Content Marketing

Buyer personas: two words that can strike fear into the hearts of many marketers. The trouble is, a good buyer persona takes significant time and effort to put together. That may be all well and good for a large company with a robust marketing team, but faced with the daunting task of customer interviews, extensive research, and translating all that data into usable personas, busy marketers are tempted to skip the step entirely.

So is there a better approach that allows marketers to gain useful insights about their customers, without getting lost in the depths of endless customer research? We think so.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a generalized representation of your ideal customer, based on actual customer data, that helps you better tailor your marketing strategy.

Buyer personas help you dive deeper to understand who your customers really are and what motivates them. This helps you focus your digital marketing, so you’re speaking directly to your customer’s needs and pain points. Because here’s the harsh truth: no one cares about your products or services unless you give them a reason to. A good buyer persona helps you uncover what your customer truly values.

Why bother with buyer personas?

When it comes to putting together a marketing strategy, most marketers will agree that identifying a target customer is important. But why invest so much time and effort in developing buyer personas?

First, creating buyer personas implies a shift in how you think about your customers. If you’re simply trying to identify a target market, you’re probably identifying who you think is best-suited to your products or services. Building a buyer persona means you’re putting yourself if your customer’s shoes, so you’re responding to what they want and need.

Furthermore, when most businesses talk about their ideal customer, they are focusing on a collection of demographics. While demographics may narrow down your audience, they aren’t as much help when it comes to creating strong, differentiated messaging.

For example, a beauty salon might say they’re targeting female professionals, ages 25-35, who are married but have no children, and have a household income of greater than $80K. Does this tell you something about their ideal customer? Absolutely. But does it tell you whether they’re interested in the newest styles and fashion trends, or if they’re looking for efficient in-and-out haircut? Not so much.

Source: VIEO Design Slideshare

Buyer personas are more than just a target market. They go beyond demographics to identify your ideal customers’ desires, challenges, and values, so you market differently to different types of people.

Your customers expect that sort of personalization. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, all marketing is person to person. The more you can understand and empathize with your customers, the better you can authentically reach them like a real human being.

How to build buyer personas that don’t take forever

Focus on the information that really matters

Sometimes marketers become so over-zealous in seeking to understand their customers that feel they need to know every single detail about their lives. Unfortunately, that means they often waste time collecting irrelevant data. We’ve seen interview questions that are so detailed they just get creepy (things like “what kind of parenting style did you grow up with?” or “were you a loner in school?”).

Remember that personas are generalizations. Unless you’re personalizing messages for every single person, you want to look for commonalities between individual customers that you can apply to a larger group. You don’t need to know intimate details about their personal life, or what their favorite breakfast cereal is. And unless you’re in a retail B2C business, traditional demographics like someone’s gender or marital status likely aren’t that important either.

If you have any doubts about whether something is relevant, ask yourself two questions:

• Does this substantially change how my customer makes decisions?
• Am I going to differentiate my marketing message based on this information?

Use a simple buyer persona template

While every business is different, and you may want to adapt this to your specific needs, here is the basic template we use for our buyer personas.

Keep in the mind that the questions you ask in each of these areas should be skewed toward the product or service you’re selling. If you’re in a B2B business, you’ll probably focus more on your customer’s professional life and how they evaluate business solutions. If you’re selling B2C, you’ll want to ask more about their personal goals and pain points.

• Overview
  • Name
  • Job title/function
  • Basic demographic info (age, income, education, location)
  • Background information (other relevant information like industry, experience, interests, hobbies)
• Day in the Life
  • What does a typical day look like?
  • What are they responsible for? What kinds of decisions do they need to make?
  • Who else do they interact with in making decisions?
  • What do they dedicate their time, effort and/or money to?
• Goals
  • What do they want?
  • What does success look like for them?
  • What tools, skills, or resources do they need to achieve their goals?
  • What do the value most in a product/service like yours?
• Problems
  • What keeps them up at night?
  • What prevents them from achieving their goals?
  • What frustrates them most about the product/service area you’re addressing?
  • What do they try to do to alleviate those frustrations?
• Questions/Objections
  • What information do they need in order to make a decision?
  • What are the most important factors they look for in evaluating a solution?
  • What would prevent them from buying your product/service?
• Content Preferences
  • How do they get information? Do they prefer certain channels or formats?
  • When do they consume content? During the work day, or at home?
  • How much communication do they want to receive, and how often?
  • What sources do they trust?

