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Tailoring Persona Research for a B2B Content Strategy

Dylan Mazeikadylan.mazeika@buyerzone.com@dylan_Mazeika

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.Persona Definition• Persona goals

2.Importance of having personas in the B2B space

3.The process

4.Benefits

Persona Definition

Far too often the second part of that definition is not explored enough; “…real data about your existing customers”. This type of research allows businesses to turn keywords and search terms and create targeted pieces of content that enables conversion specifically for your target audience and ideal customers.

You’ll be tailoring the type of information your buyers need to make a purchasing decision, in the form they want to consume it.

PERSONA DEFINITION

“A semi-fictional representation of your customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

Sam Kusinitz, HubSpot

Knowing the background about your target demo (age, occupation, personal info, etc.) is great, but it’s more important to understand the sales process for your product and where the purchasing concerns lie.

Let’s say that you drive leads for bicycle companies. Most persona approaches may come up with several personas of different individuals that are interested in buying a bicycle:

WEEKEND WARRIOR DAVE

• Personal background• Age: 25-35• Newly married or in committed

relationship• Education: undergraduate

• Shopping and research preferences

• Preferred communication: Email, Phone

• Uses industry websites and publications/ catalogs to do buying research.

• Goals and challenges• Bike use: Weekend road races• Participate and be competitive• Price isn’t important when seeking a

quality product

CITY COMMUNTER TOM• Personal background

• Age: 19-25• Single• Education: undergraduate

• Shopping and research preferences

• Preferred communication: Email• Consumes online reviews

• Audio forms of content: Podcast, video

• Primarily does research/ shopping online

• Goals and challenges• Bike use: Transportation. Around the

city and for work• Dependable and reliable means of

getting around• Long lasting and worth the money

This information definitely provides insight into your customers and lays the groundwork for topics you should be covering, but it doesn’t necessarily inform you on what type of buying concerns exist for a bicycle purchase.

Identifying pain points and challenges in the purchasing process will define the goal of your content strategy. When you are clear on the concerns that your customers have, you are able to create content and focus on topics that take a user through the purchasing funnel start to finish or pick up a generally informed buyer and convert them on your site.

(Source: Distilled)

By combining these personas with in-depth product research it becomes easy to create conversion oriented content that falls within this B2B content matrix provided by Hannah Smith at Distilled.

That 1st quadrant focuses on buyers and concerns that are at the top of a purchasing funnel, while the 4th quadrant is where purchasing concerns are made, and rubber hits the road for a user making a decision.

Dan Shure at Evolving SEO has recently spoken on the topic of prioritizing these types of content (especially if budget is an issue). • He recommends focusing on converting content first. If successful, it enables

buy in for projects that may not necessarily fall into a purchasing funnel.

The Process

Analyzing a product and buying process, combined with your persona research will provide you to topics you need to cover in the purchasing funnel

Start by identifying themes that are important to the research process in your industry and expand from there. Creating a chart in PowerPoint is helpful to visualize the industry and where the knowledge gaps are on your site.

In the next slide, we give an example of 5 themes that appear to be overarching concerns that bicycle buyers had while making a purchasing decision.

• Top brands in the industry• New technologies in the product• Types/models of the product• Uses• New trends

Bicycles

Brands

Types

Trends

Technology

Uses

Bike Shares New Bike Designs

Cannondale

Custom Bikes

Huffy Trek Specialized Schwinn Santa Cruz

Road

Touring

BMX

Mountain

CruiserRecreation and Urban

Road Mountain/ Off-road Cyclocross

Folding Bikes

Fit Bit/ Exercise tracking

Cycling gear

Carbon Frames

New Topic to Cover

Existing Topic

This bubble chart identifies topics that will create a solid foundation of information that supports that given theme.

In an online landscape that is dictated by semantic search, covering the concerns and becoming an authority on “types of bicycles” will help your visibility for people searching these types of terms.

I use basic coloring here for topics that we already cover (Gray) and topics that present new opportunities (Green)

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Authorship

Establishing yourself and site as an authority on a topic has multiple benefits in regards to users finding your site.

While Google has said there is no correlation to authorship and rankings, having your name and image displayed with the SERP listing can increase click through rate and establish trust for your listing on a results page.

As authorship becomes an important part of standing out in SERP results, covering themes and topics thoroughly will only improve your chances of engines recognizing your site and information as authoritative.

It’s important that the terms/topics you’re planning to cover match the intent of a buyer. This planning is buyer focused, but let’s not forget traditional SEO

Take recreational and urban bikes.

Serving both terms makes sense for a user for sure, but also makes sense from a semantic search standpoint.

TAKING ACTIONThe visualization chart you created (depicting your site’s content) shows you that you don’t cover urban or recreational bikes. Your persona information tells you there is a customer who is a commuter located in the city.

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CITY COMMUTER TOM• Personal background

• Age: 19-25• Single• Education: undergraduate

• Shopping and research preferences• Preferred communication: Email• Consumes online reviews

• Audio forms of content: Podcast, video

• Primarily does research/ shopping online

• Goals and challenges• Bike use: Transportation. Around the

city and for work• Dependable and reliable means of

getting around• Long lasting and worth the money

Instead of just covering the specs and dimensions of urban and recreational bikes, you can put this information in a medium that your persona is interested in (audio content: podcasts, videos).

Video reviews or testimonials of the product would do a better job of converting this user because this is the way they make decisions and do their research.

Benefits

Based on this chart and the color coding, you can see that you don’t have any coverage on recreational and urban bikes. Based on your persona research you know exactly how you should be marketing this content to City Commuter Tom (Video reviews, visual forms of media).

By focusing on these overarching research points that your users need to consider before making a purchase, your site will be in a good position to benefit from the following.

• Becoming an authority on the topic

• Robust coverage in your area of expertise

• Increased authorship in SERPs

• A thematically complete site will improve organic traffic from a semantic search perspective.

For more tips on perfecting your content strategy, visit our blog, About Leads: www.buyerzone.com/blog

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