If you’re building a persona for a new audience, Google Surveys is a great way to get some in-depth information on your audience.

Not only is it affordable ($.10-$3.00 per survey), but it gives you the opportunity to target exact demographics, setup pre-qualification questions, and find your audience’s pain points.

Other than demographics, some examples of questions you could ask in your survey include:

Workplace and Job Title

Education Level

Industry

Experience

Social Networks That You Use

What Are Your Five Biggest Problems?

While your exact questions will depend on your niche, these should give you a solid head start.

As for building a persona for an existing audience, Google Surveys is once again the way to go.

The major difference here is that you’ll be sending the survey out to your existing customer list via email.

In order to encourage customers to actually take the survey, your best bet is to offer some type of reward or run a contest for only those participants that complete the survey.

Gift cards or free services are popular rewards in this situation. As for your questions, some examples you can use include:

Did you consider any alternatives to our service or product before choosing us?

What made you choose us over a competitor?

Which hesitations or doubts did you have before completing your purchase with us?

Which questions were not answered on our website?

For more detailed info on building personas, check out my guide on How to Develop a Target Persona and Reach Your Audience.

Tip 3: Creating Brand Style Guidelines

For one, brand guidelines help ensure that your writers are all on the same page when it comes to the content that will be featured on your site.

Factors like colors, brand name usage, style, formatting, types of sources used, and tone should be consistent across all of your content.

Imagine how confused your readers would be if they were reading a 3,000 word dry, technical guide one day and a playful, down to earth 500 word article the next.

And that type of confusion will undoubtedly affect your ability to develop a strong, loyal audience over the long term.

The second reason it’s important is because it helps ensure the personality of your content remains aligned with your audience persona.

While there are many different ways to write a style guide for your brand, it’s best initially to keep it as short and simple as possible.

A paragraph on each of the following elements should be more than enough to get started:

Who Are We?

What Do We Do?

What is Our Content Differentiation Factor (CDF)?

What is Our Process?

Use of Brand Name

Our Preferred Tone of Voice

Sources

Logo

Visuals

Once these guidelines are established, you’ll also want to include your audience persona.

Take a look at this example from the Express Writer’s brand content style guidelines: