You’ve spent days creating the perfect blog post and weeks on an e-book, but no one is responding to your content. Are you sending the right content to the right customers? If you don’t know who your buyers are, then the answer is likely no.
Most companies have different types of customers; each with their own buying journey and preferences. Some customers may find you through an online Google search, then download an e-book from your website which leads to a purchase. Others may find your company through a social media offer, and after prompted through an email campaign, they decide to make a purchase.
In order to ensure you’re serving your customers the most relevant content possible that eventually leads to sales, you must speak to their persona. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your target customer and can be used to better present the most relevant content for them.
Creating personas will not only help you choose what kind of content to create and target the right topics your buyers care about, it will also help set the tone and voice for your content assets. Perhaps most importantly, by creating buyer personas, you’ll be able to understand which customers are the ones you should be focusing on and investing in.
There are many ways to conduct research and gain important information about your customers. Here are just a few:
Get to know your customers and a sense of who they are. Find out as much demographic information as you can about them, like what their background is, where they're from, job details, and any challenges or pain points they may have.
Conduct interviews and research to get a picture of your buyers. Larger companies may want to speak with their sales team, as they are the ones who speak with customers everyday who have a good sense of buyers concerns.
Speak with both happy and unhappy customers to get a mixed perspective of from your buyers. What do they like and don’t like about your company? Speak with prospects and ask how they prefer to make purchases.
Find out what your customers have purchased, how they purchased a product or service from you, and why.
Ask what their preferred content medium is. Do they prefer podcasts over e-books? Email over social media?
Finally, find out what tone of voice they use. Are they formal or informal? Are they serious, or do they speak with a sense of humor? What's their role in the purchase process? Are they decision maker or an influencer in the buying process? This will help set the tone for the content you’re producing.
You can speak with customers directly over the phone or email if that’s their preferred method of communication. You can also send out surveys or run social media polls to gauge preferences. In addition, you can analyze search terms in tools like Google Analytics to gain insights into what your buyers are searching for and demographic information about them. The opportunities to find out more about your customers are endless.
After you’ve done the research, be sure you document what you’ve learned. Here’s just one example of buyer persona from Humanlytics that you could replicate.
Small businesses may not have the resources to go into this level of detail for each of their customers. If that’s the case, you can simply add any research you have about your customers into your existing database or customer list and go from there to better understand your market. After you’ve created personas for your customers, you can then map out the right content for them based on their preferences.
After you’ve created personas for your customers, you can then map out the right content for them based on their preferences. Last week we discussed the best types of content for customers in different stages of the buying process. You can read that article here.
What do you think? Are there any other best practices you would recommend for creating buyer personas?