You will benefit from this blog post if:
• Your Custom Software Development company’s corporate blog is aimed at attracting new prospects, but you are nowhere near happy with current results.
• You are not yet familiar with the “Buyer Persona” concept, or you know what it is but not using it.
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If your blog turned out to be a disappointment, don’t be quick to change its design or shoot your SEO person.
A Prospect looks for a useful blog post on the website of a custom software development company
Better think if you are actually writing posts for potential customers rather than for everyone in the world headed by a Google robot.
A great way to understand who to write for (and to identify the target for your marketing activities) is to develop a Buyer Persona.
1. Who a Buyer Persona Is
Buyer Persona is a personalized profile of an ideal customer (Hubspot). Imagine that all your best customers are embodied in a single person, and focus all activities on him or her.
But before looking into this person’s eyes, let’s take a look at a typical disappointing blog.
We will focus our attention on the company that develops custom software. One of its main expertises is CRM integration.
Here’s what their potential customers are offered to browse through. This is a real website, but we disguised its name, so no one is offended.
Now let’s speculate on a profile of this company’s typical customer and try to look through his eyes at this blog.
2. Sample Buyer Persona
Who cares most about CRM and related stuff?
Meet the Head of Sales.
Name:
Andrew
Position:
The Head of Sales
Demographics:
Age: 35-50
Income: $120,000$ – $170,000
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Sales and Marketing
Work experience: 10 years
Country: the United States
Duties:
– Attracting new customers
– Managing sales department
Daily Tasks:
– Execution of the sales plan
– Motivation of the sales team
– Coordination of sales activities with other departments and continuous professional development of subordinates
Challenges:
– High workload
– Repeated sales quota undershoot
– Underperformance of team members
Reports directly to CEO.
3. How Buyer Persona Works
Let’s see how Andrew perceives a corporate blog described in the previous example.
Why does Andrew perceive blog stories that way? Because they do not provide solutions to his problems. Besides, they describe something outside of his scope of interest.
What he really cares about is how to meet the sales plan. Otherwise, he’ll be celebrating the next New Year’s Eve unemployed, no matter how skillful he is at dealing with Linux terminal.
4. How to Create a Buyer Persona
This is the topic for a separate blog post. But if you can’t wait to read it, here are the instructions. We’ll give you a brief overview:
- Analyze the existing customer base (or conduct marketing research) to find those customers you find nice and profitable to work with.
- Check LinkedIn and Facebook profiles of potential prospects. Pay attention to viral posts – somewhere among politics, baseball and congratulations you will find real business problems and interests.
- Talk to typical representatives of a target audience to better understand challenges and goals of potential customers.
- Summarize acquired information and create a personalized profile:
• Name
• Job Position
• Duties
• Goals
• Challenges
• Demographic profile
5. What’s the Outcome?
After developing a Buyer Persona (or even a few of them), you need to introduce the resulting profile to everyone involved in the content creation.
If all goes well, corporate approach to blogging will change.
Let’s think how our sample blog would look after revision.
This is the company’s stats resulting from an overhaul of their content strategy to the benefit of real people and problems instead of search engines.
Summary
Buyer Persona profile creation should be your first step in all marketing activities.
However, it would be a mistake to expect getting leads as soon as you come up with Andrew, Jack or Mr. Smith.
Buyer Persona is a powerful tool, but alone it is not enough. There’s still a lot of work to do, but now you know where to start blog optimization from.
This post first appeared on Digital Marketing For Tech Companies, SaaS And Startups, please read the originial post: here
