Creating powerful personas that drive an impactful content strategy for students and alumni audiences

Robert Perry

Director of Research
Pickle Jar Communications

Personas are a key tool in helping us to communicate effectively with our key audiences. They offer a lens through which you can view your content through the eyes of different priority audiences, and bring those audiences to life in a way that helps you develop targeted experiences for them.

Where personas often fall down is in relying too heavily on demographic factors. In this session, we’ll explore how you can develop personas that segment your audience by their values in life, what they’re trying to achieve, or by their relationship with you.

We’ll look at how you can conduct your research to inform these personas, what questions you might need to ask, and how you can use existing data to create new personas.

And we’ll demonstrate how you can keep your personas updated regularly, so that your content strategy stays relevant to all your audiences as trends and information needs change over time.

Key takeaways

• How to plan and conduct your audience research to develop useful and useable personas

• How to decide what to include in a persona to make it relevant for your organisation

• How to  use personas to inform your content creation for different audiences

About your speaker

Robert is Director of Research at Pickle Jar Communications. He primarily works on behalf of clients in the education sector, where he is responsible for information-gathering, audience research, user testing, and anything else related to content or customer insights.

Whatever the work and whoever the client, Robert likes to find the connections between the driving forces of a project and the needs of the audience, with the aim of being able to satisfy both at the same time. His favourite answer to any question is “it depends”.