Like
publishers, inbound marketers must have a detailed picture of their target
audience in order to create optimal content for them. 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 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 “Mary, 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.
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 does he or she need most?
- What information are they typically searching for?
- What trends are influencing their business or personal sucess?
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.
Source: A practical guide to killer
marketing content (HubSpot) e-book
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