The better you know your customers, the easier it is to create the content that they find valuable and engaging.
The recent B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends—North America study by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute asked B2B marketers about their challenges. What’s the #1 problem? Creating engaging content.
Read more in the MarketingProfs article.
The first challenge of creating engaging content is to understand the audience. “Engaging” is in the eye of the beholder.
Focus on your target audience
Content marketing practitioners talk about developing buyer personas. It’s a great practice. But in reality, many businesses skip that step in their content marketing strategies.
In all the companies I’ve worked with, I can count on one hand the number that have shared customer personas with me. Maybe the process of developing personas is too time-consuming?
So let’s make it less daunting and narrow it down to four simple questions. The questions get progressively more in-depth – the more you answer, the clearer your focus on the customer.
1 – Who are your target customers?
This first question is the most basic customer targeting. In the B2B sale, what type of business are you targeting? Who are the buyers within the business? Who will use the solution? You might have several different answers to this question. See if you can answer the following questions for each different target customer.
2 – Where are your customers?
In the B2B context, where do your buyers work? Where do they hang out during the day – either physically or online? Where do they look for answers to their questions or problems relevant to your offering?
3 – What are they doing today?
What are they doing related to what you offer? Do they realize they need your solution or do you have to educate them about the problem? Are they using a competitor’s product or nothing at all? Do they feel any urgency about the problem?
At this point, the target customer has come into sharper definition. But don’t stop yet – see if you can answer the following question.
4 – Where do they want to go?
What are your customer’s larger or longer-term objectives? Can you help them achieve those longer-term objectives? What are their values? How can you align your solution with their values or objectives?
I said the questions were simple – getting the answers takes time and work. But the payoff is big. If you can answer these four questions for your target customers, you’ll know just what you need to do to create engaging content.
Anne Janzer 