How to match content to buyer personas. B2B marketers, how do you make content truly useful to customers? What’s a persona? Tags: Content Let me answer that with a question:  do you know your customers’ needs, desires and behaviors extremely well?  So well, that you know what compels them? Don’t be quick to answer “yes”. You should know customers so intimately, you could write their story. Marketers and agencies have used the … [ visit site to read more ]. MORE >>

I first heard this term "buyer persona backlash" from Jason Stewart of Demandbase during today's webinar with Craig Rosenberg. The premise behind the "buyer persona backlash" is that marketers may choose to market to a Director of IT, for example, but if that contact works for a company that will never buy from you, then it's a wasted effort. This is not necessarily a backlash on personas, but on lazy workhabits of salespeople. Only 36% of marketers consider buyer personas when developing content. Blaming personas is just an excuse. MORE >>

I am often asked which content formats to use in which stages of the buying process. B2B marketers often arrive at this question during the creation of buyer personas and content flows. In a perfect world, there would be some magic formula for content format based on this work. However, I advise marketers to consider that content format is not a buyer persona question, it's a circumstance question. Now, arguably, certain content works better in certain formats. Longer form content is more suited to a white paper, eBook, or Webinar format. MORE >>

Many of the projects I do for companies start with buyer personas. After all, it's a logical place to start as it's next to impossible to develop a content strategy without a keen understanding of the people involved in buying complex B2B product offerings. Marketers are keeping buyer personas in the closet. talk with a lot of marketers who insist they have buyer personas and some who have no clue that they do, but find them lurking in a file somewhere once they start looking. What's curious to me is that the personas aren't being used. At all. MORE >>

One of the key principals he shared was the process of mapping content to the way your customers buy.  One of the things I did at Aplicor was develop buyer personas, map the buying process, industry, and other factors.  Once we understand their specific concerns, we can start creating or finding content to fit the specific need of the buyer at that stage. Two key points raised by Jon in this webinar: Ensure the content is valuable to them, and not just you. Find other content and reuse it (with permission). Here’s an excellent ebook from www.junta42.com. MORE >>