Bridging the Gap
Between You and Your Customers
A successful marketing campaign contributes
towards a successful business. Without marketing, businesses can still offer
their products and services, but few potential customers will know about it. Let’s
put it this way - different people have different interests, unleashing different
challenges along with it for marketers.
So, make room for targeted marketing -
providing the business with focus and direction by identifying the best
opportunities worth pursuing as well as the threats to be avoided. To achieve
this, a business must be able to identify who their actual customers are. How
so? Funny you should ask. It has everything to do with buyer persona.
Buyer persona is a research-based archetypal
representation of a specific group of people and their behaviours. Technically,
it’s not really avant-garde. It’s just that many businesses nowadays lack the
understanding of consumers’ buying behaviour. Having a solid and
well-thought-out marketing plan can help you identify gaps in the marketplace
and provide feasible solutions for your clients.
We stumbled upon this article by Arnie Kuenn on
the importance of persona-based content marketing. Have a read and let us know
what your thoughts in the comments.
Why
You Need A Persona-Based Content Marketing Strategy
Each member of a buying team has different
challenges and interests. Columnist Arnie Kuenn tells you how to home in on
those needs to help close a deal.
You've heard it before: To be successful with
content marketing, your content must be catered to the customer. More
specifically, content should speak to customer pain points and challenges
throughout the buyer’s journey.
However, to create content that is truly
targeted, you need to understand exactly who your buyers are and what their
journey looks like.
Enter persona-based content marketing: creating
and promoting content with a specific buyer persona in mind.
Defining
And Developing Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are representations of your
actual customers — taking into account who they are, what they are trying to
accomplish, what their goals are, and how they behave throughout the buying
cycle.
Buyer personas are typically based on both
independent and market research, combining insights from your actual customers
(gleaned through surveys and interviews) with trends seen in the overall
market. Depending on your industry and business model, you could have anywhere
from two personas to upwards of 20.
Many tools, resources and templates are
available that can help any business create buyer personas. But in general, the
process includes:
- Interviewing or surveying current customers to understand their buying process and how they came about purchasing your product or service.
- Considering content consumption, or how certain customers consume and engage with your content.
- Utilizing aggregated demographic information from lead forms and any insight captured from interactive content like quizzes and calculators.
- Conferring with the sales team about prospects, the sales cycle and customer generalizations.
- Taking market research like current statistics and trends into consideration.
Personas should include a full portrait of your
ideal buyer — including information like:
- Demographic/background information:
- Job title, career, roles and responsibilities
- Family/life outside work, household income
- Company size, location and industry
- Budget
- Behavioral information:
- What keeps them up at night
- Pain points and challenges
- Role in purchasing
- Content consumption
Consider
The Buying Team
Depending on the product or service you sell,
you may have to sell to one buyer or an entire buying team. In the case of most
e-commerce businesses, the sale will be direct to one consumer (one persona).
However, in many B2B sales, a whole team of buyers, all with different
personas, have a part in the decision-making process.
If you’re selling to a buying team,
persona-based content marketing is crucial. Each member of the buying team
likely has a different title or job function and a certain role in purchasing.
Additionally, the bigger the investment,
usually the bigger the buying team — making it even more important for
businesses selling big-ticket products or services to create and promote
content based on buyer personas.
Take an Internet marketing agency as an
example: There will likely be a whole team of individuals involved in the
buying process. Consider the following members of the buying team, as well as
their challenges and pain points and what type of content each may be
interested in:
- VP of Marketing – Interested in understanding how the agency can fulfill his or her company’s needs (higher search engine rankings, content creation and promotion, paid search) and examples of success. Typically the overall decision maker.
- Relevant content includes: Web copy (explaining products/services) case studies, interviews with customers and thought-leadership pieces.
- CFO/Controller – Mainly concerned with the pricing model (retainer or service-based payments?), total investment and potential ROI. Usually has a definitive role in the decision-making process.
- Relevant content includes: price sheets and case studies with ROI metrics.
- Individual Contributors/Marketers – Must feel comfortable working with the agency on a day-to-day basis and understand the level of expertise the agency can bring. Often influences the decision-making process.
- Relevant content includes: blog posts that showcase subject matter expertise, company interviews/videos and examples of past work.
Because each member of the buying team has
different priorities and preferences, creating content that speaks to each
buyer persona is essential in influencing the right people and closing the
deal.
Mapping
Content To The Buyer’s Journey
In addition to creating content that relates to
each buyer persona’s pain points, your content should also map back to a stage
in the buyer’s journey. Though buyers will fluctuate between stages — the
buying cycle is often nonlinear — the following are generally the three stages
each buyer goes through before making a purchase decision:
- Awareness: The buyer knows he or she has a problem that needs to be solved and searches for content that confirms that need and your business’ ability to fix it. Awareness-stage content also typically includes thought-leadership and third-party content that aligns a brand’s message with experts in the industry, though is often vendor neutral.
- Consideration: In the consideration stage, the buyer is researching solutions and is looking for content that speaks directly to specific pain points. In this stage, buyer personas are essential, as each persona experiences different challenges that must be addressed through vendor-published content.
- Decision: At this stage, the buyer is ready to make a purchase decision — a pivotal point in the buying cycle. Decision-stage content often features differentiating information, demos, trials, tools and comparison pieces, as well as content pertaining to the next steps once the purchase has been made.
In Conclusion
Persona-based content
marketing is becoming increasingly necessary to achieve success. Creating
persona-targeted content that is well-aligned to each stage of the buying cycle
offers buyers a better content consumption and overall buying experience.
Without a
persona-based content marketing initiative, you run the risk of letting your
competitors influence buyers by speaking to their needs and addressing
uncertainties through targeted content, increasing purchase consideration along
the way.
Though researching and
developing personas can be a daunting task, start small and work your way to a
full-blown persona-based content marketing strategy to move prospects through
the sales cycle and close more business.
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