When you go the B2B content marketing way, you don’t just do it because everyone’s doing it. You do it because everyone who’s doing it is making fat profits. And why are they making these profits? Well, because they are doing their content right and not ‘just doing it’. So the point I’m trying to make here is – the importance of content that syncs with the audience. Now you may be like “Okay…so what about it? How does it relate to creating personas? Read this now – 71% of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas vs. 37% who simply meet goals and 26% who miss them.
B2B content marketing persona
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A persona is a synthesis of the data you have on your existing customer and the data from your market research. You would want to include information like customer demographics, their behavior patterns, motivations, goals, and in short anything and everything that would get you closer to identifying your audience in and out. It’s pertinent for you to know what your buyers are trying to accomplish, only then can you create content that tightly fits into their business puzzle.
Creating personas is a tremendous approach for your business to gain insights and create a structured B2B content marketing strategy. What I’ve noticed is that today, with the assistance of technology, any organization, big or small, can go global. As a result, companies are entering new markets with little or no knowledge of the regional buying behavior. And with rising competition, there is negligible room for errors.
So now that we’ve talked about the what and the why of persona, let’ get to what this post is really meant for – help you understand how you can create personas for B2B content marketing. While there could be just so many ways of doing that, I’ve listed the important few.
- Carry out customer surveys, as it is one of the least invasive ways of extracting information from your existing or potential customers.
- Interview your customers. Your customers bought your services. There has to be something that you did right, no? To which your argument can be “But they’re not my ideal customers, why would I interview them?” Agreed. But they can definitely be a good starting point for you to hone that ideal and get a clearer picture of it.
- Talk to your Sales Team, they’re the front line of your company after all. They are the people who have interacted with those of your customers who stayed and those that left. They’d definitely share their experience on what works for your company and what doesn’t.
- And then there’s Google Analytics! It’s personally my favorite. Just go to the Audience section of your Google Analytics account and you will find a treasure of information that you can use for creating personas. For instance, if you go to the “Mobile” dropdown you can see what percentage of your website visitors are using mobiles, tablets, or desktops and what browsers are they using?
The number and type of personas that you’d need to create will depend upon the complexity of products and services that your business offers. However, you need to make sure that you’re not wasting time trying to list every single buyer. Remember, usually, only a handful matter.
