Are you wondering, "How does a global brand use digital content to reach the ideal customer?" Actually, digital content is not just a process of writing content and visual design; it is deeper and more profound than that. Digital content is mainly based on understanding the customer to make it easier to envision the right tone to appeal to them and the appropriate image to attract their attention. Consequently, digital content achieves its main goal, which aims to convert the store visitor into a happy customer. 

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Pre-building of Digital Content

Before you start building branding strategies, you must begin building the "ideal" customer persona targeted by the brand. This helps you identify their pain points and seize opportunities aligned with their expectations that accurately cover their needs. Thus, it enables you to influence them through words, images, publishing frequency, and timing in a studied, more professional, and efficient manner.

What is a Buyer Persona? 

A customer (buyer) persona is a semi-fictional description of your best potential customers. It is a persona based on realistic data about them, how they use your products and services, their areas of interest, and includes accurate data—based on market research and real-life interviews with similar models—such as the customer's geographic location, age, cognitive background, presence on web pages and social networks, etc. It is usually preceded by a guided step called the "Empathy Map" which includes the following:

• What does your customer think? (What do they hear?)

• What do they feel? (What do they say?)

• What do they see?

• What do they do?

It is like a general extrapolation attempt that helps build the customer persona for the digital content of brand management accurately and effectively. This is followed by the step of building the customer persona based on the Empathy Map data, keeping in mind that the Empathy Map will remain constant in most subsequent interactions, and the digital content creator usually keeps it in mind and recalls it constantly.

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A Template of an Empathy Map 

Why should you create buyer personas before digital content?

Taking the time to create a customer persona helps the merchant and digital content creator expand market reach and enhance brand loyalty. Below are the reasons explaining its importance and how it helps:

• Understanding your ideal customer | Knowing what your potential customer likes, their habits, preferred shopping methods, etc., gives you a deep insight into how to communicate with them optimally.

• Avoiding wasted marketing efforts | When you know your target audience, you can design and execute targeted marketing campaigns that lead to increasing online sales without extra effort or cost on your part.

• Allows you to use segmented marketing | This means you can send customized and targeted marketing campaigns for each persona.

• Achieving alignment between departments | This means that the marketing team, sales team, product development, and customer service departments share the same information about your ideal customer and achieve a successful sales plan.

• Communicating with the audience in the right place and time | Knowing your target audience means you can meet them on their preferred channel or social media platform.

• Standing out from competitors | If you are a company that puts customer needs at the forefront of its priorities, customers will notice this, establishing you as a trustworthy brand and ultimately boosting loyalty.

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Practical steps to take digital content to another level

Know who you are (not) targeting

When you know your potential customers, you can also identify who you are not targeting, and knowing this saves you from spending resources on marketing to "negative" customers who do not fit your goals.

Negative customers are buyers who waste your time and resources with no intention of buying, or their purchase probability might be low. These personas might include, for example, the "persistently curious" buyer, who showers you with a barrage of inquiries about whether things fit, your brand's exchange and return policy, and whether you can hold or "reserve" a product for them, while no actual purchase is made in the end anyway.

Negative personas reduce the profitability of your brand and interfere with your ability to serve your ideal customers. Therefore, we advise you to keep them in mind while drafting your marketing messages to define your directions and goals effectively and efficiently.

Research your personas

Building the ideal customer persona requires you to gather as much information as you can find about them, in order to understand them accurately and know their behavioral triggers that drive them to buy your product. Targeted data sources include:

• Articles about today's consumer, especially in the industry you trade in.

• Your customers, whom you may ask to complete digital surveys, or with whom you conduct periodic in-depth personal interviews.

• Your online store, to determine how your customers find you, and order cases.

• Searching for main keywords, to discover the words customers use in product searches, which you might want to use in your marketing later.

• Non-competing peers in other parts of the world, who may be willing to share their brand's buyer personas for inspiration.

Know the components of a customer persona

To create your buyer persona, you will have to paint a complete picture of who they really are, and this includes some or all of the following:

• Demographics | Age, gender, nationality, income level, education.

• Hobbies and interests.

• Why they bought your product | What is the primary goal?

• Where they bought your product from | In a retail store, online store, through promotional offers.

• How your product is used | What functions are most important to them?

• What solutions do you offer | How does it enhance their lives or solve the challenges they face?

• How often do they buy your product?

• Objections | Why would they consider not buying it?

• Media preferences | What is the best way to communicate with them? Via email? Via text messages? Via social networks?

This precise description helps you visualize your ideal customer personas, so you can communicate with them directly to understand their desires, meet their needs, and help them know "why your product is the perfect choice for them?"

Build your persona

Now that you know the characteristics of your store's customer persona, we invite you to follow these steps to create your brand's buyer persona:

• Understand all their interests

After writing down the previous data, we recommend looking into the interests of the customer persona. You are looking for answers to questions such as "What do they do for fun?" "Where do they spend their free time?" and "How do they get their information?" All of this is now available to you through the Empathy Map and then the customer persona.

This is important because knowing how your customers spend their time will tell you what is important to them. It also gives you insight into their values and how you can reach them.

Example | You may not be able to reach customers who care about sharing movies, music, and creative photos through traditional advertisements because they do not trigger their interest. Therefore, you may need to use unique and innovative marketing via digital content, such as creative social media campaigns, to catch the attention of your ideal customer persona.

• Applying interests to customer pain points

Customer pain points refer to the problems that potential customers are trying to solve. This might be what is keeping them from achieving their goals.

Example | If the customer persona's goal is to lose weight through healthy eating and exercising, you can invest in their interests to address their pain points. Through digital content targeting their interests, you can create content about recipes for healthy juices or sports that achieve their goals. This way, you can reach the target market through social media.

• Keep doing more research

Creating a customer persona helps you build a deeper understanding of your customers as real people, as the Persona enables you to anticipate their needs and address them immediately. It also helps you focus your marketing efforts to enhance the attraction of potential customers, thereby contributing to converting potential customers into permanent and happy customers, because they represent your ideal customer.

Warning | Remember that trends change and your customers are dynamic. Therefore, it is important to constantly monitor and review buyer personas. This way, you can adapt your marketing campaigns based on the changes in the buyer persona.

A model to inspire you before creating digital content 

A model for a brand selling professional photography equipment

Name | Shaimaa

Age | 28                                  Gender | Female

Nationality | Saudi                   City | Medina

Social Status | Married

Education level | University graduate

Hobbies and interests | 

• Photography

• Following fashion trends

• Creating creative content

Sources of intake |

• International fashion articles

• Documentaries

• Websites

• Social Networks

Presence platforms |

• Instagram

• Platform x

Goals |

Leadership in providing professional content on social networks.