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One of the first questions to consider when creating a marketing strategy or any individual piece of content to fuel that strategy should be this:
Who am I trying to reach?
In B2B marketing, there may be multiple customer personas you need to consider as you create your content, each of whom has a different pain point and need that your solution can address.
Consider this hypothetical example:
Registration Specialists is a healthcare IT company, providing registration software to hospitals, clinics and private healthcare providers. It offers a variety of solutions, some suited to small practices, others designed to serve large, multi-location healthcare systems. So, the marketing team creates several different customer personas, each of whom represents a different need:
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Healthcare system CFO: This person is a key decision-maker when it comes to purchasing software, with a tendency to consider costs and revenue recovery potential over all other factors.
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Healthcare system director of registration: This person oversees the day-to-day use of the software, and while costs and revenue recovery are among considerations, he or she also focuses on how easy the system is to use and how quickly front desk personnel can navigate it as patients wait to check in.
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Private practice provider: This person has a small office, with only one or two people trained to use the software, and would prefer something that blends registration, patient records, billing, and insurance claims processing in a single platform, reducing the number of vendors they deal with and the complication of navigating between systems.
You can see that you will want to create different content for each of those personas. But let’s take a step back—how do you create customer or buyer personas? The descriptions above are only a small sampling of the characteristics you should consider when creating your customer personas.
(Click here to learn more about why creating buyer personas is a key part of brand development, or download a sample of a complete persona description.)
Identify these 10 characteristics for each of your customer personas:
1. Job title
2. Typical age
3. Level of involvement (user, influencer, decision maker)
4. Career goals:
What impacts this person’s ability to be promoted?
Who is the competition?
How can this person differentiate himself/herself?
5. Frustration and pain points
What the pitfalls this person faces on the job?
What keeps her up at night?
6. How can you solve the persona’s problems?
7. Where will this persona look for information?
Where does she go online for research?
What search terms will she use?
Does she use social media?
8. What type of information and content will this persona want?
Is she looking for quick information, or in-depth details?
Does she prefer text, images or video?
9. What are the main marketing messages you want this persona to hear?
10. What is the core value proposition for this persona?
With these characteristics discussed and detailed, you have a solid foundation to use as a basis for creating tightly targeted marketing content.
Find more resources about creating and using buyer personas in these blog posts and downloads:
