Well-researched personas are a gold mine for your content strategists, digital marketers, and web writers.
Why? Because these representations of key consumer groups help your whole team understand your audiences’:
- Habits and preferences
- Health care knowledge
- Expectations for your website
- Needs, motivations, and goals
- Strengths and challenges
Together with journey maps, personas help you develop digital content that meets your audience’s needs and expectations. And when you put your users first, you deliver a better consumer experience – and increase appreciation, trust, and loyalty.
Let’s look at four ways anyone who plans or develops content for your website or other digital properties can put your persona investment to good use.
Sample Persona
Name: Millennial Megan
Demographics: 30 years old, college graduate, married, 1 young child
Job: Meeting and event planner
Insurance: High-deductible health plan
Goals: Wants to keep herself and her family healthy
Challenges: Little experience navigating the healthcare system, doesn’t have much free time, on a tight budget
Technology habits: Shops online, enjoys YouTube videos, prefers email and text messaging over phone calls
1: Manage your messaging
Add personas to your digital marketing toolbox to encourage and support consistent, effective messaging. Just like brand standards, voice and tone guidelines, and style guides, personas help your team communicate to a specific audience through a unified point-of-view.
They also can help us remember that we’re speaking to real people, not a nameless, faceless crowd. Think about Millennial Megan as you write your urgent care service line section, promote it through content marketing, and craft targeted PPC campaigns.
2: Figure out your focus
To create user-focused content, you need to empathize with your audience. Personas can make it easier to see your website from a consumer’s perspective.
Because personas are based on data, they help us look more objectively at users’ needs, goals, questions, and potential problems. When we know what users wish for, we can cut the fluff and focus on content that brings them the most value.
For example, we know Millennial Megan is on a tight budget, so when we write urgent care content, we’ll note that it’s a cost-effective care option. We also know she’s busy, so we’ll highlight the consumer advantages of online reservations.
3: Raise your readability
Your content won’t do much good if your target audience doesn’t understand it or isn’t likely to read it.
Is your persona an overloaded parent who wants content that’s quick and to-the-point? An attentive academic who prefers lots of detail? A young adult with low health literacy who would benefit from explanations of basic health care terms?
Personas can help us better understand how to write in a way that meets our users’ needs. Consider Millennial Megan again. She doesn’t have much experience navigating the health care system, so we probably want to take time to explain what urgent care is – and how it’s different from emergency care.
4: Craft compelling CTAs
Nearly every page of your website should have a call to action (CTA) – a prompt that drives your user to further engage with your organization. Effective CTAs support both your goals and your users’ goals. Here, again, we can turn to personas for insight into users’ goals and the types of actions they’re most likely to prefer.
Next Steps
You’ve got four solid leads on ways to use personas to improve your digital content.
If you don’t have personas yet, use this list to bolster your argument for prioritizing persona development.
If you do have personas, spend some time looking at how your current web content aligns with the goals, needs, challenges, and expectations of your personas.
Need help? Reach out to Geonetric’s digital marketing and content experts for help developing personas or user-focused web content.