As head of marketing, you are tasked with helping sales make the number. Sales counts on you for a certain number of qualified opportunities. The expectations are high, and you must contribute to the company’s growth number each year. How are you doing this?
Many marketers have turned to content. According to the Content Marketing Institute, over 91% of B2B marketers are using content marketing. That is a huge number. Content is what attracts prospects to your company. If you’re publishing a lot of content, you’re probably getting a lot of website visitors. But are these visitors converting? Are they taking the action you want them to take? With the overabundance of content out there, are you capturing your prospect’s attention?
To do this, you must produce content that stands above the rest. And more importantly, you must produce content that results in conversions, and ultimately sales ready opportunities. The question is, how?
Double Conversion Rates
Higher conversion rates equal more leads. More leads equals more opportunities. What is the secret to higher conversion rates? Putting your buyers above everything else. If you provide an enormous amount of value, every day, your prospects will respond.
Here is a 3 step process to increasing your conversion rates to meet growth expectations.
Step One: Develop Your Buyer Personas
Most marketers know who their buyers are. Typically this process involves:
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Understanding attributes such as company size, geography, revenue, etc.
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Performing qualitative research – what are their typical behaviors? What are their goals and roles in the organization?
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Understanding trigger events – what events create a compelling need for a solution?
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Understand their challenges – what issues do they need to resolve to hit their revenue and growth goals?
One thing to note is that this is not a onetime effort. It is vital to update your personas on a regular basis. Want an easy way to do this? Make a conscience effort to have direct interaction with your personas regularly. Schedule a call, or meet for coffee. Use these opportunities to pick their brains to understand what’s important to them now.
Step Two: Identify Your Primary Buyer Personas
At this point, you have developed your different buyer personas. The next step is to streamline.
First, you need to determine which personas really end up becoming your ideal customer. And which ones take more of a supporting role. This is not to say these secondary personas are not important. This exercise just allows you to better target your marketing efforts. Primary buyer personas will be marketed to differently than secondary personas. The content that is important to each will differ.
Step Three: Map Your Content to Your Personas
Next, you must map out all of your content to your personas, to see what you have to offer.
This can be a time-consuming part of the process. Depending on your content strategy you may or may not already be writing your content to specific buyer personas. Download this Content Mapping Tool. It will help you map your current and future content to your persona’s buyer’s journey.
Moving forward, every single piece of content you create should be earmarked for a specific buyer persona. It should also be written for a specific part of the buyer’s journey. It answers a question that your personas are asking themselves while evaluating both their problems and solutions.
Key Takeaway
Always look outward-in with your approach. This means listening to your buyers. The more relevant you are, the more your prospects will look to you for the answers. And the more they look to you for answers, the easier it is to make your number.