To download a copy of this template, click on the link below.

How to research your buyer personas

Even if you’re crunched for time, you still need to invest the effort in doing research. If you want your buyer personas to be useful in guiding your marketing strategy, you can’t rely on guessing or making things up about your customers.

The best way to research your buyer personas is to talk to your buyers. Unfortunately, busy marketers don’t always have the time to conduct in-depth customer interviews. If you can invest the time, by all means, do it. If not, here are some quick tips to help you research your personas:

Talk to your sales team

Your sales team is on the front lines when it comes to interacting with customers during the decision-making process. Pick their brains about the how and why different people choose to become customers. Ask questions like:

• What kinds of different prospects do you interact with?
• What are the top most frequently asked questions you get from customers?
• What are they looking for from a solution like ours?
• Why do customers choose our solution over others?
• What common objections do you get from prospects?

Talk to your customer service team

This is one source marketers sometimes overlook. While your sales team might know the most about the decision-making process, your customer service team is most familiar with the ongoing successes and pain points with your current customers. They can have tremendous insight into what your customers find important. Here are a few things you can ask them:

• What are the most common complains you hear from our customers?
• What do they like the most about working with us?
• Who are our best clients? Why?
• Who are our worst clients? Why?

Mine your analytics

Check your analytics from any source you’re using for marketing: website, email, social media, or your CRM system, if you have one. What types of content are your customers looking at, or engaging with? Are they downloading certain pieces of content? What pages are your website visitors looking at, and what sources did they come from? Look for patterns that identify what information your customer finds interesting and relevant.

Ask for customer feedback in other ways

While not as efficient as knocking out your questions in an interview, you can get direct customer feedback in other ways. Develop a survey, and send it out via email (but note that you might need an incentive to get responses). Or, add an extra field to your online forms to ask customers about their biggest challenge, or their #1 priority when it comes to your product/service.

Use external sources

There are tons of places online where your customers might share information you can use to develop your buyer personas. Check questions sites like Quora or Yahoo answers for problems your inquisitive customers might be asking about. It might sound stalker-ish, but Facebook and LinkedIn are great places to learn about your customers – people share an enormous amount of information about themselves on social media. Look for industry blogs, and competitor’s content to learn about what others in your space are talking about. Depending on your business, you might even find that sites like Reddit have interesting discussions you can follow.

Next Steps

Buyer personas don’t need to be a source of fear or anxiety. Using our template or your own version, just start filling in information as you go. You’ll discover quickly that you’re identifying more about your customers than you ever knew.

If you need help in identifying your buyer personas for your business, we can help! We offer a variety of digital marketing services and we can assist you in developing your buyer personas to help build and grow your business.

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Nearly all businesses today are doing some form of content marketing – 91% according to the most recent industry study. Despite that, many marketers are still not seeing the results they want from their efforts. They write blogs, but no one reads them. They send out emails, but no one opens them. No one will like their Facebook page or follow  them on LinkedIn.

Maybe that sounds familiar. But with 79% of marketers saying they’re seeing success from content marketing, what are you missing? Why is your content marketing failing?

The answer: strategy. Specifically, a documented content marketing strategy.

Strategy Supports Success

Sometimes, content marketing can seem like a hungry beast – one that constantly needs to be fed. When you’re struggling to keep up a weekly blog, or regular social posts, it’s hard to stop and think about strategy. It’s no surprise that many small businesses (who often only have tiny or one-person marketing teams), end up doing random acts of content. They focus on feeding the beast, one blog-post morsel at a time, rather than figuring out a long-term strategy.

Studies have proven, year after year, that a documented content marketing strategy is critical to success. Only 37% of B2B marketers have a documented strategy, yet 62% of the top performers have invested in one. What’s more, 72% of respondents said that strategy contributed to increased content marketing success over the last year.

 

Why Do You Need A Documented Content Marketing Strategy?

First, note the word documented. You need to write it down, otherwise it’s just nice ideas. The process of getting a strategy down on paper will help create alignment in your organization. Plus it’s harder to forget something in writing.

But why do you need a strategy to begin with? Here are a few reasons:

You Need to Be Remarkable

There’s a lot of content out there. Every month, WordPress users alone produce nearly 82 million blog posts. Every minute, people send 156 million emails and view  4.1 million YouTube videos.

Whatever you want to say has already been said. Probably many times over.

Your job is to bring your unique story and perspective to the content. You need to answer the question: why should anyone care?

