This post is the third of a five-part series on Inbound Marketing campaigns, and the different pieces that go into them.
Understanding your buyer personas is the first step to create valuable content for your visitors. After all, what you are going to say depends a lot on the person to whom you are speaking. For example, you probably don’t speak to your grandmother the way you converse with your best friend.
But how can you create content for those different audiences? If you have not created several buyer personas, start there. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your real life ideal customer. You can look to your current customers, social media following, and blog readership demographic as a starting point. Read more about that in our post on how to create buyer personas. Once that’s done, now it’s time to use them.
First, use your buyer personas profile checklist to generate content ideas. If you have already created a few buyer personas, you’re sitting on a goldmine of content ideas. Run down each profile and put yourself in the mindset of the customer as you brainstorm content ideas for each bullet point. Challenge yourself to branch off into further subsets of each profile point to really tailor your content.
- Location
- Household income
- Gender, age, and education
- Job role and typical day and duties
- What bothers them (related to your product/service)
- Why they chose you above others
- Goals and responsibilities
- Challenges and pains
- Hobbies and lifestyle
- Marital/child status
- Values
- What they watch and read
- Social groups and connections
- Shopping and vendor interaction preferences
Produce videos, record podcasts, and write ebooks and blog posts with specific buyer personas in mind. Ensure the content you create is aimed at a particular buyer persona to establish a connection with your audience. Touch on your customers’ struggles and goals and aim to solve a common problem. Write directly to this character you’ve created instead of keeping your tone broad in hopes of pulling everyone in. You might even pretend you are writing “Dear [Name]” at the start of a blog post to help you speak more directly to that customer. Doing all this will make your content more relevant and shareable.
Make sure you adopt the language of your personas. Speak like your buyer personas by using their lingo, slang, and buzzwords. You developed a deep understanding of the people within your buyer personas community when you created each profile. Now, use that information to communicate naturally and easily with those specific types of people.
Craft landing pages for buyer personas. We’ve talked about landing pages before. While you may only have one or two, go back and make sure the language on those pages appeals to your personas. Consider adding content that resonates with them, if you don’t already have it.
Segment your list of contacts by buyer persona. Organizing your contacts via buyer persona helps you in several ways. First, you can direct your content appropriately. If you write a blog post aimed at a specific buyer persona, there’s no need to email blast all of your customers. By sending content directly to those who benefit from it, you won’t risk annoying others who aren’t interested. Segmenting your contacts also helps you to see what content is working to grow more buyers in each group as well as which personas to focus your efforts on. Studies show far higher open and click rates in segmented emails.
Audit your existing content for buyer persona alignment. It never hurts to cull your work. Review past content and ask yourself if it connects with any of your buyer personas. If the answer is no, rework the content so that it does, or simply get rid of it all together. There’s no harm in ditching dead content that isn’t connecting with anyone.
Reallocate your ad spend and human resources. Now that you have buyer personas profiles, a list of content ideas, and a segmented contact list, you can properly reallocate your ad spending and team power to satisfy those needs.
Need help with all of this? Contact Print and Web Designer to be part of your team!
Use your buyer personas and journey as a tool to identify and produce different types of content that will highlight your value, educate your customer, and move them towards benefiting from your business.