Editor’s note: In 2015, former Inflower Everett Sizemore presented at the Confluence and SMX, Milan conferences to share our agency’s process of developing audience personas and associated content strategies based on those personas.

In this guide, he explains how to use one template in our toolkit: The Persona Topic Matrix.

A key step in developing any content marketing strategy is understanding your audience — both who they are and want they want and the types of content that best resonate with them.

Unfortunately, many businesses only complete the first part of that research before jumping headfirst into content creation.

Today, I’d like to share the tool we use to tackle the second half of that process at Inflow: The Persona Topic Matrix.

I’ll share what it is, how it works, and why it should be an instrumental part of building your business’s content marketing strategy. (You’ll also find a link to download it for free and try it out yourself.)

Introducing: Inflow’s Persona Topic Matrix

Content gap analysis is an important step in developing your business’s content strategy. And, while there are plenty of templates out there for finding gaps between your and your competitors’ content based on keywords and popular topics, there aren’t as many resources for discovering gaps in your own content based on your customers’ desires and needs.

We created the Persona Topic Matrix to fill that gap.

Inflow’s Persona Topic Matrix allows you to organize content ideas and topics by customer persona, broken down into each stage of the customer journey: Indifference, Research, Consideration, Purchase, and Evangelist.

This way, your content marketing team can not only focus on delivering the right content for the right target audiences — but also presenting that content at the right time in the buying cycle.

When combined with other content marketing tools and templates (such as our Audience Persona Research Template), you’ll be able to develop a more comprehensive content strategy with a better understanding of your audience’s needs and wants.

How to Use the Persona Topic Matrix

Before you download and start using our audience content matrix, make sure you have fully fleshed out your business’s ideal audience personas. You cannot create compelling content without a deep understanding of your target audience; if you try, you’ll waste time producing a content calendar that fails to deliver desired results.

Check out Inflow’s resources on building audience personas below:

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get into how to use our Persona Topic Matrix.

1. Download a copy of the template by filling out the form below.
2. Choose a high-level content topic (ie. an eCommerce product category or major customer pain point). We recommend creating new sheet for each content topic, keeping our example sheet as a reference point.
3. Add any existing content that addresses the content topic. Make sure to add those URLs to the correct stage in the customer journey.
4. Highlight cells with a lack of content. These will be the gaps to focus on in your future content calendar.
5. Add new content ideas to fill those gaps. As a general rule, we recommend having at least one piece of content that applies to each persona at each stage in their buying cycle.

Note that we created this template specifically for Inflow and its clients, based on what works for our internal marketing processes. You can easily adjust and optimize the template to work better for your teams by changing buyer journey stages, adding and removing persona columns, and more.

Get your copy below:

Remember: A content gap analysis like this is only one step in creating an effective content marketing strategy for your business. You’ll also need to competitor gap analysis, SEO keyword research, and content promotion strategies to drive the results you’re looking for.

The experts at Inflow can make all of that happen for you. With our content marketing and SEO expertise, we can create a personalized strategy to help your brand’s content resonate with your target customers, improve your brand awareness, and achieve your business growth goals.

To learn more or to request a free consultation, contact us today.