your buyers define themselves.

Persona work can be clarifying for an organization — it helps define the audiences that matter to you, and humanizes their behaviors and pain points. But beyond understanding what they need at a conceptual level, you need to understand how they talk about themselves and their needs. For instance, ask yourselves:

• How does someone in your buyer group define themselves on social media?
• How do they reference pain points?

This work is critical background so you can assemble a cohort of buyers to track.

 

2. Leverage technology as your compass.

The next step is tapping into technology to help with the heavy lifting to monitor media consumption habits across all your persona groups (this effectively moves your audience targets from static personas to real people). You’ll want to understand consistent reading patterns and sharing patterns; emerging trends and shifts in topical interests. You will likely surface many sources you’ve never heard of, which feels a little like discovering gold.

At Revmade, we’ve built an audience data stack to identify, monitor, parse and analyze the information consumption patterns of thousands of professionals. We use it to help our clients align with their buyer personas, and it can influence everything from the content we write to which sources we prioritize for distribution.

 

3. Set up interviews with your buyers to dive in more.

Once you have identified what your buyers are reading and sharing, you’ll start to develop a strong list of publications, blogs, accounts and influencers that matter to them.

The next step is to interview a few buyers in each persona group to understand why they find the information from those sources valuable. For example:

• Do they use certain groups for entertainment over utility?
• Do they trust them all equally?

Interviews will give you a better understanding for which sources are the most critical to each group.

 

4. Set up an ongoing process for identifying the topics that are getting attention from your buyers.

Finally, it’s important to know that the work is never done. And that’s a good thing, because plenty of your competitors will lose steam — and insight — before you do. The best companies regularly tap into where their buyers heads’ are at, and they create a system for responding to their needs and interests based on the trends they uncover.

Knowing what is influencing your buyers — and why — can power your entire marketing and early sales process. R

To understand more about how Revmade can help regularly surface media consumption trends in your buyer personas, reach out to us here.