Count Your Personas
Your buyer personas are distinct audiences, so they need distinct, customized content. The operations manager doesn’t have the same needs as the customer services director. Create a separate set of content for each persona your marketing and sales team targets.
You benefit from fine-tuned control of your message, answering the most important questions from each persona. SBI sees many content marketing plans failing to differentiate themselves from each other. Keep your personas’ attention by giving your sales team the tools they need to catch their interest.
What are Your Sales Channels?
We recommend treating each sales channel at its own entity when you look at your content needs. A tweet or LinkedIn update isn’t the same as a blog post or white paper. Before you start freaking out about justifying a massive content budget, look at your existing content. We recommend repurposing existing content instead of churning out an extensive content quantity.
Different groups of buyers don’t visit the same channels, so cut out channels that don’t match the persona’s typical behavior. When we talked about Why Social Media Content Fails, we recommended a 4:1:1 rule. Four posts are educational, one is a soft promotion, and one includes a distinct call for action and a hard promotion style. Use this as a jumping off point for your content marketing plan.
Keep a careful eye on channel reaction, engagement and reach. You don’t want to pound your head against the wall with a persona and channel combination that isn’t reacting to its customized content. Content marketing is not a set it and forget it strategy, especially for marketing teams focused on increasing their audience engagement.
Consider Your Budget
In an ideal world, the marketing team has vaults filled with gold to throw at content creators. CMOs deal with the real world, which means keeping a strict budget in mind. Sales and marketing teams demand a significant amount of content for effective campaigns. This is the case whether they’re dealing with one buyer persona or 100.
Successful content marketing strategies focus content efforts on the top performing channels and personas. Cut down on content creation expenses by repurposing content for different audiences and channels. Stay away from unprofitable content that does nothing but discuss features. Buyers want to know how the content benefits them, not what it does. This content marketing strategy will evolve as you strive for more positive audience action and engagement.
You’re busy handling your marketing team and getting everything you can out of your content budget. Get an extra edge by listening to the SBI podcast. We look through hundreds of sources and provide our own insights in the sales and marketing world and deliver the most relevant and actionable advice. Your time is valuable, so make the best use of it with our podcast.