Shaping Your Content Arsenal with Smarter Personas: QPFF-MAGIC 101

Are your target audience personas tucked away in an old slide deck, not having seen the light of day since they were created years ago? 

If so, it’s time to dust those bad boys off and update them so that they’ll actually be useful in guiding your strategy. Or, you might be thinking to yourself, “What personas?” Either way, in this article, I’m going to introduce you to the QPFF-MAGIC framework that will help you create personas that live, breathe, and guide your strategy. 

What is QPFF-MAGIC?

QPFF-MAGIC digs deep into what your buyers are really thinking and feeling. Here’s what it stands for:

• Questions: What are they asking at each stage of the buyer’s journey?
• Problems: What’s going wrong for them? What are their pain points?
• Fears: What’s the risk if they choose the wrong partner or path?
• Frustrations: What drives them nuts about current tools, vendors, or internal processes?
• Myths & Misunderstandings: What do they believe (wrongly) about your industry, product, or service? What do you have to educate buyers on most frequently?
• Alternatives: What solutions are they considering instead of your product or service?
• Goals: What do they ultimately want to achieve?
• Interests: What are they curious about?
• Concerns: What objections tend to stall sales conversations?

Why QPFF-MAGIC Works for B2B

Many personas we’ve seen focus on the demographics and psychographics of audiences. Demographics and psychographics are great tools for:

• Ensuring your brand’s visual identity aligns with an audience’s preferences
• Shaping your brand’s voice and tone to resonate with particular personality types
• Guiding the overall feel of your brand
• Developing targeting parameters for ad campaigns
• Guiding conceptual messaging

If you’re selling consumer goods like insulated drinkware, cosmetics, or fragrances—all fairly low-stakes purchases—then demographics and psychographics might be enough to accomplish your goals. But for a B2B environment where a partnership’s lifetime value can rise into the multimillions, buyers need more than vibes. 

Food for thought:

Okay, so what do they want to read about? Demographics and psychographics can point you in the right direction, but they’re a couple of steps removed from the actual subject matter you need to cover in your content asset library (technical articles, website pages, presentation decks, videos, sales enablement materials, etc.). 

🪄That’s where QPFF-MAGIC comes in. 

With your audience’s Questions, Problems, Fears, Frustrations, Myths & Misunderstandings, Alternatives, Goals, Interests, and Concerns lies your ultimate content marketing roadmap. Each bullet point on your list needs to have a corresponding content asset that addresses it. 

As you begin to close these content gaps, here’s what happens:

• You create a more empowered buying experience that makes prospects feel like they’re in the driver’s seat
• You strengthen your website’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), a framework that helps Google determine which search results are most helpful and reliable for users
• You arm your sales team with the ultimate sales enablement arsenal for educating buyers and overcoming objections

How Do I Get QPFF-MAGIC?

Below are prompts you can use in a team strategy session, during a subject matter expert (SME) interview, or as a self-guided reflection to build your own QPFF-MAGIC profile:

 Q – Questions

• What’s the first question Prospect A asked? 
• What are the questions that come up most frequently? 
• What are the toughest questions to answer during the sales process?

 P – Problems

• Why did Prospect A reach out to us?
• What was the final straw for Prospect A that caused them to reach out to find a solution?
• Was there a particular incident that went wrong, or was it a slow-burning problem that built up over time?
• What was going wrong with their previous supplier?

F – Fears

• Did the prospect ask about guarantees or warranties? What did they want to know?
• What do people say about companies in our market that have a bad reputation?

 F – Frustrations

• What makes them angry with our competitors or alternatives? 
• Were there any friction points during the sales or onboarding process? 
• What does “good service” mean to them?

 M – Myths & Misunderstandings

• What do you have to spend the most time educating buyers on during the sales process? 
• What perspectives do buyers come in with that are just plain wrong?

A – Alternatives

• What competitors did the prospect consider? 
• Were there other types of solutions they thought about? (e.g. just sticking it out, hiring internally vs. outsourcing, etc.)

 G – Goals

• How do they hope things will be different once they’ve solved this problem– in their career and their life?  
• What emotions will they feel once they’ve solved their problem? 
• What will be possible for them once the problem is solved that isn’t possible now?

 I – Interests

• What new technologies in their field are they interested in?
• Where do they go to learn about their industry? Publications, podcasts, etc? 
• Are they members of any industry associations? 

 C – Concerns

• What will happen if they don’t solve their problems?
• What’s keeping them up at night? 
• What could go wrong in their career if they don’t solve this problem or if they make a wrong purchasing decision?

How You Can Use QPFF-MAGIC In Your Marketing Strategy

Once you’ve filled out a QPFF-MAGIC profile for your audience, here’s how you can start using it.

Guide Your Messaging

Your persona’s fears, problems, and concerns tell you exactly what your messaging should speak to—and just as importantly, what to avoid.

• Address fears head-on with reassurance (e.g., “Here’s how we de-risk implementation.”)
• Use frustrations to shape positioning (e.g., “Tired of vendors that ghost you after onboarding?”)
• Debunk myths early in the customer journey with educational content

Build Better Campaign Themes and Content

If your content library focuses on product features or capabilities, then QPFF-MAGIC can help you shift to audience-first storytelling.

• Turn common questions into SEO blog posts or FAQ-based ad headlines
• Create downloadable guides to help audiences solve recurring problems
• Share case studies that show how you helped others overcome similar goals or concerns

Align Sales and Marketing

Use QPFF-MAGIC to create materials that help your sales team close deals.

• Arm them with one-pagers that address objections (Concerns)
• Give them outbound messaging that taps into frustrations and alternatives
• Build slides or email templates that highlight how your offer supports their goals

Gain Confidence in Your Content Arsenal with QPFF-MAGIC

It’s time to free yourself from the uncertainty of what to write about to support your sales and marketing goals. With QPFF-MAGIC, you can unlock your long-term roadmap to creating a killer content arsenal—and you want to know the best part? It works amazingly well if you’re trying to scale content with AI. 

Ready to make your content marketing work harder and smarter? Book a strategy session with our team or download this deck to learn more!