In today’s marketing world it's imperative to continually create new content that speaks directly to your target audience.
Content that gets their attention, keeps them engaged, and makes them want to do business with you is the definition of great content.
To ensure you are writing the right content, you need to have a deeper understanding of the issues that drive your target audience so you can speak directly to them. It starts with building buyer personas.
Building Buyer Personas
When you are thinking about the type of content you need to create in order to write effectively for your target audience, it’s helpful to understand who you are writing to. There are many insights about your buyers that you need to understand including:
- What triggers your buyer to begin researching solutions to a problem?
- What are they most concerned about?
- What are the steps your buyer will take to reach a decision?
Once you understand exactly who your buyer is and write to their needs, then you can use analytics to review the actions they take on your website, landing pages and social media accounts.
For instance, as an Inbound Content Marketing agency we might discover that a prospect needs help with:
- A new content marketing program to generate more traffic to their website
- Content offers that can boost and nurture leads
- A website redesign to generate a higher conversion rate
And, when your analytics and online marketing is consolidated into an automated marketing platform, you can easily see the search terms that brought prospects to your website, identify the content that caught their eye (and how long they stayed on that content), along with the forms they completed to get more information.
This type of lead intelligence information is not only priceless, it also helps refine your buyer personas over time.
Developing Your Buyer Profiles
After you’ve segmented your buyers and learned more about their needs, you also need to understand how they shop for the things you sell. Asking these questions can help you discover more about them:
- What is their online behavior?
- How are they finding your information online?
- What kinds of content do they like as they conduct their research? (blog articles, ebooks, webinars, videos, infographics, etc.)
- Which of your products or services do they want to know more about?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you understand what drives your prospects. And the more you understand their needs, desires and behaviors, the more you can develop custom content that speaks directly to them.
After you’ve got your buyer personas and buyer profiles nailed down, the next step is to conduct a content audit. We’ll talk more about that in the next article but until then, check out these other helpful articles on content marketing:
- Create a First-Rate Content Marketing Strategy
- Your SEO Strategy Hinges on Frequently Published High-Quality Content
- Creating B2B Content Requires A Carefully Developed Sales Funnel
- Why Content Marketing is Critical for a Successful Website Redesign
Content marketing is one of the eight steps in a Digital Marketing plan. To learn about the other steps and how you can put the Digital Marketing plan to work for your business, download the free whitepaper “8 Critical Ingredients of a Digital Marketing Plan.”
