The best place to start any inbound marketing program is by defining your buyer personas which make up the foundation of any inbound marketing campaign. However, building this representation of your ideal customer can seem like a daunting task. To help get you started, here are 7 things you'll need to know about your B2B buyer personas in order to optimize the success of your future campaigns:
1. What Is Their Job Role / Title?
One of the most important things to know about your buyer personas are their roles within their organization. In a complex B2B sale, these roles may vary from decision makers in the C-suite to potential champions in the marketing department. Understanding the differences between these roles and the content that they prefer to engage with is critical to the success of any inbound marketing campaign.
2. How Do They Define Professional Success?
Without knowing how your persona defines professional success, your content and solutions will never be able to create the excitement necessary for them to further engage with your business. By centering your content around their potential setbacks and presenting a path to renewed success, your campaigns will become more successful. With so much content available to your personas, your personalized outreach will stand out.
3. What Are Their Biggest Challenges?
By understanding your personas' biggest challenges, you can create campaigns that will present solutions to these pain points and educate them on how to overcome this problem. For example, if your buyer persona faces the challenge of lead generation, you can set up lead nurturing workflows that present relevant content and start solving this challenge while creating preference for your company's solution set.
4. What Key Messages Will Resonate With Them?
It’s impossible to create a successful inbound content strategy without understanding what key messages will resonate with your buyer personas. What can you say to them that will help them understand that you can relate to their challenges, have solutions that will address these issues and want to help them achieve their professional goals?
5. What Are Their Online Watering Holes And Preferred Social Media Channels?
Knowing how and where your personas engage online enables you to make educated decisions about where you share your content. Additionally, knowing where your personas hang out online can further help you tailor your content strategy. By studying the content they are already engaging with and how they use the social space, you can craft content in formats they're already familiar with and align it to what they're already sharing with their peers.
6. How Do They Prefer to Interact (Phone, Email, etc.)?
Once this persona has become a lead, you need to know how you can most effectively nurture them. Are they receiving hundreds of emails each day? Then an email campaign may slip through the cracks. Perhaps, it would be better to hand off to the sales team for a phone call to follow up. Knowing how to follow up with a persona will enable you to optimize your lead nurturing campaign and increase the amount of sales qualified leads generated by your campaigns.
7. Are They Your Champion?
Lastly, is this person your champion? In a nutshell, your champion is the person who is excited about your solution and advocates for that solution to the key decision makers at their organization. Many of our campaigns focus on the champion persona in order to arm them with the right tools and content and enable them to advocate on your behalf. However, for this to be successful, you must have a clear understanding of the target organization's structure and the roles that fill the champion qualification.
Once you have fully defined your buyer personas, learn how to effectively reach them with relevant, engaging content to maximize the ROI of your content strategy and generate more revenue for your organization:
