Blog - Strategic Content

A persona is a fictitious person that’s made up from a composite of who you believe your prospective customer is likely to be.

I like to think of a persona as being one person that represents the behavioral patterns, attitudes, lifestyle choices, and motivations of your prospect. Importantly, a persona is an individual, not a demographic.

Creating a persona gives you the opportunity to visualize and empathize with your prospect or audience. It’s your audience of one person who you know so well. You’ve literally been in their shoes and seen how they view the world. What you write or talk about will resonate.

And the persona you’ve created represents your prospective customer.

We all have a worldview. Simply, it’s how we see the world and it’s responsible for our behavior and actions.

Knowing your prospective customer is understanding their behavior and actions. It’s being able to empathize with them and see their worldview. That’s the starting point to creating products or services they’ll want to buy from you.

Being able to empathize with your prospective customers is literally putting yourself in their shoes to understand their behavior.

But this behavioral information lacks context because we need to know the WHY behind the behavioral patterns. The WHY is their worldview and that’s why it matters. How does your prospect see the world?

Knowing your prospective customer is the starting point to creating products or services that people want to buy.

It begins at the emotional level by having empathy with them. What are their feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another? Ideally, it’s putting yourself in their shoes to truly understand them and this can be achieved by creating an empathy map.

An empathy map represents the sensory information of the customer and is usually shown as four quadrants broken into “Thinking”, “Seeing”, “Doing”, and “Feeling”.

This article shows you how to create an empathy map.

This is not about creating a buyer persona or persona – that comes later. Instead, it’s working out who your ideal audience is to buy from you.

You can increase your Ratings and Reviews to rank higher in iTunes by using the Pay-It-Forward strategy. It works brilliantly because other podcasters have the same objective.

Sending a message with a screenshot to the person whose podcast you’ve just reviewed and asking them to review your podcast is key. It not only demonstrates proof, but it’s likely to be reciprocated.

The Pay-It-Forward principle is an actionable strategy you can implement today to dramatically increase your Ratings and Reviews. The result is a higher ranking in iTunes.

Everything for your podcast starts at the 8 weeks of New and Noteworthy. It’s during this period that you have to work and push very hard to get ratings, reviews, downloads, and subscribers. You also need to be consistent in doing so during the 8 weeks.

With that goal in mind, your podcast will build a base, develop momentum, and start to rank well in its categories. If you’re in the top 16 for your category, your podcast is being seen by the tens of millions of people on iTunes.

New and Noteworthy is a means to an end to gain that momentum to get ranked in the top spots.