Rand Fishkin of Moz tackles the question by talking about 10x content: the idea that in a world overloaded by content, producing “good” content isn’t enough anymore. You need to create something that’s 10 times better than everyone else.

As Fishkin points out, however, you don’t just do this by accident. 10x content requires planning, research and time to succeed. It needs strategy. Otherwise you are just like one small fish in an enormous ocean.

You Need to Be Radically Relevant to Your Customers

We don’t just produce a ton of content. We also consume a ton of content. Remember those 82 million blog posts per month? WordPress also reports that people view more than 21.3 billion pages per month. So it’s not that your customers aren’t consuming content. They just might not be consuming your content.

The problem is relevance.

Too many businesses mistakenly assume that if they just create content, their potential customers will immediately see it, love it, and hand over their money. Unfortunately for all of us, it doesn’t work like that. Unless you give your customers a compelling reason to pay attention to your content, they’ll ignore you in favor of a more timely answer, a more in-depth resource, or a funny cat video.

You need to earn the attention of your customers by being hyper-relevant. That’s where your content marketing strategy comes into play. You need to research your target audience so you’re deeply in tune with what they need and how you can answer their questions. By learning where they hang out and how they consume content, you can also plan the appropriate content tactics to reach them in the right place at the right time.

Your Content is Tied to Your Other Marketing Efforts

Having a solid content marketing strategy isn’t just about doing content right. It’s about doing all of your marketing right. Content is the substance of message – the stuff your business’s story is made of. You can’t do marketing without content.

Furthermore, content is becoming more and more intertwined with SEO. In fact, it’s now one of Google’s top ranking factors. Google looks for well-written, highly relevant, long-form content when ranking your website. Waxing eloquent about your products and services isn’t enough anymore (because no one wants to read it). You need content that engages and informs your audience. Not only will it rank better, but it will also attract valuable backlinks to your website.

Social media is also driven by content. You use social media to connect and engage with your customers, but content gives you the substance to share and start the conversation. Again, you can’t have a conversation when you only talk about yourself, so you need relevant, non-promotional content.

In both cases, success comes back to having a solid, documented content marketing strategy. Optimized content for SEO and consistent engagement on social media doesn’t happen by accident.

You Need to Know Whether It’s Working

Documenting a content strategy means that you are establishing clear goals for your content, as well as a way to measure them. Without a strategy, it’s easy to fall into the trap of random acts of content that you can’t relate to your business objectives.

Only 35% of businesses measure the ROI of their content marketing, but those that do have metrics in place typically have positive results to share. 77% reported increased audience engagement, and 72% said they get more leads.

A documented content strategy gives you a roadmap for success so you can identify what’s working and what needs to be improved.

Start Building Your Strategy

If you don’t have documented content marketing strategy, it’s never too late to start! We’ve got multiple resources to help you on your way. First, check out the recording of our recent seminar: How to Transform Your Business with Content Marketing, download our e-book below, or contact us learn more about our expert content marketing services.

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The most recent B2B content marketing benchmarks, budgets, and trends report for 2017 is out. Here are a few interesting key takeaways to take from the report.

1. Content marketing spend vs. increasing amount of original content

Of those polled, 70% said they expected to be generating more unique content, but only 39% of those expected to increase their marketing spending. If you’re wondering how so many marketers expect to generate more original content for the same amount of spend, consider optimizing existing content to boost site traffic.

Content audits are a great way to capitalize on work you’ve already done while keeping your content fresh and relevant to readers and search engines. Besides, there’s little point to inundating a website or campaign with more content if your old content is still performing well. In the case of original content vs. new content, less is more as long as the content is high quality. Refreshing old content is, generally speaking, more preferable than generating brand new marketing material if you are still seeing a high return on your investment on creating that content.

2. Content marketers are going after lead generation and brand awareness

It’s integral to any marketing campaign to establish clear goals early. Goals are how your company will gauge the success of its content marketing, but also how it will direct those same marketing efforts.

Lead generation is a logical goal for marketers, and so is increasing your brand awareness; but the interesting part is that fewer than 45% of marketers are worried about creating brand advocates. Never underestimate the power of customer evangelism because if you aren’t encouraging positive feedback or providing your audience with a space to build that fan base, then you’re missing out.

We’ve talked about relationship management before and how it can be used to frame public perception of your brand, so if you’re not actively engaging with your customers and managing the relationship your brand has with them, you’re losing an opportunity to have others help to expand your brand awareness.

