Using buyer persona's to create content that drives conversion

Inbound Marketing: 

Where content is king, & the buyer’s journey leads the way

If you are a marketing professional, then by now you’ve heard about one of the most effective forms of marketing out there.

• Inbound Marketing isEasy
• Productive
• Has a way better ROI (return on investment) than traditional marketing formats
• Inbound marketing has a 60% higher conversion rate than other lead generation strategies
• And it’s far more brand friendly 

In fact, it’s so effective that you won’t spend countless hours scouring the Internet, pounding the pavement, spending millions of dollars, or combing through the yellow pages to cold call potential customers.


Finding high-quality leads for your sales team using inbound marketing strategy is kind of like going fishing…

 Except with inbound the fish jump right into the boat for you! 

Why you ask?


Because with inbound marketing, your leads actually seek you out. They come to you!


Yes, you read that right!



High-quality, warmed-up and essentially ready to make a buying decision, your customers actually call-in or email you.


Pretty neat, right?


I promise you, it’s not witchcraft or some mystical alchemy. In fact, it is fairly straight forward and simple to explain.

But first, a little background on inbound marketing.

The ins and outs of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is the process of identifying your perfect customer then creating high-quality content that establishes your brand as the thought leader or expert on a particular topic.



HOW?



It gets the word out to your target audience that your company has the solution.

The 4-Step process for successful Inbound Marketing

1. Identify the key pain points or challenges that your ideal customer may be facing
2. Provide actionable & knowledgeable answers to solve those problems 
3. Convince them to put their trust in your brand
4. And, continue to add value to their long-term goals well after the sale

Once you’ve gotten their attention, and earned the role as the authority in your particular industry, they will take decisive action to work with you.

If you build it, they will buy!

This is easy money!

Also, it delivers easily measurable results.




There are four stages of the inbound marketing process.

1. Attract
2. Convert
3. Close
4. Delight

Sounds pretty easy right? Well, first before you can apply the inbound methodology, you have to create amazing content.

And...

Before you can create content of legendary status, you have to know who your target audience is. This is done through creating buyer personas.



What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer and gives us detailed and research-backed

• Background
• Demographics
• Habits & mannerisms
• And their goals & challenges.

To create a buyer persona, we use actual client research from real data. We get this data from our website, or surveys, or even interviewing our current customers in person.

Once we have compiled our research through our various real-world means, and we have the above details mapped out, it not only becomes easier to figure out what solutions you can offer your potential client, but also what their common objections might be in deciding to make a purchase.


Creating buyer persona’s helps us to understand the issues and problems our ideal client is trying to solve so that we can create content that helps them through the buyer's journey.



Example Buyer Persona:

-NAME: Corey Content
Background:
-Male, 38 yr old, Married w/2 children, owns a modest house in the
suburbs with an income of $120,000
-ROLE: Corey is the Director of Marketing
with a SaaS Start-up
-COMPANY: SaaS Start-up offering Check Approval Software/Company is
under a year-old.
-GOALS: Establish authority in the financial industry, increase
product awareness, implement Inbound Marketing Methodology for lead
generation, Increase Marketing ROI for the quarter.
-CHALLENGES: Choosing the best Content Management Platform for
inbound conversion/Company Website Blog vs. 3rd Party Platform.
-HOW WE CAN HELP: Aid in Research & Creation of Buyer Persona's, and
create Content to facilitate Buyer Journey/On-board marketing staff to
new content platform quickly and cost efficiently.
-COMMON OBJECTIONS: Cost and effectiveness of adding new inbound
marketing Content Management Software/Training staff to create new
content quickly
-REAL QUOTES:
**”We can not afford to contract freelance copywriters to
create the necessary Knowledge Base, white papers, click-bait, and
landing pages.”
**“We have a team of young marketing interns with little experience in
writing SEO copy.”



We have created the buyer persona for our ideal customer, now what?

The step in implementing an inbound marketing strategy is to use the buyer's journey to create incredible content.

What is the buyer's journey, you ask?

It is a 3-step process of discovery for both company and prospect. We then use that information to create and distribute epic content specifically designed to help our ideal client to

1. Discover that they have a problem
2. Identify what the problem is & begin to look for a solution
3. Decide what the best course of action to take should be.

***COURSE OF THE BUYERS JOURNEY***

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision

Through this entire process, the buyer persona we created is our go-to reference when creating content for the inbound workflow.

The content we create would be meaningless without the context for which we are creating it. Content & Context go hand in hand in Inbound Marketing.

Our CONTENT is WHAT we create, and the CONTEXT is WHO we create it for.

Creating amazing content for our buyer persona

Now that we’ve got all the research and legwork done, we’re ready to create amazing content to drive conversions and generate leads for our sales team.

Each stage of the buyer's journey has different content requirements. The first stage being awareness, we need to create some amazing content to attract the right audience and grow our brand awareness.


In the next blog post, we’ll talk about creating content for the Awareness Stage.

We will need to create educational content that gets our brand the attention at the top of the funnel.

This includes content such as

• Research & Analyst Reports
• Editorial & Expert Content
• E-books & Educational Content
• White papers & case studies

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