Andriana BoyrikovaDo you know who your prospects and customers are? Do you understand what they need or want? If you don’t, why do you keep creating tons of content which is irrelevant to them? After all, it is a total waste of time and resources to generate content for someone you don’t know or understand.
The only way to create relevant content to your prospects and customers is if you know them inside out.
Start with your customer in mind
A common mistake businesses fall prey to is generating self-centric content: an incessant flow of posts about their company and the product or service they provide, why they are better than their competitors, blasting out “Me, me, me” in everything they post. Moreover, their content is focused on what they consider important instead of what their audience finds useful.
What is the point of posting piles of content that the people you target don’t read as they don’t find it valuable?
When you plan a content marketing strategy, your prospects and customers should be your beacon: stop writing what you like and get to know what your customer feels, thinks, needs, and wants instead, so that you can tailor content to their needs and problems.
Here’s where the buyer persona comes in hand. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional person who represents your ideal customer. Your buyer persona has a name, face, personality, goals, and concerns. After you have consistently integrated your business purpose in your content strategy, now is the time to develop clear-cut buyer personas.
Define your buyer personas
Before you start defining your buyer personas:
- Look at your current customer base: go through your website and social media analytics, CRM data, contact database, user feedback, and examine who your most common customers are.
- Conduct online surveys and interviews with your existing prospects and customers (it is more useful if you do that with different customers and not only with the satisfied and most loyal ones).
- Find similarities: narrow down your results by finding commonalities.
Now, on the basis of your findings, you can start developing your buyer persona template.
Here is my example of a B2B buyer persona template:
However, keep in mind that buyer persona development is a very personalized process, so there is no specific structure or set of questions you should follow. Just sit with your team and together visualize and develop your personas.
Know your buyer personas. Every piece of content you create should address a need, problem, or question they have.
How many buyer personas should you define?
You need one persona for every distinct group you target. For example, if you are a B2B company which provides a cloud-based document storage service, you might target the decision-maker – the CEO or CIO, and the end users – the employees who will use the service on a daily basis: these are two distinct personas. If you are a B2C company which offers life coaching services, you might target PhD students and corporate managers: again, two distinct buyer personas.
The number of buyer personas depends on the number of distinct audiences you target. However, my advice is to start small, e.g., with the two buyer personas you find most important to attract. Otherwise, you risk spreading yourself too thin.
Why are buyer personas crucial for your content marketing strategy?
According to SiriusDecisions Survey “fully 60%-70% of content churned out by B2B marketing departments today sits unused.”
Catching your prospects and customers’ attention with the content you post is getting ever more difficult in today’s social media noise. You really need to know and understand them in order to provide them with relevant and valuable content.
Among some of the benefits for your content marketing strategy will be:
- no more guessing what your prospects and customers want but content that they need
- a more objective method for deciding on content priorities than simply writing what you like
- content that resolves your personas’ problems, helps them in their challenges, and taps into their interests
- improved customer experience.
So next time you sit to write content for your website or other channels, look at your buyer persona and give that person the information they need.
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I hope you have found these tips helpful. Have you already created your buyer persona template? If yes, which elements of your buyer persona do you consider the most important? Let me know in a comment.
Featured image: Markus Spiske, Unsplash.
Do you need help with defining your buyer personas? Email me and I would love to help you create your buyer persona template.
