Life Science Marketing Persona Guide

Create more relevant and engaging content with well-defined personas.

Why do I need a Persona?Developing one or more personas will improve the clarity of your marketing messages. It’s important to tell the right story and answer the right questions with your content. Having well-defined personas makes it easier to do that.

What is a Persona?A persona is a fictional representation of your most likely customer based on facts. Although it doesn’t reflect anyone specifically, a persona describes (in detail) someone who has much in common with your customer and would likely buy your products for the exact same reasons.Those reasons are both logical and emotional.

Logic and Emotion

“A man has two reasons for what he does –

the real reason – and the one he tells his wife.”

- Mark Twain

What would our conversation sound like?If I were having a conversation with this person, how would they answer the questions on this slide and the next?

“So you’re a (job title). That sounds fascinating. I’m curious. What does a typical day at work look like for you? What do you like about this job?But there must be some challenges too, right?OK. Honestly, what’s does your next job look like? (Career goal)Where do you get information when you have a question or problem at work?

There’s more to life than work.Hey, I don’t want to be boring and talk about work at a party all night. What do you do with the rest of your time? Family, hobbies, passions…?What keeps you from doing more of that?Oooh. That sounds tough. What would it take to fix that?Really? Have you met ___________________? His/her company helps (your value prop here).

One more thing….What would be this person’s primary objection to buying your product or services?

Where does a Persona come from?A persona is derived from your goal.What is the desired outcome of your campaign?If you are specific as you should be, this persona represents the target customer you are trying to influence with your content. Your business may actually need several personas for different campaigns.

Benefits of a PersonaContent made for everyone is attractive to no one.Personas improve the quality of your content by ensuring that content creators understand their audience.Content produced with a specific persona in mind is more relevant and engaging.

How is it different from a segment? Personas reflect people, not industries.Segmenting your market is always a good idea. But not everyone in a given segment has the same concerns. A purchasing agent, an end user and a facilities manager all have different challenges they need to manage. One of your challenges in content marketing is to persuade diverse constituencies while enabling them to reach a consensus on a solution.

How many Personas do I need?Start with one or two. You can always add another later on.Because you’ll be creating (mostly) different content for each of your personas, four is probably too many unless you have a huge amount of capacity.

What if I met your customer at a party? To begin defining your persona, describe how I could recognize this person at a party so I could introduce you.

Male or female?Age?Education level?

Make it real. Meet Meg.Your persona guides your content.When you create content for her ask: • Does this content help her in her job? • If not, don’t do it.

Molecular MegMolecular Meg is a 30 year-old postdoc at the University of Texas. She studies developmental pathways in zebra fish and is particularly interested in key transcriptional events in the development of the eye and the optic nerve.

She is hoping to become an Assistant Professor at a major university and needs to publish some significant papers to make that happen. She is a smart scientist but struggles with the consistency and purity of the RNA she extracts from zebra fish embryos.

A typical day will be spent primarily in the lab but there are the usual distractions of seminars, journal clubs, lab meetings etc.

She is married and has a 2 year-old boy named Ethan who is in daycare. Her husband works in sales for a tech company.

Her husband’s salary covers daycare but when he is out of town, she has to pick Ethan up by 6pm. So she needs to have things go right when she’s in the lab.

Molecular Meg She looks forward to landing a job, possibly having another child and watching her children learn to play baseball, a sport which she is fanatic about.Our product can help her extract high quality RNA from complex tissues faster and more reliably than what she is using. She might be concerned that the packaging contains a lot of plastic that goes straight to the landfill which she considers to be irresponsible.

Meg researches purchases (for everything) on the web. Google is her best friend. She hangs out on Facebook as do a lot of her previous classmates and coworkers (all biologists). She is also a member of several LinkedIn Groups and will use them to get technical and professional advice from her peers.A quote from Meg: “I love doing science. It’s what gets me out of bed every day. But I shouldn’t have to sacrifice time with my family just because my RNA preps are unreliable.”

I have my persona(s). Now what?Let it guide your contentEvery content creator should have a copy

• Campaign developers• Product managers• Blog authors

Hang in cubicles

photo credit: nicwn via photopin.com cc SA 2.0

What questions does your persona ask before buying?With your persona(s) in hand, you’re ready to create content to move that person from prospect to happy customer.Content Marketing is simply about answering all your prospects questions. Do you know what they are?I’ve created some examples to get you started.

It will help you:• Consider all the questions your prospect may ask during of the buying

cycle• Show subject matter experts the desired form of the answer to each

question• Decide the best formats for answers at each stage of the buying cycle• Provide content creators an outline for each asset you need to create• Choose from multiple options for easily repurposing your content.• Simplify and speed-up planning for future campaigns

Download the free Ultimate Life Science Content Planning Tool.

Create a manageable content marketing plan to get more leads with less effort