From Persona and Journey to Strategy

As we have discussed in the last two chapters, consumers' goals, needs, motivations, and challenges provide the raw material from which to create content for each persona. Journeys tell you what your content should be about (problem, solutions, and your product) and how it addresses different stages of the journey. From week three below:

Let’s take the example of making content and associated search ads, i.e., creating a blog post and then deciding to advertise this blog post on Google SERPs. As we discussed last week, your goal when optimizing your webpages is to identify consumers who will be used to perform searches online. The idea behind making search ads is similar. As we briefly covered, we saw a few ways to help us to do this:

• Who they are/what they need (Persona)
• How they go about solving their needs (Journey)
• What they search to do so (Journey, ZMOT, types)
• Benchmark against competition

Once you’ve identified keywords that your consumers are using throughout their journey, you can start creating content or ads based on these keywords so that you show up on a search engine when a consumer does this search.

Persona helps identify general keywords based on their needs, motivations, and challenges. Journey helps identify specific keywords based on how users go about answering needs, motivations, challenges throughout their journey. For example,

• If a consumer has pain in their lower back, they might search Google to find out how to address it. This presents an opportunity to create awareness around a back pain-related product you are selling (e.g., a pair of sneakers).
• If a consumer wants to compare sneakers to understand which one offers the best support to address back pain, this provides you with an opportunity to compare your product with those of your competitors.