If you want to supercharge your content marketing efforts this year, nailing your buyer personas is essential. You can’t expect to create content that converts if your team doesn’t understand exactly who they are creating content for in the first place. Before a single piece of content is created, your marketing and content creation departments should understand who the blog post, white paper, or guest post is created for. If you want help improving the effectiveness of your content outreach this year, be sure to integrate the following tips into your content marketing strategy.

1) Understand where your content consumers are in the buying process. Some may need to be familiarized with your brand’s product and service offerings, while others may need help making a purchasing decision. Create buyer personas for each step in the buying process so you can narrow your content focus and target buyers appropriately.

2) Multiple factors go into creating buyer personas, including education level, gender, lifestyle preferences, and income earning potential. Ensure your personas are as detailed as possible for maximum conversions.

3) Your potential buyers will have a variety of communication preferences that should be included in your buyer persona creation process. Some will prefer social media outreach while others would much prefer a weekly email newsletter. Take communication preferences into account if you want to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing outreach.

4) Not only will your buyers have different communication preferences, they will also have content format preferences. Some buyers prefer visual content while others prefer audio or text. Consider the content format preferences of potential buyers when creating targeted content if you want to significantly increase your CRO (conversion rate optimization).

5) You should also integrate social media preferences into your buyer personas. Some customers use Facebook as their only social networking platform. Other buyers will be familiar with social media communities like Twitter and Reddit. The social network you use has a huge impact on the types of content you share. While memes and GIFs might perform well on Reddit, they won’t work on a networking site like Quora. Think about how your buyers prefer to network before you start creating content to appeal to their needs.

Keep these buyer persona tips in mind if you want to increase your content marketing ROI this year. Failure to nail your buyer persona strategy before starting content outreach can mean your content contributions offer little value to your target market.