Blog courtesy of Jacob Seal from Bridge Global Strategies

This blog post is the first in a four-part series, describing the steps to execute a successful content marketing strategy.

Just twenty years ago, an effective marketing strategy usually required significant investments across many different communications channels, such as print and broadcast advertising, public relations, direct mail and telemarketing. The amount of exposure a company could generate for a specific product or service was often predicated on the size of its marcom budget; if you sunk enough into it, you could plaster the entire city with your shiny logo and tagline. But much to the relief of small- and medium-sized businesses, the Internet has brought a new dimension to marketing economics by enabling companies to directly engage their target markets in more meaningful ways and at a fraction of the cost of carrying out a massive campaign using traditional channels.

Today, many companies are augmenting their PR and advertising activities (or sometimes completely replacing them) with content marketing—producing online content, such as blogs, social media, e-books and webinars—to ensure that they are getting found by the right people. When done right, content marketing will help you increase the number of visitors to your website and tap information about them that can help you move them down the funnel of the buying process.

There are four stages to content marketing: develop your buyer personas, map your content to the buying cycle, create an editorial calendar and develop your content. In this post, we will walk you through the first stage, providing a simple process for creating insightful buyer personas.

Stage One: Develop Your Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are fictional representations of your target customers based on real-world information and educated guesses about their likes, dislikes, habits, behaviors, motivations, concerns and demographics. If you have a business plan, you probably already have much of the information that you’ll need to create buyer personas.

Chances are that not all of your customers share the exact same demographic and psychographic traits, so it is a good idea to create several buyer personas to represent each major segment of your customer base. For example, if you are a healthcare company, your target market might be segmented by patients and doctors, and perhaps even further by age and geography depending on your product or service.

Flesh out your buyer personas by including information such as their job title or role and information about their industry. But don’t stop there, also try to determine:

  • Their interests, concerns and most pressing needs,
  • Their media habits (do they read blogs, social media or use search engines to satisfy their needs?)
  • How they evaluate information in the buying process (do they prioritize quality, price, ease of use?)

If you already have some analytics about how your prospects and customers are interacting with your website, you can also include this valuable info in your personas. If you look at their traffic sources (e.g. keyword search, email link, social media, etc.), which pages on your site they visited and for how long, and which forms they filled out, you can use this information in the future to help you better tailor your marketing efforts for each persona.

Creating buyer personas may seem like a tedious task with not a lot of immediate gratification, but don’t shortchange the process. If you invest a little time at the onset of your content marketing strategy to research your target customers, you will thank yourself later when the content engine starts churning.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with public relations, marketing or crisis communications, contact Scott Public Relations.

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