Why Personas are Critical for Content Strategy

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The most popular content strategy tools borrow from the discipline of information architecture, but there is one invaluable tool that is imperative to the process of strategy and implementation of tactics that we can thank our user experience cousins for: personas.

By Kristina Mausser on February 16, 2012

 

Content Strategy

This series of articles explores content strategy and interaction design. Curated by Colleen Jones of Content Science, each article highlights a new voice, a new way of doing content strategy, or applying tried-and-true content principles to new situations.
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Why Target Audience Segmentation Isn’t Enough

At an organizational level, content treatment, be it in print or online, has traditionally defaulted to the use of broader target audience segmentation to define messaging and distribution/dissemination. Speak to most content owners and creators within established departments – communications, marketing, policy – and you’ll hear how their messaging strategy aligns with the organization’s (or product/service’s) target audience. The challenge with digital content, however, is that the target audience segmentation approach of yesterday’s Industrial Revolution falls far short of the content requirements of today’s Information Age.

“A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design.” – Kim Goodwin

The Benefits Of Personas To Digital Content

Personas help to bring richness to otherwise statistical data. Unlike traditional target audience segmentation, they provide greater depth and context to generic target audience groups by focusing on one character who embodies the predominant qualities of the larger group.
When done right, personas bolster demographic, psychographic and technographic data with more qualitative information that is paramount to all content decisions:


All of the above have incredible effects on the types of content published, when it is published, how it is published and what happens to it after it has been published.
Because of this, those who undertake content strategy without doing their due diligence to create personas will miss critical information points that should be used to inform the planning, creation, management and measurement of digital content.

Target Audience vs. Personas: A Case Study

I recently worked on creating a bilingual (English/French) content strategy for a university publication that was transitioning from print-only to digital first. When I started, the information provided by the editorial team and the communications department was that the publication had two distinct primary target audience segments:

• alumni over the age of 40; and,
• alumni under the age of 40.

Their secondary target market was university staff and donors. As a starting point, these vague delineations didn’t provide enough information to help decide:

• What content needed to be created;
• How to digitally disseminate the content (Through email? Social? Web? Mobile?);
• Where visitors would be viewing the content (Locally? From around the world?);
• How they would access the content (From their desktop computer? From their iPhones? Not online at all?)

By bolstering the initial broad target audience segmentation with additional psychographic and technographic data, the university still didn’t have enough information to help properly create an effective digital content strategy for such a broad target audience group.

With so many critical questions left unanswered, and too many costly technology decisions to make, the university agreed to create personas from research undertaken for that express purpose.

Amazing results were uncovered once the personas were completed. A third target audience segment emerged (current students) and the university discovered that the technology assumptions they had made based on dividing their primary target audience segment into two groups – older and younger users – was erroneous. It turns out, their highly educated older demographic was just as inclined to read content on a tablet as their younger audience group. What’s more, the personas also helped to define an effective content strategy for user generated content in multiple languages. This helped to plan for a better user experience through an adaptive translation approach rather than a more traditional virtual English/French tumble approach.

Surprisingly, the most valuable effect the personas had on informing the content strategy was on the conversations they sparked with key stakeholders. Similar to most organizations, the university had content stakeholders scattered between a variety of different departments – web, communications, marketing, graphic design, alumni, public relations, development, and the magazine itself. While each could agree on the segments they were trying to target, none could agree on which department’s communications objectives and content were more important.

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Borrowing from the fundamentals of user experience design, I printed the personas on 4×3 foot poster-size paper (as seen in the image above) and hung them up in the boardroom for all to see during critical content strategy meetings. Each time content strategy discussions derailed due to departmental agenda, I was able to re-direct the conversations to one of the personas hanging on the wall – how would this decision/requirement/objective/perspective help this particular user in obtaining the information that he/she wants or needs?

This approach helped all inter-disciplinary teams contribute to the overall content strategy by directing their expertise and efforts towards creating a sustainable model and governance structure that satisfied not only the needs of the department, but of their users as well.

With the foundational research completed for each target audience segment, the university now has a baseline upon which to continue to assess, measure and tweak the initial content strategy. In two years’ time they can update the personas with new research and continue to glean insights from the rapidly changing technological and social landscape that impacts the university’s messaging and delivery.

The Long Term Value of Personas To Content Strategy

Content strategy is more than just a discipline. It’s an approach to content that must be adopted at all levels of an organization to be effective. As it becomes ubiquitous to the way in which traditional disciplines create and manage content (marketing, communications, public relations, etc.) across digital channels, the tools that we use now to plan for content will need to evolve beyond the out-dated approach of target audience segmentation. With the demise of top down communications and a increasingly fractured digital channel landscape, organizations must continue to plan for and produce content that remains liquid and linked to engage users on their terms.