Planning for a new year, new you and feeling lost with too many options? You’re not alone.

With so many options on how to redefine yourself each year, the plenitude of FOMO-driven inspiration from social media, and quite simply too little time to live out every possibility—it’s easy to get lost and overwhelmed before the next year even starts.

Buyer Persona cards are dead—long live Persona Story Maps!

It’s time you level up with Persona Story Maps and bring your consumers to life in a more personal way. These 2-D live documents allow you to surface and document consumers emotional and physical journey as they pass through your sales funnel.

With their mental condition and physical touch points before you, you and your team can then strategize every step of their journey how your content and digital channels will be used to attract, retain, and guide them through your funnel at a quicker rate.

Knowing your target customer’s needs is the lynchpin for successful sales. If you have a great product, but the prospect on the other side of the table doesn’t have the pain your product or service is built to heal, where does that leave you?

We have found that modeling the complex needs of people, or personas, is hard—there are emotional components that drive us to build things like Persona Story Maps and persona cards, but what are we to do with organizations when we’re focused on account-based customer sales?

I want to share with you how our agile marketing team works. We’ve found a ton of operational efficiency for our marketing services by leveraging agile methodologies and story mapping tools we had traditionally only used for web development and product design.

By making this shift, our processes and mapping tools are now our greatest assets.

After reading this, I hope you can adopt these strategies for yourself, so you too may find cohesion across your disparate digital channels and more effectively define valuable campaigns for your team.

Let’s dive in.

Too often, business owners fall back on a common misconception: “Content creation is easy. Simply choose a topic you think will hit home with your target audience and write about it.”

The problem here is creating engaging content your customers find valuable, and also driving results on your bottom line, is not that simple.

You need a plan and a guide for how those content assets are drive business initiatives forward and engage customers to the point of conversion.

“But we have an editorial calendar?”