In any kind of marketing, it is important to know your buyers’ persona in detail. Content marketing utilizes written and multimedia content, in order to appeal to your buyer. Without a thorough understanding of your target audience, your content cannot perform.
Content that is targeted at a general audience cannot resonate with any one individual. The result is costly and time-consuming marketing campaigns. Ultimately, they bear little results.
This is especially true in B2B marketing. Typically, B2B products require an understanding of the relevant industry. Without this, your product or solution offers little value. It is important to identify a niche, and attract prospects that suit your niche.
In all of your marketing, your content needs to speak to a specific audience. It should discuss their difficulties, and pain points. Therefore, you need to know who they are.
What message are you sending?
Create Personas
Knowing your target audience doesn’t just mean building a list of the basic demographics. This still builds a wide target range. You need to build a persona in as much detail as you can.
A persona is a detailed description of your target audience. More specifically, it is the description of one individual buyer.
In order to build your persona, begin conducting research on your customers. Your research should include your existing customers, your competitors’ customers and your ideal customers. Take the time to consider who your solution has resonated with.
Demographics are still important, so consider their general age, gender and location. However, you need to look deeper than just demographics. Use demographics, and your customer profiles, to build an image of your persona. Some educated guesswork is normal.
Consider their hobbies, job roles, family life, motivations and more. A buyers’ persona needs to be a full profile of who you think would benefit from your product or service.
Once you have identified a clear persona, run tests to verify your understanding. Consider running surveys, or small campaigns with messaging based on your persona. The more detailed your persona, the better your targeting. Your tests can help to refine the minute details.
Persona Drives Keywords for SEO and PPC
Keyword selection is the key to making your content work for your inbound marketing strategies. It is important to conduct keyword research. Using your persona, consider what search terms your potential customers are likely to be using.
Build a good understanding and selection of relevant keywords. These will be used to guide your content.
Keywords should advise on relevant topics for blog posts or videos. Ultimately, relevance and valuable information are important to your leads.
Relevant content improves your SEO. This results in more visitors to your website or content and improves inbound and organic traffic.
Well-optimized, and relevant content can serve your outbound and paid marketing efforts too. Content that suits your buyers results in better conversion rates for both strategies. Improved conversions mean better ROI.
Type of Content
Utilize your persona to assess the type or genre of content that will suit them best. For example, video content is increasing in popularity.
Video content is palatable, and more visually engaging than traditional content forms. Social media platforms are beginning to favour video content, over image or text. This is especially relevant if your target persona is younger, or uses social media regularly. Your social paid ads could benefit from video.
On the other hand, blogs and long-form content are more suited to market experts. Typically, business decision-makers spend more time on search engines, looking for solutions. Therefore, optimized written content may be more likely to reach your desired audience.
The type of content that you create should demonstrate that you understand your market. If your content doesn’t reach your target audience, it cannot benefit them. Ensure that your content resonates with your specific persona.
Distribution
Consider the platforms that you will use to distribute your content to generate leads. This means understanding where your buyers will find your content. You might consider LinkedIn, Facebook, Emails and more.
Use your buyers’ persona to assess where your prospects are spending their time. Identify what tools they use to make purchase decisions.
It is important to understand your distribution channels for all marketing strategies. Use a combination of strategies to achieve the most reach:
- Inbound: Typically, inbound content is hosted on your website. Your website can host your blogs, long-form content, infographics, videos and more. This is why SEO that targets your personas is important. Inbound marketing channels are ideal for those that are searching for solutions to their problems autonomously. For example, target your website at decision-makers that use Google to search for answers.
- Outbound: You can reach out to your target prospects directly using outbound methods like Email or LinkedIn messaging. In outbound marketing, it is important to offer content as a conversion. Target contact lists with content that is relevant to them. This might be useful for personas that spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, for instance.
- Paid: Social media platforms offer targeted advertising. This is ideal for the personas that might not have identified their problem. Use your content to demonstrate the issues they might be having. Your content should build awareness of solutions, and your business.
Typically, business decision-makers will search for solutions themselves. However, your persona should confirm or deny this assumption.
Overall, good targeting results in success for inbound, outbound and paid ads content. Relevance to your audience is key, and provides a positive ROI.
At Nituno, we take the time to research and identify your buyers’ persona. We produce content to drive traffic and improve conversions across your marketing strategies. Get in touch with us today.
