Using Buyer Personas to Generate Digital Content

by Myra Stacey | Dec 10, 2018 | Inbound Marketing, Services

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.

1. Location
2. Household income
3. Gender, age, and education
4. Job role and typical day and duties
5. What bothers them (related to your product/service)
6. Why they chose you above others
7. Goals and responsibilities
8. Challenges and pains
9. Hobbies and lifestyle
10. Marital/child status
11. Values
12. What they watch and read
13. Social groups and connections
14. 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.

What is Marketing Automation and How Does it Play a Role in Inbound Marketing?

by Myra Stacey | Dec 10, 2018 | Inbound Marketing, Services

This post is the second of a five-part series on Inbound Marketing campaigns, and the different pieces that go into them.

“Marketing automation” is a phrase you might be hearing more often. As a busy Cary business owner, you probably haven’t had time to dig into it. Let’s take a look at what that means and how you can use it to generate more potential customers.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to software that combines email marketing and customer relationship management (CRM). Marketing automation gives you a place to track all your contacts and leads and then set up an email schedule to reach out to them on a regular basis. Such programs can also push out social media updates and manage some of your content.

Here’s one example of how might look:

1. A customer visits your website or landing page and downloads your free white paper or signs up for your newsletter.
2. The email program sends a “thanks for signing up” message.
3. The email program also sends the free white paper or whatever other content/deal you set up.
4. Your contact will then receive any other emails you want, set on a schedule, to help him or her through the buying process.
   1. You might send emails that answer FAQs or messages with a more sales-driven angle. The idea is that this person will see your brand in his/her inbox regularly and remember you.
5. The email program shows your contact as he/she goes through this path. You have a place to write down notes about any follow-up calls you make. The program keeps his/her information.
6. Let’s say a contact clicks on something and buys or signs up. You can set up the program to alert you, send them a different email, remove them from your other email path, or other actions.
7. A contact can always unsubscribe; the software will manage it for you.

Quick Notes about CRMs and Email

• Smaller companies often don’t use CRMs such as Salesforce, Highrise, Zoho, and others because they may not have a separate sales person to manage those contacts and leads. If you are the “sales team,” for your company, you might be using the “contacts” section of your email client. And that’s fine.
• You may use an email marketing program such as MailChimp, popular for its low cost and ease of use. Each month (or whenever), you put together an email to send to your clients and customers.

Connecting Automation to Your Inbound Marketing

As we mentioned recently in our post about Inbound Marketing, you need to create a campaign targeting a specific set of your audience. You can then set up email marketing to help you guide prospects on their buyer journey. To connect the two, you need:

• A piece of content, or something your potential clients find or receive that leads them to sign up. (You can also add contacts manually if you have a bunch from networking or elsewhere.)
• The software to execute this. Many people use programs such as Sharpspring, Active Campaign, Email on Acid, and others. Some of these programs are meant for marketing agencies — with prices to match! However, you can find lower-level programs or talk to us about connecting automation to your Joomla!-based website.
• Text and images for the emails you’ll send and a plan for how and when. This part of the strategy is often the most challenging. One critical point: You must tailor your email messages to prospects. No one wants to receive generic emails.

A Note about Email Software

Why use software instead of your Gmail or Outlook anyway? We hear this a lot from people who are emailing a few hundred or fewer people with a newsletter each month. There are a couple of good reasons to sign up for the free version of an email program:

• Look more professional. You can design better emails with software.
• Lighten your server load. If you get to be sending hundreds (or thousands) of emails, your email provider is going to shut you down.
• Spam laws/unsubscribe. You can more easily manage your email sends and do it correctly — without risking hefty fines.

Challenges with Marketing Automation

To some degree, marketing automation has become a buzzword. We often meet people who have signed up for fancy programs, paying a lot of money for one of the big-name brands thinking it’s going to transform their business. But software only works if you use it. Smaller companies often struggle just to get their daily tasks done. Those who sign up for a silver bullet program may later realize it was a waste of money because they aren’t using it.

Instead, research the best practices for marketing automation and find a solution that fits your business size and abilities. You can always add on later! We’re happy to offer guidance for Cary business owners who are ready to take steps to grow. Contact us for a consultation.

How to Create an Inbound Marketing Campaign for Your Cary Business

by Myra Stacey | Dec 6, 2018 | Inbound Marketing, Services

This post is the first of a five-part series on Inbound Marketing campaigns, and the different pieces that go into them.  

Inbound marketing is a critical part of finding new clients — even for smaller businesses in Raleigh and Cary. But many business owners we speak to think inbound marketing is confusing. Here’s a breakdown of what inbound marketing means and the path your customer will travel.

What is Inbound Marketing?

We covered this in a recent post, so we won’t give you the full dive here, but Inbound Marketing, is, essentially, putting information out there that your customers find that leads them to you. You might think of it like fishing. However, we prefer to compare it to hunting because in fishing, you’re putting out a net and may catch anything, even fish too small for you. Hunting is more strategic and focused on particular types of animals — in this case, the customers that fit your product or service. If you’re still confused about inbound marketing terms and types of content, check out our Inbound Marketing Dictionary for more info.

