Content Strategy Workshop: Building Personas
If you are running your own business or corporate team, chances are you will not be producing all of your marketing material. You will more than likely work with any of the 62,000 advertising agencies and countless freelancers to produce good content. You may even ask your team to start producing more themselves. While it's always a pleasure to work with talented designers, storytellers and content creators, there's usually one big challenge you'll likely face no matter what.
These people won't know your customers like you do.
A content strategy is more than a list of stories, ads or blog posts. I see it as a rich outline of the story you want your brand (and ultimately, your customers) to tell. Before I start working with my clients on content, I like to make sure we both have a clear understanding of your "customers."
Personas are quite popular in the design community, but have just as much use in your content strategy. This video will walk you through why personas are important and how to develop ones that work. When you're ready to move past personas and on to your story, let me know.
Bonus Materials
Here's a bit more on putting personas together
Great article on personas from Smashing Magazine
A summary of Stanley Milgram's study on obedience
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson