Weekend Reading – Buyer Personas, Micro-Influencers and Content Funnels

Looking for a way to pass the time this weekend? We’ve scanned the web and created a list of some of our most interesting content finds. Today we’ll look at buyer personas, micro-influencers and content funnels!

The Importance of Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are pretty common in marketing. They are designed to help marketers get a clearer picture of whom they are trying to talk to. In the world of Canadian tourism marketing (a place where we spend a lot of time), the Destination Canada Explorer Quotient (EQ) is the gold standard for personas.

Read #1 – Hacking Your Buying Personas: The Only 3 Questions You Need to Ask

This article helps to simplify the persona creation process. I like their approach of asking three simple questions as a way of better understanding the audience. The article then gets into showing how the Inbound.org tools can help the process. Will this process lead you to create detailed personas like the EQ ones? Nope. Is it a good start? Yes!

What is a Micro-Influencer?

This article touches on something that my team discusses fairly regularly – the relationship between audience size and influence. It was nice to see someone use actual data to confirm something that I’ve been noticing for a while. Often times it’s the social media users with smaller audiences that are more engaged with their followers.

Read #2 – Who Are Micro-Influencers & How to Find Them

Think about it this way…

If you were a car company wanting to engage with “gear heads” and car enthusiasts, are you better off hitching your influencer wagon to a social media influencer with 100 000 general interest followers that has limited engagement with most of them, or a car buff with 5 000 fans that actually talk with him/her on a regular basis? I’m guessing the person with the larger audience would command more money for a campaign too. Some food for thought. (Full disclosure – we use Brand 24 as our social media monitoring tool of choice)

Can’t Spell Funnel Without Fun!

If you ever find yourself in a room full of marketers and need to make some quick conversation, start talking about funnels. Very simply, funnels are the mechanism that marketers use to lead someone down the purchase path – awareness, consideration, intent, and conversion. The concept of a funnel is pretty straightforward but understanding how content fits into the puzzle can be a bit of a challenge.

Read #3 – How to Create Better Content for Any Point in the Funnel

This article stresses the importance of creating content with a purpose. It also provides some pretty actionable ways to research and create the content that needs to be present in a successful funnel. They focus on using Simply Measured as their tool of choice (it is the Simply Measured website after all), but the tactics shown can be completed using a variety of other tools too.

There you have it… some light reading for the weekend! Enjoy!