The first step of any content marketing campaign is to identify your campaign audience through persona research. Your campaign audience defines who your marketing and sales team need to focus their efforts towards. So how do you identify this audience?

Here are 7 elements of the persona to gather data from so that you can define your campaign audience personas:

Personal Background

In order to paint a clearer picture of who your campaign audience is on a personal level, ask questions like these:

• What is their marital status?

• What is their household income?

• What city do they live in?

• What is their gender?

• What is their age?

• Do they have children?

• What is their education background?

• If they did go to school, what did they major in and what is their current career?

Company

The details about your campaign audience’s company will be very helpful when creating your landing pages. These elements will paint a very clear picture of the types of companies that your campaign’s audience work for which will help with more efficiently in targeting your outreach efforts.

• What industry is their company in?

• What is the size of their company in revenue?

• How many employees does their company have?

• What products or services do they currently use if any that are related to yours?

Role

A person’s job title usually says a lot about their role in their company. However, every company is different and depending on the size of the company, etc. this will determine what that person’s specific role is and what their responsibilities are. This will tell you a lot about their needs and wants product and service wise.

• Is this person a manager, executive or regular employee?

• What is their title?

• Do they manage others? If so how many people do they manage?

• Whom do they report to?

• Who reports to them?

• How is their success measured?

• What does a typical day look like for them?

• What skill sets do they need to have in order to be successful in their role?

• What are their top 3 products or services that they need in order to be successful in their role?

For business to business companies, this information is crucial to understanding if this person even has the authority to purchase your product or service.

Challenges

Identifying challenges will help to uncover needs, wants, problems that they currently face as well as pain points about their job. This information should be collected whenever possible and used as a pre-qualifier for where this person fits in your product or service’s purchasing funnel.

Goals

• What does it mean to be successful in your role?

• What is their primary goal?

• What is their secondary goal?

• What goals do they ask the people that they manage to set and reach?

• What are the frequency of these goals?

These questions will also uncover some crucial information as to how your product or service can potentially help solve their challenge in order to reach their goals. Knowing the challenges that they face is only half of what you really need to know.

Watering Holes

This information will help you to identify where to reach them (what marketing mediums would be the most effective).

• How do you stay up to date with the latest information and news in your industry?

• Which blogs do you read?

• Which social networks do you use to keep in touch with your professional contacts?

Shopping Preferences

Identifying what sales experience that they are receptive to is a must. To uncover this information, ask them these questions:

• How do you prefer to interact with vendors? Email? Phone?

• Do you use the Internet to research vendors? If yes, what does your research process look like?

Have them describe their most recent purchase.

• Why did you consider this purchase?

• What was your evaluation process?

• What was the deciding factor that led you to make this purchase?

Once you have collected all of your data, you will have a very clear picture of who your target campaign audience is, where to find them and how to effectively sell them your product or service.