Digital Marketing for Creatives

By now you should have a great insight as to what your competitors are doing and more importantly where you can expect to find your audience as well as have a lot of insights as to the type of content your audience enjoys. But WHO is your audience? Well depending on the creative industry you are involved in you may have some ideas (and this may evolve over time). What would be a really worthwhile exercise is to create a buyer persona so we can get not only an idea of who they are, but also other useful data which will enable us to market more effectively. 

So, let’s imagine we make high-end, luxury dog coats. Our dog coats will keep dogs warm and dry and are priced at the higher end of the market. Our dog coats are for the pampered pooches of this world. They are beautifully padded with rose gold fittings; these are premium priced products. Based on this we can start to make a few well-deduced assumptions. Based on what we know about our industry and our product we will certainly expect our potential buyers to have a good amount of disposable income, probably be female and probably over 30 years of age. We might also surmise that they might work in a professional industry.

So if we have that information, we can already start to build some idea on what it will take to sell that product to that person. What platforms will we expect to find our buyer? Make a note of those platforms. If we know what platforms they will be on (based on our competitor analysis) we will have some idea of the type of content they are more likely to respond to. 

We will also have some idea of their pain points. 

What is a pain point? A pain point is something that might be an obstacle to them buying our product. So obviously the main pain point is the price. It is a very expensive dog coat, after all. If we know what that pain point/obstacle is, we can start to address this pain point in the marketing. We might want to highlight the high-end quality of the product or the exclusive nature of the brand, as a justification of the price.

So based on your competitor analysis, any market research you may have completed plus your industry knowledge, you should be able to create a good buyer persona. 

However, let’s imagine you produce accountancy software for small to medium businesses. You will need a buyer persona for everyone involved in the buying process. So you might need a buyer persona for the person who uses the software, plus a buyer persona for the person who will agree to buy the software for the company. Both of those personas will be very different as each persona has different needs. 

Now, don’t keep all of these details in your head or a notebook, create an actual template. If you google ‘free buyer persona templates’ you will get some ideas on how a buyer persona should look. Pick a favourite template and create a buyer persona that will contain all this important information and put it on a wall somewhere so you can always reference it when creating some content. This persona will be your guidestone for all your content. It will also be a guide for anyone else who might do some marketing for you.

Now, don’t keep all of these details in your head or a notebook, create an actual template. If you google ‘free buyer persona templates’ you will get some ideas on how a buyer persona should look. Pick a favourite template and create a buyer persona that will contain all this important information and put it on a wall somewhere so you can always reference it when creating some content. This persona will be your guidestone for all your content. It will also be a guide for anyone else who might do some marketing for you.

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Next time we’ll be looking at SEO basics before moving onto creating some content.