When building content marketing strategy getting to know the audience is essential. Every another step will be determined by all that work done at this stage. Follow the list of tools allowing understand and describe targeting group.
Every piece of content in content marketing strategy is different and requires an individual approach. But before any quiz, video, webinar, post, or articles are written, the targeting audience has its minutes. Precise research, needs and preferences analysis, communications habits. Actually, it is more complicated and takes much more time than minutes.
Buyers personas will be your travel mates during the whole process. It’s essential to create them as good as you only can. It will have the influence on every further task. Start with internal research once again (or have it in mind during planning stage). Get to know your customers. Find out what connect them. Check out CRMs and talk with salespeople. Point out the most important thoughts.
After that, spend a little time in Google Analytics – audience and behavior sections allow you to enrich your research with many additional data. If you focus on B2B customers LinkedIn is a must here. An even non-premium account gives you many filters and searching possibilities.
All that steps described above can be done on your own. In the next parts, you will find tools, templates, and software which help you at this stage of your content marketing strategy.
Get to Know Your Buyer Personas Through Surveys
After internal, Google Analytics, and LinkedIn research you may need to ask about some details. Even the best searching can’t substitute surveys. Here is what you need:
1. Engageform – intuitive and efficient survey creator. Build easy to share, mobile-friendly surveys and get to 35%+ higher completion rates. Make your audience more comfortable to fill questions thanks to the user-friendly design and using one page per question forms over lists of questions. A perfect solution when sharing surveys through email. We know that emails are mainly opened on mobile.
Source: emailmonday
Learn how to create your mobile-friendly survey. See the survey creation tutorial below.
Engageform allows conforming form to target group thanks to many features: different question types (open forms, ratings, picture and multiple choice), extra content to use in questions (gifs, video, audio), advanced design options (blur and brightness adjuster, different themes, preferred fonts, etc.) and easy sharing possibilities (embed code, URL, social media buttons).
See Your Content Marketing Personas In a Full View
When you are more familiar with your personas profiles, you should look at them in the market and population context. Build the background and understand their specific characteristics with theses tools and knowledge bases.
2. think with Google – amounts of articles and infographics. At this stage the most useful section – Customer trends. Deep insights with knowledge gained through analysis of Google search and YouTube watch trends.
3. Bing Ads Insights – a lot of helpful data and content from Microsoft. You can choose articles with industry, topic and content format filters. It may enrich your personas with tons of extra knowledge.
4. MyBestSegments – Nielsen tool allows finding answers to three important questions when creating buyers personas:
- Who are my best customers?
- What are they like?
- Where can I find them?
5. Connectivity – the useful feature to enrich your database with additional knowledge about already gained customers. After uploading customer lists, you can deepen segmentations, monitor interactions and obtain similar leads.
Create Your Buyer Personas
All that knowledge gained during collecting data and getting to know your audience and customers will help you with creating the most authentic buyer personas. Gathering information is always easier than selecting the right ones. This is why you should be focused on the value of the content, not quantity. These drafts/tools for building personas allow concentrating on the key facts since the beginning.
6. MakeMyPersona – a useful buyer persona Word Doc generator, created by HubSpot. You have to answer on 19 essential questions about your ideal client – in exchange, you will receive well-presented persona.
7. Buyer Persona Institute – a valuable knowledge base with amounts of ebooks, templates, insights, and examples. You will have to share your email, name, and company name to get drafts. But it pays off.
8. Xtensio – an intuitive buyer persona creator. A strong asset here – great visualization. With a helpful guide, you will be well-equipped to build realistic and useful drafts.
9. Persona builder – a great platform to create buyer persona made by You & Co. You have to answer 18 questions and share your email to get results in Doc.
10. Personaapp – simple, but easy to share builder. Focused on visualization and easy to get the form. Recommended to all content marketing strategist who prefers clarity over detailed descriptions.
Building the best possible buyer personas requires time and resources. It works well when all that knowledge gathered during the planning process is used and enriched we insights and surveys. Buyer persona creators allow focusing on the best practices. To make sure that your personas will help you a lot when it comes to telling your brand story, follow rules pointed out below:
- Ask the right (from your business point of view) questions.
- Not assume anything – if you are not sure, conduct the survey.
- Your persona/s should be realistic – think of it as an authentic human being.
- Take into account all details you may need at the next stages of the strategy.
- Appreciate the value of information gained thanks to your colleagues from different teams.
- There is no I will remember – all that information should be described.
- Share and discuss the effect of your researchers with your coworkers – be open to their opinions.
- Use the real photos – it helps to treat personas as a people.
- Don’t be afraid to step back and update your drafts at any stage of the whole process.
A creating buyer persona is similar to others types of content preparation. You getting better with every another one. For sure you will have to do it many times because your business is changing and your audience is growing up.
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