No matter how much time and energy you invest in content, it will all go to waste if you’re not reaching the right people. According to a survey by SiriusDecisions:
Irrelevance is the number one reason why content is not read by buyers.
And 29% of respondents said this is their top challenge. But out of the 93% of B2B marketers who have adopted content-driven marketing, only 23% are focusing on buyer personas.
The reason? Marketers don’t have right cross-team processes for implementing personas and, frankly, they don’t even know where to start.
This post covers the three critical steps to building accurate buyer personas, so you and your team can hit the ground running.
1. Document What You Know Already
Gather your audience’s demographic data and online browsing behavior. Talk to stakeholders in sales, customer service, and other teams across your organization to uncover common pain points. By leveraging user information you already have, you can get a good picture of who is engaging with your content, why they’re engaging, and where.
2. Discover What You Don’t Know
Conduct research to uncover persona behaviors, where they go for support, challenges, motivations, and aspirations. Focus groups, surveys, and user interviews are all excellent ways to discover valuable information about your target audience. Document this research and pull out major themes to include in your final buyer personas.
3. Map Personas to the Buyer’s Journey
Map your personas motivations, questions, needs, and behaviors at each stage of the buyer’s journey—from awareness through purchase. Getting to know not only who your personas are, but what content they need and when, is key to making your marketing relevant at every stage of the funnel.
Eventually, every piece of content you create should target at least one of your buyer personas. By aligning personas and buying stages to your content, you’ll be able to see where the major gaps are and how to best fill them.
But mapping content manually isn’t sustainable and hard to implement across the organization.
Learn more about how to build personas—and how to reach them with relevant content—using a system like Kapost. Register for our upcoming webinar, “How to Target Content Using Buyer Personas in Kapost.”