How do you get people to read your blog articles or other content? Business blogs by their very nature are not as interesting as other content on the internet.
Which is a nice way to say most of them are downright boring.
How do you make your blog more interesting? Well, you write information that your readers want to read.
It seems easy enough, doesn’t it? Problem solved!
Ahh, but how do you know what they want to read? The simplest way to make sure that you are creating content that your customers and prospects want is to develop buyer personas. This means that you know who you are writing to and so you craft the information for them.
A Q&D guide to develop buyer personas
Problem and Solution: What problem does your prospect have that you can solve? For instance, we help people with website design and marketing.
However, usually our clients real issue is that they want more customers. So remember to focus on your buyer’s real problem and how you can help them solve it.
Create: Make sure that you have a narrow view of your target. For instance, selling a solution to a CEO is different than selling to the director of supply chain. They have different goals and different problems. A CEO is more likely to look at things globally than a more local position.
Target: For a persona to be extra useful you need to create a “real” person that fits your criteria of your buyer.
For instance, let’s say that your targets are COO’s of Fortune 500 companies. That is pretty vague.
Now compare that to: Douglas a COO of a Fortune 500 who lives in Charlotte, NC. His company wants to improve efficiency through material handling automation. He has been married for 33 years, has three children, is 55 years old and his hobbies include golf and fly fishing.
Who seems more real? Who is it easier to craft a piece of content for? Douglas, of course. You kind of know Douglas. He has weight, and we know what moves the needle for him.
Give Value: We always preach that to be successful in marketing and business you need to emphasize giving value on both sides of the sale. You need to give value to your prospects by giving them information that has value. Not sales information, but genuinely helpful information.
We already know what their problem is, now give them some ideas on how to solve it.
Segment: Now you need to segment your marketing. It is much more efficient to create content that will appeal to each of your buyer personas. That’s right, you are probably going to have a few. There may even be different personas that you create content for at each company.
For instance, you might have an engineer who is doing the research on how to solve a particular problem. Then you have the CEO who is making the final decision.
However, you might have an influencer at the CFO or a director level. Knowing all of those buyers and having content built for each of them is very powerful.
Interested in building a complete buyer personas? Get our guide on how to Develop Buyer Personas for Your Business.