Content marketing that drives business results is the kind that’s tailored to a specific audience’s needs. So today, we are talking about buyer personas and getting to know our #1 ideal customer better.
Specifically, let’s highlight a few really important questions to either help you get started or… confirm that you’re doing great.
As usual, you can read all about it below or watch this video instead:
Who is Your #1 Target Audience?
And I’m talking about who they are in the organization. What is their position? What is their expertise level? Do they have decision making power?
All of this is going to affect both the topics you choose for your content marketing efforts and the body of the content you and your team will create.
For example, if you target complete newbies in the industry and use a lot of jargon, they’re not going to stick around. Similarly, if you only offer entry level kind of content, and you’re targeting senior executives – they’re not going to stick around either.
Of course, who your #1 buyer is can be different depending on company size, for example, and obviously, in B2B, we have multiple people or multiple departments involved in buying processes, but do your best to get really clear on who’s the #1 person who’ll be reading your content, so you can write specifically to her.
Step #2: What are Your Persona’s Goals? What Transformation Does She Go Through Thanks to Your Product?
Now, this is two-fold. First, you want to think of the transformation you’ll create for an organization.
For example, if you work at a social listening software and you help companies identify and participate in conversations customers have about them on social media, the transformation for the company is to deepen their understanding of their customers and make real changes, so they can move from being a company that’s disconnected from its customers to one that anticipates their needs and prioritizes quality of service, which leads to an increase in retention and advocacy instead of an increase in churn.
That’s one thing.
The other thing is the transformation of that one person who’s reading your content. As Ardath Albee said in the Intelligent Content Conference 2017, you want to consider professional attributes, like how long they’ve been in their career, to try to understand their personal and professional goals. Are they looking to climb the ladder, or have they already climbed the ladder and are now looking to leave a legacy?
Definitely check out the link to watch her talk, but make sure you come back here, because in the foreseeable future, we’ll be talking about the psychology behind why you want to take that one person and their feelings into considerations, especially in B2B.
Step #3: Start Looking at Your Buyer Persona in Relation to Your Company
Why do they need your kind of product? Why your product and not a competitor’s product? What’s stopping them from buying?
And in B2B specifically, who else is on the decision making committee?
What do these people need from our #1 buyer persona in order to convert?
Now, if you’re going to write blog posts and ebook and videos and case studies, the content doesn’t have to be salesy to take all of this into consideration. Instead, the point in asking these questions can be to develop content that answers them in a non-salesy way.
For example, let’s say that your company provides video production services to companies. And your prospects understand that video marketing could really, really help them, and they even trust your company’s expertise, but they can’t decide on topics or on the story they want to highlight.
This actually happened to me – a project got really delayed because the CEO and the marketing team couldn’t decide on topics.
In this case, you could develop blog posts and videos that explain how to do these things. You don’t need to mention your company and do any pitches. Just give them practical tips for creating a brand story, to start closing the gap between where they are now and where they need to be in order to buy from you.
Step #4: Once Your Persona Does Buy, What’s Stopping Her From Optimizing Success with Your Product?
So in this example, maybe they don’t know how to market the videos. You could develop a tutorial for that. If you market a CRM and you see that many companies struggle with getting their salespeople to insert data into the CRM, develop a tutorial on how to get more salespeople on board.
The more successful your clients are with your products, the more they will buy from you, and the more that they’ll recommend your products to colleagues and friends.
And once they start with advocacy, they might even be open to going on the record and participating in case studies, where you can highlight how they overcame common challenges that prospects and other customers are still struggling with, which can decrease your sales cycle – which is exactly what happened when I started using case studies in my marketing. You can read about it here [no opt in required].
