In my last blog post, we established that content marketing is an incredibly effective way to connect and communicate with a highly targeted audience and that the first thing you need to do when creating a content marketing plan is to set yourself some content marketing goals. So what’s next?
The next step is the most important in the whole content marketing process: understanding your audience. Frankly, if you don’t understand who your audience is, if you don’t take time to find out what motivates them and how they relate to your product or service, then there is just no point in doing content marketing in the first place. So where do you start in identifying and understanding your audience? As a marketer you’ve probably already built a good picture of who your audience is and will have hopefully created buyer personas for your audience but in a content marketing strategy you need to look at these personas in much greater detail. I suggest you start your buyer personas from scratch if you are embarking on your first content marketing journey.
1. Do your research
A common mistake marketers make is creating personas based on their own discussions of who they think their customers are and what they’re likely to care about. This might reflect years of knowledge and experience and can certainly be a starting point in the buyer persona process but in reality, these points are nothing more than assumptions and shouldn’t be the basis of who you are targeting your content at. You should take time to truly understand your customers, use real data and statistics to develop factual personas that truly represent your audience and then fully integrate those personas into your content strategy. To do this, you should consider doing some or all of the following:
- Interviewing existing customers
- Speaking to your sales team/customer service team
- Surveying prospects and customers
- Research customer databases to identify customers
- Evaluate web analytics reports
- Use keyword research to identify topics of interests
- Monitor social media activity
2. Personalise your audience
Once you have analysed your findings, you can begin to create buyer personas to personalise your target audience. Give your personas names and faces and include information like their personal details, goals, challenges and why they would love your business. This will help you and others in your company relate to your personas and therefore think of them in future business processes. If possible it’s ideal to have specific personas for every person involved in the buying process but if you are time shy you can start with two or three key personas and build on them over time.
When creating buyer personas for a law firm for example, different practice area law firms will have different personas. A family lawyer might deal with 46-year-old Bob, the owner of a construction company in Staffordshire going through a divorce with his wife Elaine and fighting for custody over their two children. An intellectual property lawyer might deal with companies or individuals with several different buyer personas in one case. For example, if a company is seeking legal advice about another company stealing their product idea, the lawyer might need to deal with the companies CEO, their in-house legal counsel or the administration assistant. It’s important to create personas for each of these people involved so your content can be catered to each potential persona.
The more detailed you are with your buyer personas, the better. So when you’re creating Bob from Staffordshire include his wife and children’s names, what he likes doing in his spare time, what he thinks about certain things, what he wants to do in the future. Making your personas seem real and relatable will remind you and your team members to link back to them at all stages of your content marketing plan.
3. Always keep your personas in mind
Once you’ve created your personas, you can use them to create content that is going to be relevant to the persona at each stage of the buying cycle. Creating buyer personas isn’t a quick task you can complete on your morning commute; you should spend a decent amount of time researching and creating them. Often buyer personas can lack depth and as a result just aren’t that useful because people don’t really understand who their audience is. Once you’ve created your personas, keep using them as a reference tool when you are creating content: would your personas find what you’re creating interesting? Is it relevant to them? Does it teach them something they would want to know? Always keep your personas in the front of your mind. If your personas lack depth or if you forget to use them, you will create generic, ineffective content which does not assist in moving customers down the path to purchase.
Before beginning your content creation you must know who your audience is but remember you will only know so much; what you’re doing is new and so some of it will be trial and error. Don’t forget to listen to your audience, they will tell you what works for them and what they want more of. Consistently update your buyer personas as you get to know more about your audience and publish your personas around your company; it’s not just marketers who benefit from having a clear picture of their audience. Remember that content will be different for different personas; so one blog post will not be suitable for three different personas, (and you shouldn’t try and make it so) if it was, your content would be unfocused and not result in the goals you originally set yourself. So create detailed, factual and realistic buyer personas and make sure you think of them at all stages of your content marketing plan.
