Content marketing isn’t about creating content for its own sake – it’s about engaging prospective buyers and generating leads.
It’s about identifying your audience and understanding their needs and using this as the basis upon which your content is created.
Buyer personas
To be successful with content marketing your content needs to be tailored in such a way that it speaks to your target audience (a potential buyer).
Creating buyer personas will help you determine what kind of content you need as well as set the tone, style and delivery strategies for your content. It will also help you target the topics you should be writing about and understand where buyers find and consume information.
Personas are developed based on customer demographics and behaviour, along with your own understanding of their motivations and challenges.
But how does creating a buyer persona help you?
- It assists you in understanding where consumers get their information and how they want to consume it.
- It helps you establish the blend of content you need to be creating for those consumers.
- It enables you to identify and target the topics you should be writing about.
- It provides clarity in terms of the delivery strategies for your content.
So let’s begin by imagining who your ideal customer is. Add images and give names to your buyer profiles. Take a look at the following questions whilst mentally picturing your potential buyer:
- Who is he?
- What’s his job?
- What industry does he work in?
- What’s a typical day in the office look like for him?
The answers are going to give you the foundation of your persona.
Now let’s go a bit deeper. Think about the specific roles and responsibilities that this person might have in relation to your business and answer these kinds of questions:
- What challenges does he face in his job?
- What could help him face those challenges easier?
- How far along is he in the potential buying process?
- Is he the primary decision maker?
To help enhance your buyer personas further, you can also conduct interviews with customers and prospective customers, send out surveys and do your own research.
Also consider using any key details on your prospective buyer’s content preferences that are available to you. Bear in mind some of these questions:
- How do they prefer to access information?
- How much information do they want to receive and how often?
- How often are they exposed to relevant content?
- What influences their content consumption?
- How often do they log on to social networks?
Answering questions like these will give you a broader and clearer picture of your audience and help you identify the best and most relevant content topics, which in turn will move that potential buyer closer to making that purchase.
Content marketing works best when you write specifically for and understand those buyers you are hoping to reach. Meticulously created buyer personas will help you identify your prospective buyers’ interests and motivations and communicate with them on their own terms.