Who are you trying to reach when you publish your latest blog? What is you want them to do after reading it? And how can you be sure that the words you’ve written will effectively achieve this?
B2B content writing is time consuming, so you need to know you’re going to be getting a great return on your investment on everything you write. To be sure of this, you need to be clear on what your business objectives for your blog are to start with. You’ll also need to know who it is you’re marketing to, and all the ‘how’s, what’s, why’s and when’s’ of their preferences.
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This is easiest to do when you take the time to develop a well thought out buyer persona. Here’s what you need to know.
Write a B2B buyer persona
There are numerous tools, templates and questionnaires available to help you write your buyer personas.
Essentially what you are trying to find out can be split into five main categories:
- Background: Personal demographics, educational background, career path
- Employer: Industry, size of the company, geographical location
- Job role: Role, title, position in the company hierarchy, job requirements, skills, knowledge and tools, reporting metrics, measures of success and responsibility portfolio
- Challenges: What do they need help with, what causes them problems, how do your products or services solve those problems
- Social platforms: Information sources, blogs and publications they read, social networks and forums they use.
With answers to these questions you’re one step closer to knowing what makes your persona tick. You’ll be able to start piecing together the elements of the jigsaw that will put your products and brand right in front of their noses, just when they need them.
Think about how this persona likes to be sold to, what he or she values in a product or brand and what type of information they are going to need in order to make a purchase decision. Once you know all this, you can begin to see how parts of these requirements can be met by your blog, and how your buyer persona can help you form more effective blog topics, content and voice.
Align your content with your buyer personas
Once you know what your buyer personas are all about, you can get to work putting this into action by making sure your blog is ticking their boxes. Here are some ideas for putting buyer personas to work in a content marketing environment:
- Review your ad spending: Through the creation of buyer personas, you should have a better understanding of where your audience hangs out online. This means you can reallocate spending on advertising to make sure you’re targeting the right market. For example, if you know your buyers are on Facebook a lot, you can allocate more spend to promoting your blog here.
- Speak their language: If you know who your buyer is, you should know what their lingo is too. Use their buzzwords in your blogs, and become a trusted part of their community by speaking their own language in everything you do.
- Create persona specific blog posts: No doubt you’ve got a few different buyer personas amongst your audience, which gives you many opportunities to really target your content at each individual one. Now and then, throw out a persona specific blog post targeting niche keywords to embrace the diversity of your audience.
- Do some co-marketing with cool companies: Get your buyers favourite brands to cooperate with you on marketing. Share offers, guest blog post for each other and cement your position as a top brand for your buyers.
By keeping your buyer persona in mind when you’re choosing your topics, your language and the marketing of your blog posts, you’re more likely to end up in front of the right person more often.
What are your objectives for your B2B content?
While you are thinking about aligning your content to appeal to your buyer personas, it’s crucial you look at everything in the context of your business objectives so that you’re driving your buyers in the right direction. Think about why you’re blogging, could it be to…
- Raise awareness?
- Increase brand recognition?
- Drive signups?
- Drive website traffic?
- Boost sales?
- Lead generation?
There are many more objectives that you could be looking to meet through the creation of your blog, sometimes more than one at a time. For this reason, it’s important you understand the purpose of your blog and how your content is going to support the overarching business objectives you’ve identified.
By considering both your buyer personas and your business objectives, you should be able to create amazing blog campaigns that both appeal to your audience and aim to drive your business forwards.
Execute this well, and you could be reaping the benefits in no time.
