Pick any day of the week, and there’s one thing on every inbound marketer’s to-do list: creating new content
. Marketers used to create content only when it suited their company’s
internal needs – say, when they had a new product to promote. Well,
inbound marketing forces you to give up that approach. But constantly
coming up with new content can be overwhelming, and if you panic and
start pushing out content that’s a bad fit for your audience, you risk
attracting the wrong kind of visitor while driving away high-quality
prospects.
That's why, like publishers, inbound marketers
must have a detailed picture of their target audience in order to
create optimal content for them. The best way to understand your
audience is to build buyer personas with these 3 steps: segment by
demographics, identify their needs, and develop behavior-based profiles.
1. Segment by Demographics
Who are your ideal customers and prospects? What are their biggest
concerns, needs, and interests? Where can you reach them – on search engines , social media , or blogs – and what kinds of content do they prefer? These types of questions will help you develop buyer personas.
Personas are fictional representations of your
ideal customers, based on real data about customer demographics and
online behavior, along with educated speculation about their personal
histories, motivations, and concerns.
Start developing personas
by researching your existing customer base to identify the most common
buyers for your products and services. You may have several different
types of buyers, so give each one a detailed description, including
name, job title or role, industry or company info, and demographic info.
For example, a community bank’s biggest customers may include small
business owners and mothers managing the bank accounts for a family of
four. In this case, the bank’s marketers might name these personas
"Business Owner Bob” and "Martha, the Busy Mom,” and extrapolate details
about their responsibilities, the typical size of their business or
household income, what geographic region they’re in, and so on.
2. Identify Their Needs
Based on those profiles, you can outline the pains, needs, and
challenges of each persona by asking yourself several important
questions:
What are the biggest problems they are trying to solve?
What do they need most?
What information are they typically searching for?
What trends are influencing their business or personal success?
Analyzing the path
that prospects take on the journey to becoming a customer is a great
way to get insights about the needs and challenges of your target
audience. If you use a marketing platform like HubSpot
, you can see which search terms brought prospects to your site, how
long they stayed on your site, which pieces of content they viewed, and
which forms they’ve filled out. Such lead intelligence
will help you make better decisions when identifying
the characteristics of your ideal customers and ways to nurture your new
prospects.
3. Develop Behavior-Based Profiles
Next, develop a profile of each persona’s typical online behavior.
You know who they are and what their needs are, now think about all the
ways they research a potential purchase on your site or on others. Here
are suggestions of the questions you should ask:
What do they do online? Do they read blogs? Are they active on
Twitter ,
Facebook , or other social networks? What kind of search terms do they use? Are they email newsletter subscribers?
The result of this process should be a detailed description of your
personas’ demographics, needs, and behavior. The more detail you pack
into your persona development, the easier it will be to create content for each of your target customer segments and know where to promote it.
Don't look now, but you just put yourself on the path to a killer content strategy.
This post is an adapted excerpt from our free ebook, A Practical Guide to Killer Marketing Content . To learn more about keeping those great content ideas flowing, download the free ebook here!