Persona Matrix Template for Topic & Content Gap Analysis

I shared some audience persona tools and templates at Confluence in Oklahoma City and SMX, Milan recently. They’re all linked to below, including the slide deck. In this post I’d like to focus on one of these resources, which we call the Persona Topic Matrix.

A photograph of Everett presenting at the Confluence conference. Text states "Audience personas develop the right content for the right person and present it to them at the right time in their buying cycle." @Balibones.

There are lots of templates out there for content gap analysis, many of which take into account personas and each stage of their buying cycle. However, we couldn’t find one that worked the way we needed it to, which is what prompted me to create our own version for the Inflow team. Here’s what it looks like:

Persona topic matrix preview. A person at the top labeled Style-focused Samuel. Topic: widgets. Below is text about him. Followed by a table with Four columns: Buying Cycle stages, Existing Content, 2 - 3 new content ideas, 2 - 3 examples of good content from competitors and others. Some cells under existing content and 2 - 3 new content ideas are red with an X. — A quick glance tells us that we’re missing some early-stage content for Style-Focused Samuel. This is the type of content that generates demand and drives traffic into the top of the funnel. It is especially important for new brands and new product categories.

Icon: Persona Topic Matrix. Click Here to access.

Instructions for Using the Persona Topic Matrix

Make a copy of this file and save it to your Google Drive account.
Choose a topic, such as a top-level eCommerce category, and create a new tab using the format from the pre-populated tabs for each of your personas. Learn more about audience personas here.
Fill out one tab for each persona per topic. It’s best to start with a single topic.
Provide a URL to content that has already been published on that topic for that persona.
1. Some content may appeal to multiple personas, but more targeted content is usually better.
Put a capital “X” in cells to indicate a lack of content. The cell should turn red for easy analysis.
Provide ideas where there are content gaps.
1. As a general rule, try to have at least one piece of content that applies to each persona at each stage in their buying cycle.

Additional Tips:

Don’t attempt to do persona-based content gap analysis if you haven’t developed audience personas yet. This is the result of persona research, not a step to developing them. If you need help developing them see the slide deck below.

It may help to use this Audience Persona Research Template to organize the information you find because it can quickly get overwhelming without a way to capture it all.

Also, our Audience Persona Research Phone Call Agenda may help when gathering information from the client to gets started.