Customer Persona and Content Writing
A customer persona is a documented profile of the reader a piece of content must win: what they value, what they fear, what language they use and what action they are one step away from taking. In content writing, the persona decides the message before the writer decides the words.
Table of Contents
What a useful persona contains
Four things, and none of them is a stock photo with a fictional name. The pain point in the customer’s own phrasing. The objection they raise before buying. The outcome they are actually purchasing. And the vocabulary they use, which is rarely the vocabulary the company uses internally. A persona missing the customer’s language produces content in the brand’s accent, aimed at nobody.
Where personas come from
Never from a brainstorm. Personas are built from primary sources: sales conversations, support tickets, channel owners and customer interviews. Building content for a travel website, I structured entire template sets and travel packages around different user personas, and every one of them traced back to real conversations, not workshop sticky notes.
The test most persona documents fail
Conversion is not a metric; it is people trusting you enough to pay you. Read your persona document and ask: does this describe a segment, or a person who could trust us? A persona that only segments produces content that only categorizes. A persona that captures trust conditions produces content that converts.
The interviewing method that fills a persona with real language is covered in voice of customer research, and turning personas into content plans is part of my content strategy work.
This micro-blog is part of Rajat Jhingan’s copywriting essentials. Explore more micro blogs here.
By Rajat Jhingan — Content Strategist & Copywriter


