More than 83% of marketing experts consider customers as their primary goal for B2B content marketing.
In other words, meeting customer expectations is one of the most important things that marketers consider when developing a content strategy.
So, to implement a good marketing strategy, it is best for you to produce content that best matches the concerns of your target audience by creating a data-driven persona.
Given its importance, creating a buyer persona is not a task that should be neglected. It’s a whole process that you must follow to identify and get a clear idea of your target customers.
That’s why in this article, you’ll have the persona-focused steps to create relevant content that meets your business goals and the styles of your buyers.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is an imaginary character created to represent the different types of customers who need the services of a company. This persona is often used in marketing strategies focused on the target audience.
So, it is essential to know your persona and the way of the employee when implementing a marketing strategy content marketing.
A content strategy is in fact an action plan in which you use visual and/or textual content to achieve your business objectives. A good content strategy attracts your target audience and keeps them there, even after a purchase.
In short, the persona is the fictional character of your potential customers. You define them by researching their personalities and how they use your products or services.
Furthermore, defining the profile of your customers requires time for reflection and, above all, an analysis of their purchasing cycles. This requires you to gather personal information about your customers and their business cycle, before creating the persona.
Source : Semrush
I then expose you the steps to implement a good content strategy based on persona.
Step 1: Define your buyer personas based on data, not assumptions
The buyer persona is an excellent way to create content that highlights your buyers and to fuel your content marketing strategy.
By exploiting all the available data down to the smallest detail to create factual characters that reflect your customers, you enrich your marketing strategy.
To define your persona, you must necessarily collect information about it. By using analytics tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console Lead Forensics and Google Webmaster, you will be able to:
- To determine the needs and desires of your customers;
- To have an idea of their behavior;
- To know the types of content that interest them as well as the social networks they often use;
- To understand and exploit the purchasing decisions of your customers;
- Etc.
Based on the information collected on your personas, you can easily personalize your different marketing campaigns and directly index your customers in the online market.
Step 2: Solve your customers’ problems precisely
More than 60% of buyers online are often led to purchase a product after reading an article about it.
So, as soon as you identify a problem that your personas are encountering, you will certainly have some ideas relating to the content that you will be required to create.
In this case, it is really important that your content is relevant and provides value to your products, because compelling content is a factor in closing sales. This has been proven by almost 80% of marketers.
You can also suggest products that can serve as a solution to attract new prospects.
Furthermore, when planning your editorial plans, not only should you take into account the factors that best motivate your buyer persona, but also the challenges they face on a daily basis.
By taking these aspects into consideration in the articles you create, you meet the expectations of your potential customers and build their loyalty. This increases your brand’s engagement and visibility rate.
Step 3: Identify important moments, topics and events
Next to 58% of marketing experts claim that relevant and engaging content are the main factors that show the importance of content marketing.
By identifying events, questions and current topics related to your sector of activity and the interests of your personas, you will be more creative.
Precisely, by mapping your important moments, you will be able to easily write relevant content that attracts your buyers.
Step 4: Distribute your content on the social media most used by your personas
Don’t lose sight of the fact that today, more than ever, social networks are essential to marketing content strategies.
Given that the number of people present on social networks is estimated at 4.62 billion, you will therefore have more chance of organizing your brand’s campaigns on social networks and of succeeding in them.
By having an idea on the platform where your personas are more present, the growth of your brand could easily increase as well as the engagement rate.
So, to find the social media that matches your personas, most marketers use several tactics to target their audience.
Take the example of the social network YouTube. Since there are already more than 2 billion people on this social platform, you can create and publish your content in video form on this network. If only your personas spend enough time on YouTube.
In another context, if your buyers often download white papers and guides, you need to create these kinds of content.
Source : Stratello
Just remember that the choice of the distribution platform for your content depends on the preferred social network of your personas.
Step 5: Comply with your personas on a daily basis
One thing is to nurture your persona with content and another is to do it at the right time. It is therefore a question of providing your targets with attractive content, but also of doing it at the right time.
You must also use the information from your targets to establish the publication timeline of the content you create for them. You must also get your targets to adapt to your publishing program.
For example, if you notice that your persona likes evening outings on weekends or often stays online at those times, then all you have to do is schedule your posts at those times.
Your posts can describe relaxing skills to adopt during weekend outings to make the most of the time, as shown in this image below.
Source : Homestead simple
If you do so, it is certain that your brand will be mentioned in this release and recommended to future occasions or other contacts.
This is once again why it is important to know your personas in order to maximize a content marketing strategy campaign.
Step 6: Connect all the elements of your content marketing strategy
Remember that before starting to create your content marketing plan, you must necessarily identify your main marketing objective and the criteria that underlie them.
By determining these aspects, you will be able to:
- Target your content creation;
- Measure the return on investment of your content;
- And evolve your personas based on real data.
By summarizing the information collected on your personas, you put in place a good content marketing strategy.
And you should remember that, whatever your business goals, a persona-based approach is a powerful way to create relevant, useful and compelling content.
Conclusion
In short, any company that wishes to implement a content marketing strategy must first know its buyer personas, that is to say its target clientele.
It is necessary to know your target, who they frequent, their expressions, their habits and the networks on which they operate the most in order to optimize your marketing strategy and capture the attention of your customers.
With the information collected on your personas, you can also determine the success or failure of your campaign.
If you have already developed a content marketing strategy focused on personas, let us know the purposes in the comment.
Otherwise, implement these six steps in your marketing strategy to get a better return on investment. Also read the article on 6 types of visual content which you can use in your marketing campaigns.
