This isn’t your first rodeo. You know your business and you know your customers, so why is that every article about digital or inbound marketing starts with what seems like a no brainer?
Define your ideal customer persona
You’ve been told to build these persona profiles time and again, but for most small business owners, it feels redundant. But it doesn’t have to be. Sure, writing a short description of your ideal customer doesn’t do much, unless you are training new sales and marketing professionals, but what about an in-depth persona profile that really gets to the heart of what the people you want on your website actually need?
That’s why this is so important. Let’s take a closer look at what a persona is, and more importantly, how to write content that targets them effectively.
An inbound marketing persona is an avatar of sorts. It’s a high level “bucket” that captures everything that matters about the ideal customer you want to engage with.
More importantly, it puts a name and a face to that avatar, building out a fictional character who can interact with your brand.
Why is this so important?
Because it vastly improves the quality of the content you produce. Think about how differently you talk on a conference call with eight other people vs a quick call to a good friend or a family member. You open up, you relax, you know your audience and you stop being so careful.
The biggest problem with poor performing marketing campaigns is that they play it safe. They use a scattershot approach that never commits. It’s written for everyone, and as such it’s written for no one.
The solution is to write for one person – the ideal persona you’ve defined who should be being your content.
This doesn’t need to be a brain burning exercise, either. A good inbound marketing persona is short – no more than a page and a half – and touches only shortly on background and demographics. The heart of what you need to know is how this person asks questions and how they get answers to those questions.
Here’s a summary of what a good persona profile looks like:
It seems like a lot, but you likely already know 75% of this. It just hasn’t been written down before. And more likely than not, you’ve mixed and matched what you know about the different personas your company has.
Yes, I said personas.
The average small business has at least two inbound marketing personas and as many as five. The decision makers you target, verticals you work within, industries you sell to, and people you engage with on a regular basis likely cross a spectrum of different life stages and positions.
Your marketing should do the same.
Once you know the answers to the eight questions above, the rest gets a lot easier. Instead of wondering what types of blog posts or emails could possibly be interesting to these people, you now have lists of:
That’s a whole lot of information, and without doing any additional research, you should have a half dozen or more content ideas. But we can go deeper. Here are three steps that get to the heart of what these people want:
Step one is to do a bit of light research. There are some very powerful free tools out there that will help us understand:
With this information, we now know the top 10-15 topics related to your persona’s problem. If you wrote responses to all of these topics, you’d be set right there, but more likely than not, you’ll have new ideas to go with them.
If you use Hubspot, open the Content Strategy tool. If not, you can do this in a mindmap or on a piece of paper. We’re going to build Content Pillars that help to structure the campaign.
What is a content pillar? It’s a central focal point around which we can write four or more pieces of content that relate to the key concerns of our persona.
For example, if you are a startup offering real estate search services to millennials on their smart phones, you know that they have questions around things like how to get a mortgage, how to evaluate neighborhoods, what type of real estate agent to work with, and similar questions about buying and moving into a home. If your persona is a 31-year-old millennial professional who has been married for two years and is ready to move to the suburbs and start a family, your first content pillar could be:
Neighborhood Selection
This content cluster will deal exclusively with choosing the right neighborhood based on a number of important questions that our inbound marketing persona may not have thought of yet. Related topics could include:
These topics all relate to our core content cluster and provide value to the reader who may not have lived in a suburb since high school (or never if they grew in the city).
Good inbound marketing content is actionable and designed to help your visitors. It should certainly lead them to your products and services, showcasing items that you want them to engage with – whether an app download, a software demo, or a contact form – but that is not the primary goal.
To ensure your content meets these minimum requirements and speaks to the needs of your audience, write content that solves at least one problem and drives them to take a singular action. Want to do more? Great. But don’t write short, high level information they could find on a dozen other websites and then link to your consultation form. It won’t work.
Content is all fine and good, but the goal here is to make sales, right?
It’s a fine line we walk when building a content strategy. It needs to be actionable, interesting, and educational, but no matter how much people like that content, if it doesn’t drive action, it’s hard to justify the time or money spent.
That’s why inbound marketing persona identification and optimization is so important. Your personas will allow you to speak directly to the core needs of your target audience, address their key problems and concerns, and provide a viable solution they will be more eager to engage with. Generic, high level sales speak may feel like a better use of these resources, but it’s instantly forgettable. Be an authority who is legitimately in it to help and you’ll drive much better results for your prospects.