Keep Marketing Personas Alive, The Serial Podcast Way

Last year, during episode 50 of the Beyond Social Media Show podcast, I discussed a problem content marketers face, especially within large companies: Keeping their personas alive beyond their initial creation.

The point of creating marketing personas is to help the whole organization understand their consumers intimately, to get in customers' heads and see the world from their eyes. If personas are simply reduced to a label in a content management system, that's a failure because it doesn't accomplish the goal of keeping the customer at the forefront forefront of everyone's mind.

The solutions I discussed were aimed at just that goal.

This week, I came across some validation of those ideas courtesy of Tiffanie Wen's Atlantic article examining why the Serial podcast was so popular, particularly how people react neurologically to that form of storytelling:

I love the idea of creating an audio drama featuring your top marketing personas that illustrates the important points employees need to know about those target audiences over the course of a dramatic storyline. I think it would be an incredibly effective and efficient way to keep those marketing personas alive across an organization.

It would, of course, take enough resources to produce to make sense only for organizations of a certain size. I wouldn't be surprised to see content marketing outfits begin to offer audio dramas as a category of services.