Before your even touch your pen and paper, you have to visualize your ideal customer. Define his or her geographic location, demographic, and mostly importantly, needs. If you’re in the B2B sector, identify your ideal customer’s industry, size, number of employees, years in business, key challenges, budget range, services required, and internal resources available.  This allows you to see the world through the customer’s perspective and ascertain their major challenges. Doing this research is essential to helping you craft content that directly addresses their concerns and showcase how your offering can resolve their problems.

Don’t just stop there. Every B2B purchasing process involves several key stakeholders. There’s an end-user, decision maker, influencer, and gatekeeper. To ensure your content addresses each stakeholder’s needs, develop a buyer persona for each stakeholder to identify their basic demographics: age, gender, income, family information, and job title. Include other relevant information such as: fears, frustrations, pains, urgencies, wants, and aspirations. 

 

This helps you define different kinds of content to target each stakeholder. For instance, if you’re promoting a sales management CRM to a technology company, create one set of messages dedicated to the Marketing Manager and another set for the Director of Finance. The content for the Marketing Manager could explain how the system boosts effective communication between sales and marketing while content for the Director of Finance illustrates how the product reduces manual errors and as a result, cost. Targeted content that showcases how your product addresses each stakeholder’s needs deliver more impact.

Consumers at different stages of the sales cycle use different keywords. Consumers who are in the awareness stage (the first stage) use very general keywords. For instance, an individual who’s planning to buy a pair of runners will use generic terms such as “running shoes.” Conversely, consumers who are deeper in the buying funnel may use more problem-based, symptoms-based, or question-based keywords. They may use keywords such as “running shoes with soft padding,” “need high ankle shoes,” or “which brand sells good runners.” 

 

By identifying the different stages your consumers go through and the different keywords they use at each stage, you can create content that’s specific to each consumer group. This allows consumers at each stage of the buying cycle to find you when they search, and then click through to read content that pushes them along the sales funnel seamlessly.

 

While content is king, it’s most effective when it’s tailored, relevant, and insightful. By using the 3 tips above, you can identify who your audience is, what pains they experience, and what problems they’re trying to solve. This will allow you to develop content that addresses your audience’s needs and show how your prospects can’t live without your products.

 

These three tips are based on our P.A.C.E model (promote, analyze, convert, and engage) which we use to help our clients achieve their business objectives. To see how you can attain your business goal with digital marketing, please contact us to book a complimentary meeting. If you want to learn about digital marketing in-depth, attend our 1-day digital marketing training workshop.