With social media, viral videos, and brand enthusiasts, it’s never been easier to increase the reach of your brand. If you have customers out there spreading word of how awesome you are, doesn’t that kind of tie into generating new leads as well? The more people who know about you, the greater your opportunity for new leads.

3. Email isn’t dying as quickly (or at all) as some marketers believed

There’s been a deal of consternation among industries as to whether email is a dying marketing channel, or if it’s simply being wasted on the younger generation. Despite the many varied articles and blogs regarding the topic, the marketers polled by CMI—93% of them—were utilizing email to distribute their content.

4. Social media is still top of its game as a go-to marketing tactic

While content marketers are still using an array of tactics, social media is being used by more than 80% of them, which isn’t really a huge surprise. With the changes Facebook made to its business pages and platforms like LinkedIn for B2B businesses, social media is an ideal channel and tactic for content marketers.

It’s also important to note the continued popularity of infographics and whitepapers. These tactics are fairly evergreen, as well as being a reliable way to get backlinks. Remember that whole ‘less is more’ line from earlier? Well, implementing a few updates to an existing (but potentially out of date) eBook, whitepaper or infographic can make it good as new again, or in the case of content marketing, relevant.

5. Site traffic the leading metric for content marketing measurement

Content marketers have been using website traffic as a metric to measure results of their content marketing efforts, but they’ve also been paying attention to sales, the quality of those sales leads, and conversion rates. You could argue that it’s strange to see how few marketers cited higher conversion rates or even SEO rankings as a metric. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see that despite social media content being one of the top tactics being used, only 22% are using social media sharing as a metric of measure.

Marketing trends come and go, but paying attention to what we’ve been doing as content marketers is the only way to adjust course when we notice patterns that really aren’t optimizing tactics that work.

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One of the core functions of great content marketing is to  have a documented strategy that, when executed, offers solutions to your targets’ problems. When they’re presented with a conversion trigger, they’ll be much likelier to take an action. If none of the people who view your content take the next step in the customer journey, you may need to look into changing your content marketing strategy.

A documented marketing strategy is the driving force behind getting your content marketing to produce results that meet your company’s goals. Without market research, tracking, and documented goals, you are just performing tactics haphazardly without really knowing what is working.

Constantly create valuable, resourceful, and entertaining content to make your website visitors, email subscribers, customers, and followers more informed and committed to your brand.  You should do this to gain their trust, which leads them through the customer journey of eventually converting, making a sale, and becoming a loyal long-term customer.

This is why content marketing has to be performed consistently across different platforms, including paid, earned, owned, and shared media – also known as the PESO marketing model.

Content marketing, defined by Content Marketing Institute, is “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

In the business-to-business world, 88% of B2B marketers claim to be using content marketing as a tactic. In business-to-consumer industries, 76% of B2C marketers claim they are using content marketing.

But only a fraction of those businesses actually think that their content marketing is achieving results that they want. Of the 88% of B2Bs who are involved in content marketing, 30% of marketers said it was effective or very effective, with only 6% of those claiming it to be very effective.

When it comes to B2C, 38% of respondents doing content marketing said it was effective or very effective, with 10% of those saying it was very effective.

What does this mean?

Across the board, over 60% of marketers aren’t seeing results from their content marketing efforts. A big reason for this is that they don’t do the research, know their target audiences, set goals, and track everything along the way in a documented marketing strategy.

Do you have a content marketing strategy?

A documented content marketing strategy is often the defining factor in whether content marketing succeeds or fails. In fact, without a documented strategy, you’ll only ever succeed by accident. Your strategy provides everything from data-driven research through to tactical execution, along with the analytics that show whether you’ve met your marketing goals.

So how many marketers in B2C and B2B have a documented content marketing strategy?

• Only 32% of B2B marketers have a documented marketing strategy, while 48% have a marketing strategy that is not documented.

• In B2C, 37% of marketers have a documented strategy, while 44% don’t document their strategy.

Strategies keep your brand’s messaging consistent across all platforms, and tracking everything lets you know that what you’re doing is leading toward your goals. If your strategy is unrefined or nonexistent, there’s no way to ensure cohesive content marketing efforts.

Having a documented marketing strategy is the key to keeping everyone in your organization focused, so each employee knows exactly how their role plays out in an ongoing, collaborative effort. Some vague abstraction of a strategy that exists solely in the minds of one or two people on the content marketing team won’t serve the team as a whole.