Creating a Campaign

A campaign is a specific inbound marketing path. A company might run multiple campaigns at the same time, each one targeting a different audience. You might have several inbound marketing campaigns, but many small companies start with one. Your campaign actions include multiple steps and pieces. You’ll need:

• A landing page on your website where people fill out a form so you can get their email address and continue to communicate with them.
• A piece of content or some other giveaway or free sample in exchange for filling out that form.
• Automatic emails set up to go out to those people once you have their address so you can stay in front of them.
• A way to track your leads so that you can identify those who buy, those who might buy, and those who aren’t worth the time.

First Steps

In future posts, we’ll explain more about automation, buyer personas, and blogging, as well as new Internet rules that will affect your campaign. The main takeaway here is to realize that your marketing should come with a strategy, a plan for reaching a specific audience of people. As you outline your inbound marketing campaign, start with some questions:

• Whom would I like to reach?
• What appeals to those people?
• What content or thing can I give away or create that will help my potential customer somehow?
• What hurdles, struggles, or challenges is my potential customer facing that I can solve?
• What messages do I want to send people who are considering my service or product that may encourage them to buy?  
• Do I have the tools I need (website, blog, other content, email software) to create a campaign?  

Getting it Done – How Print and Web Designer Can Help

Business owners also say it’s too much work. While they are correct that inbound marketing takes some work, the usefulness of it outweighs those efforts. Our team can not only set this up for you, but do so fairly easily by tying it to your Joomla!-based website. Our program includes setting up landing pages, automating the process, and then generating reports so that you can worry less about the campaign and more about the new customers coming your way.

Inbound Marketing: What is a Funnel?

by Myra Stacey | Aug 25, 2018 | Inbound Marketing, Services

Inbound marketing is a way of attracting more customers to your business. We’ve discussed several aspects of inbound marketing this month. Next, we should talk about your sales funnel.

Finding Your Customers

Every business owners should understand his/her target customer or audience. Business owners also need to know or learn:

• The lifetime value of every new client. How much money is a new client worth to you over their relationship “lifetime” with your business? Knowing this will help gauge how much you can/should spend on marketing and advertising. For example, if one new client is worth $5,000, that investment of $500 is fine.

• The age, rough income, education level, and other demographic information. We talk about this more in our post on personas.

• Cost of Customer Acquisition – Calculate your CAC by dividing all the costs spent on acquiring new customers (marketing/advertising) by the number of new clients obtained in a period, such as a month.

• What do you consider a conversion? We’ve talked before about landing pages and tracking people. One metric you track is how many conversions you have on your website or landing page. But is a conversion the action of the consumer clicking “Contact” or is it filling out the contact form?

• The length of your sales funnel – How long does it take your business to court and secure a new customer?

What is a Sales Funnel?

That last one is sometimes tricky to figure out. So let’s dive into the sales funnel. The funnel is an image that looks — you guessed it — like a funnel, with a wide open top that narrows downward. The idea is that the open top is where you’re bringing and gathering clients, and then they move downward through stages of the buying process.

These stages are:

• Awareness – This is when a customer is searching for information about a product or service. He or she is aware of a need and may be aware that there are companies who can help.

• Interest – The consumer is learning about the different products or services, comparing specific options, reading reviews.

• Consideration – He or she is thinking about those options, possibly sharing the information with other buyers (such as a spouse or partner if he/she is involved).

• Intent – The consumer intends to buy, adding the item to a shopping cart, or getting a demonstration from your sales team. In some B2Bs, this is a verbal confirmation with you.

• Evaluation – At this stage, the buyer is obtaining the contract and proposal from you and asking any final questions. In the case of B2C with products, he/she is reviewing his/her shopping cart and going to check out.

• Purchase – The transaction is complete!

Some companies have a very long sales funnel, meaning it takes many months or even years to court new customers. One example of this might be a service that works with the government. They fill out RFPs (Requests for Proposals) and go through a lengthy vetting process. The customer is only searching for a new company every few years.

As you speak with potential customers, get a feel for their stage of the buying process. You should create marketing and sales materials different for each step. For example, if someone just wants to know more, have a one sheet ready for them with information that doesn’t sound salesy. You want to come across as helpful so that when he/she is prepared to buy, he/she thinks of you as useful, not as that pushy person who won’t stop calling. Much of your inbound marketing content is focused on this stage of the buying process, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore the others. You should have:

• Informational one sheets about the product or service, not your company

• Visuals, documentation, or explanation of how your product or service works

• Brochures that talk about your company and how it stands out

• Online reviews from customers and testimonials on your website

• A demonstration/presentation if applicable

• An FAQ sheet if needed

• Information about what happens after a customer chooses to buy — the next steps

If you’re not sure about your sales funnel, contact us for a free consultation. We can help you figure it out and create materials to guide your buyers.