How can you create content that resonates with different customer emotions and motivations?

Dont cut corners with personas. Focus on fact and not ‘what you think’. Go beyond surveys and interviews, get into their day-to-day and observe them and capture what you see. If you can also get into their workplace, their neighborhood, their homes and just listen and learn. That’s where the real research and insights beyond the surface observations really come out. Before you start, ensure you have a segmentation approach for your personas and create prototype personas with what you know. This way you can be clear with your goals which may be focused on deeper understanding in key areas, diving into areas of unknown, etc. And don’t forget your own workforce as you do this. Your audience may be right under your nose.

Start by looking at the data. The analytics and what they teach you about the customer. Their age, gender, location. Look at the content that's most popular on your site and on social media to get insights into their motivations and feelings. Speak to sales, customer success and anyone else who deals directly to your customers. They will give you insights far beyond the data. Finally, speak to the customers. They are uniquely placed to tell you the real reasons they use your products and services. Speak to them to get a full picture of your ideal customers.

Social intelligence can provide an extensive insight into customer personas. Media consumption habits, purchase intent, sentiment, emotional drivers, technological savviness, personality, politics, religion, interests, influencers, family dynamics, relationship status, transportation, socioeconomics, education, profession and career level compliment the basic but not entirely helpful demographics of age, gender, location and ethnicity. Collecting this data from surveys online, in supermarket parking lots and malls provides for unintentional bias and a small sample size, not to mention a significant expense. Social intelligence, gathered through social listening tools, is far less expensive and can provide an unbiased "customer voice".

When using the right tone and voice when speaking to customers it's important to remember several things: Drop the industry lingo and use the terms and phrases your customer are using. Don't abandon your brand voice. Adjust your tone to fit the nature of the conversation: authoritative, apologetic, etc.

A/B testing and multivariate testing are the best ways to test the effectiveness of brand content. It's important when testing content that you NOT compare more than one element at a time. Testing copy, imagery and Call To Action in the same test can be inconclusive; you really don't know which element or combination of elements are working or not. Facebook is helpful because for a very low cost, you can very quickly run an A/B or multivariate test of content using ads. Facebook ads allow you to run a single ad, with multiple images, providing analytics on which works best. You can then run a campaign with multiple campaigns to individually test copy, headlines and calls to action. Remember; only test ONE element at a time.