A successful Inbound Marketing program starts with high-quality content. That means creating a content strategy that answers the exact questions your customers have at the exact time they have them.
There’s three key factors in creating a content strategy that generates revenue for your business:
- Understanding your customers.
- Understanding the buyer journey of each customer.
- Understanding how you can map content to answer the questions that your customers have at each step of the buyer’s journey.
In this blog, The Brit Agency will explain how you can develop buyer personas to better understand your customers, how you can use those personas to create a buyer journey for each customer and how you can map content to ensure you are providing your customers with the right content at the right time.
We have broken this down into three simple steps:
Step #1 - Develop your buyer personas
As we covered in our blog, ‘Why Buyer Personas are Important for Your B2B Marketing Strategy’, creating buyer personas should be the very first step of any successful content marketing program.
A buyer personas, as defined by HubSpot, is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. This should be based on market research and real data of our company’s existing customers.
Creating buyer personas is the key to understanding what it is that drives a customer to your business. A buyer persona will clearly define your customers' challenges, their goals, why they would turn to your products or services, common objections, what sources they use to find information, and what influences their purchasing decision.
As a result, you’ll be able to segment content by buyer persona and tailor your messaging to ensure that you are answering each one of your customers’ questions.
Step #2 - Understand the buyer journey
Developing buyer personas will allow you to create content and messaging that appeals to your target audience - but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to deliver the right content at the right time. So, the next stage of content mapping is understanding how the buyer journey relates to each of your buyer personas.
The buyer journey is made up of a three-step process:
Awareness: The buyer realizes they have a problem.
Consideration: The buyer defines their problems and researches options to solve it.
Decision: The buyer chooses a solution and makes their final purchase decision.
To successfully combine your buyer personas with their buyer journey, create a document that lays out the questions that each buyer persona is asking at each stage of their buyer journey. The answers to these questions are the content that will be valuable and relevant to your customers throughout the different stages of their life cycle.
Step #3 - Link the questions your buyer personas are asking to the different stages of the buyer journey
Once you combine your buyer personas with their buyer’s journey, your organization can start to map out and create highly-targeted content that is aimed at answering the questions that your customers have at the exact moment in time that they have them.
The Inbound Marketing philosophy is all about creating the right content and delivering that content to the right person at the right time.
By linking your buyer personas to the buyer's journey your organization will be able to create a content strategy that not only answers your customers’ questions and pushes them further down the marketing funnel towards making a purchasing decision, but one that is delivered at the right time in each of your persona’s buyer journeys.
This content strategy should then be based around creating pillar pages and topic clusters, that organize the content on your website. Over time, this strategic development of content will help establish your brand as the ‘Wikipedia’ on your specific topic matter and will become a revenue-generating machine for your business.
Want to learn about the importance of content mapping and how your B2B business can develop a world-class content marketing strategy that converts prospects into customers? Contact The Brit Agency team today. Our team of content marketing and Inbound marketing experts are here to help.