EZMarketing’s brand strategist, Brandon Peach, had this to say about content marketing strategy:

“A content marketing strategy helps to tell the story of your business. It’s essential that a content marketing strategy be documented, since it’s been demonstrated year after year that content marketers who do so feel more effective, and can justify spending more on their content budget.”

Documentation is the proof that shows whether or not a marketing strategy is working, and if  it is, companies are more willing to leverage a higher budget to continue evolving and optimizing their strategy.

Are you actively updating your content marketing strategy?

A strategy isn’t a once-and-done task. It’s something that needs revised and updated as the scope of your industry or business goals change. Strategy has to accommodate trends in the metrics you’ve measured, or the behavior of your target audience.

Your strategy should always be at the forefront of your mind and actions. It’s only natural for it to change according to key performance indicators (KPIs), the metrics important to your business, and when what you’re doing isn’t as effective as it could be.

The strategy that’s never updated is the one that can’t compete.

Do you have content marketing goals?

Consider why you use content marketing by asking yourself: “What do I want to accomplish?” You may have a strategy in place, but does it accomplish the goals you wanted to address in the first place?

A content marketing strategy should be born from the objectives put in place by the content marketing team. The chart below highlights common goals for B2B content marketers.

Your goals will define the specifics of your strategy. If your goal is lead generation and sales, then you might want to create more eBooks, case studies, and whitepapers in your content strategy to help generate more leads and sales.

In B2C, organizational goals are slightly different, with sales also being a top priority in all industries.

In B2C, if you want to focus on customer retention, then work on better customer service, and providing unique, relevant, and valuable content through email and social media to your subscribers and followers.

Objectives keep a marketing strategy goal-oriented and your content marketing results-driven.

Are you promoting your content?

Promoting content is one of the two key parts of content marketing: creation and promotion.

While your content marketing team may be churning out great content, if the process ends there then content marketing simply isn’t working hard enough for you. In fact, it’s probably not doing anything at all, because you haven’t taken the next step, which is promoting that content.

Most experts say you should spend just as much time, if not more, promoting your content as you do creating it.

What are some ways to promote your content?

Social media promotions, email marketing, influencer marketing, and industry outreach are all great ways to promote your content.

Writing a new post for your blog or publishing a cutting-edge eBook to your website isn’t enough. If your website has a strong following, then your current audience may find it – but your target audience who isn’t aware of your brand probably won’t. If your competition is creating helpful content, they will be found before you will be.

You can promote your content through paid content promotion services like Outbrain, or targeting specific audiences in Facebook or Twitter to get the word out. Also, reaching out to industry publications, bloggers, journalists, and writers to let them know about your content and how it may be helpful for their audience. Figuring out the sites to place your content where your target audience visits takes a bit of work. But Rand Fishkin from Moz explains how to discover the sites your audience visits in this extremely helpful whiteboard video.

Marketers who spend more time promoting their content on the right platforms and websites will see more success than businesses who spend more time creating and not enough time promoting.

Are you spending enough on content marketing?

As we’ve said above, too few companies think that their content marketing is actually effective. Those same companies may not be spending enough money or time on their content marketing either, which can be a contributing factor to their lack of confidence (and results).

If you’re spending a minimal amount on content marketing, then it’s difficult to expect it to do everything it’s supposed to do as effectively as you need it to. Content marketing is about ROI, and if you’re not investing enough, you won’t be seeing those huge returns.

So what percentage of marketing budgets are being spent on content marketing?

For B2B, the average is about 28% of marketing budgets that are being spent on content marketing. The marketers that found content marketing to be the most effective were allocating 46% of their total marketing budget on content marketing.

Are you spending almost half of your marketing budget on content marketing? Those that see the best results are.

In B2C, 32% of marketing budgets are being spent on content marketing. The most effective marketers say that about 38% of their marketing budget is being spent on content marketing.

So what are you allocating from your whole marketing budget on content marketing?

It’s been shown that companies with strategic content marketing generate a higher percentage of leads than companies who don’t.

Ask yourself: “Is my content marketing working for me?”

Here’s the bottom line. If your content marketing isn’t working for you, it could be any number of things—from a nonexistent strategy, lack of promotion, a stifled budget, or unclear objectives and goals.

If you’re still wondering about where your content marketing stands, contact EZMarketing and we’ll do more than just develop content for you—we’ll help you create the strategy that gets results. Our Lancaster digital marketing agency offers content marketing a core internet marketing service.

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