Sophie’s 2024 brightonSEO talk: Audience-centric planning and creative personas: a strategic approach to relevancy

Seven years after my first ever speaking gig, I was delighted to take to the brightonSEO stage once again this year. This time around I was talking about relevancy – a hot topic in the world of SEO and Digital PR right now! This post summarises what I talked about and you can find my slides at the bottom.

I started by exploring the definition of relevancy and what it actually means in the context of Digital PR (for me, it’s that we’re trying to speak to the right audience for our client or their business). But that’s tricky when you’re also trying to push the limits of relevancy so that you can grow a link profile. From here, I talked about the need for boundaries, referencing the 2006 study by some landscape architects who observed kids playing in one playground with a fence and one without. They found that they were much more creative and brave when there were fences – or boundaries – in place, as they knew what was safe and what the limits were and I believe that same concept translates nicely to Digital PR where ideas can be a bit ‘meh’ without some boundaries in place to force creativity – and relevancy.

I also talked about how measuring relevancy is difficult given that its definition focuses on connection and appropriateness; both of which are highly subjective terms. In my opinion, the best way to ensure relevancy therefore is to have a decent strategy in place and then a framework or tool for measurement.

Prior to my 15 years (!) at Propellernet, I studied multimedia journalism at Bournemouth University and while I never worked as a journalist, I still use so much of what I learned in my training on a daily basis. In my talk, I shared the questions that I was taught to always answer as quickly as possible when writing a news article. Those were:

• Who
• What
• Why
• When
• Where
• How

I use these questions now to shape my audience insights when planning for our clients, with questions like:

Who

• Who is the target audience?
• Who is the current audience?

What

• What are the key concerns of the audience?
• What are the biggest barriers to purchase/use?
• What’s going on more broadly in their lives?

Why

• Why does the audience need/use the product/service?
• Why would someone choose one brand over another?

When

• When in their lives does the audience need/use the service/product?
• When in the day/week/month/year does the audience need/use the service/product?

Where

• Where are they looking for the product/service? Is there a location element?

How

• How do they feel about the product/service?
• How do they feel about the fact that they need/want the product/service?
• Is there a pricing elements to consider (how = how much)?

You can of course turn to any insight source to answer these questions, but some of the research methods I find most useful are:

• Search data – I’ve talked about ‘search listening’ and trained up clients on its potential for a few years now, and search data is full of audience insights  – making it useful way beyond performance and optimisation
• Social data – There’s a huge social listening industry and plenty of tools you can use, and for certain audiences, specific social platforms will be a goldmine of insights. But you can also take insights by just exploring search behaviour and posts!
• YouGov – A brilliant tool full of demographic and attitudinal insights which we use regularly at Propellernet
• Reviews – We work with BeautyPie who ask reviewers for key demographic and skin-related information when they leave their review. This is super useful as we’re able to segment insights that we find in the reviews – and it’s amazing what people are willing to reveal in them!

In my talk, I gave the example of a business that sells travel insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions. I suggested that you might think that doing some audience insight work, based on the above questions, will give you enough to pop into a brief which you can then use to create audience-relevant campaign and press office ideas. But we’ve recently started using AI, specifically Perplexity, at Propellernet to quickly generate creative personas for our briefs. For clarity, we never put confidential client data into AI and nor do we publish the output anywhere, but we find that personifying audience insights makes them much more tangible and useful for our ideation sessions, and AI is brilliant for that.

For anyone who attended on the day and has landed here looking for the prompt I used to generate my creative audience personas, this is what you’re looking for…

You’re a marketer, researching target audiences for a UK-based travel insurance client. The target audience is male and female travellers with medical conditions including heart conditions, diabetes, arthritis, anxiety and epilepsy. They’re concerned about falling ill while abroad and so understand that it’s important that they purchase quality travel insurance but they struggle with the cost of the insurance, which is often more when they declare their health condition when buying their travel insurance. They often wonder if they could get away with not declaring it. Their single annual holiday is something they hugely look forward to given that their day to day life can be difficult with their health condition. They tend to buy insurance immediately after booking their holiday and most buy it online independently, with some taking advice from an organisation or charity related to their health condition. Based on the this information, give me three, relevant UK-focused audience personas, including details such as name, age, location, job, income and any other pertinent information. Each persona should be based on a unique reason for buying travel insurance or a unique barrier to purchase. Include a first-person statement from each persona which explains their day-to-day, why they’re buying travel insurance and what’s great or difficult about that process.

With the example above, Perplexity gave me:

• Margaret Thompson, The Cautious Planner who has Type 2 diabetes and goes to Spain once a year
• David Hughes, The Reluctant Purchaser who has anxiety and epilepsy and finds travel stressful but makes the effort for his family
• Alan Forsyth, The Adventurous Retiree who has arthritis and a controlled heart condition but loves to travel – and appreciates the need for good travel insurance since a friend has a medical episode in Thailand

I made the point – and hopefully you’ll agree! – that it’s much easier to think about ideas relevant to Margaret, David and Alan rather than ideas that are relevant to facts/data points. Each audience gives you a wealth of angles to take, all of which have that relevancy we’re looking for.

And so, I concluded by suggesting that audience engagement is a brilliant measure of relevancy and that turning audience insights into audience stories enables you to deliver creative, relevant content that Google and your target audience loves, over and over again – which is key because we want to be delivering links for the long term.