Content marketers have it hard, and we face many problems in our career. You’ve spent hours creating a compelling piece of content, with visual stimuli and some very interesting points. After publishing your content with a self-satisfied smile, you congratulate yourself on your brilliance. Then you check out your website stats and realize your audience is moving on instead of engaging with your content.
We all understand that sinking feeling and the inevitable wave of self-pity when our audience doesn’t love our content. However, there are ways to keep readers interested. If you want to keep your readers, you need to become them. Who are they? What do they want? It’s time to dive into the buyer persona strategy and make your content irresistible.
Creating Compelling Content
Introduce Your Work
Every time someone sees a link to a piece of content, they have two choices. Click on the link to read the content, or completely ignore it. The only way they’ll read your content is if you give them a reason to. A captivating introduction is everything, but most don’t realize it.
You probably spend ages thinking of a catchy headline, but if your introduction is boring, then the headline won’t matter. Introductions should:
Speak about a recent event.
Tell a story.
Use an interesting statistic.
Make an observation about the audience.
Use visual stimuli.
If a headline grabs your reader, the introduction should engage them and make them feel they need to read the rest of the article. Click here for some great introduction tips.
Guide Readers Through Your Content
People want to know what they’re reading about and need content to give them clarity, not confusion. Think of a piece of content as going on an interesting journey. You don’t know what you’ll see along the way, but you know where you’re going and the stops you’ll make. You need to create an experience for your readers.
Try to avoid vague pronouns when writing as they confuse readers and lessen the impact of your content. You should also simplify your writing whenever you can. Long words might look impressive, but they can confuse readers and interrupt the flow of your content.
As you go into more detail, you should let the readers transition between points. Summarise each topic then explain what you will talk about next. This way the reader can follow your content and not be left behind.
Don’t End, Conclude
Just because your audience has made it to the end of your content, doesn’t mean you can end it abruptly. Every piece of writing, case study and video should have a strong conclusion. You need to summarize what you talked about, how the information relates to the topic and finalize your content.
Asking readers to voice their opinions, challenging them or leaving an open-ended question will engage them to comment or share your work and subscribe to your mailing list.
We’ve talked about how to create engaging content, but sometimes an audience will move on. The best technique you can use to keep them interested is buyer persona strategy.
What is Buyer Persona Strategy?
In recent years content marketers have discovered that consumers want personalized content. They need to know you understand them, know the challenges they face and offer an effective solution. Every buyer is different, but they have similar traits. Buyer Persona Content Marketing is about creating content for a specific buyer.
How to Create Buyer Personas
Buyer personas represent your real customers or target audience. They take age, gender, sexuality, and lifestyle into account and look at how these factors affect each customers journey. Most companies base their buyer persona strategy on their actual customers or research from the overall market. This helps them build a loyal customer base and expand their business into other target areas.
There are many steps involved when creating a buyer persona, and you could have one, two or twenty personas.
Research
Research is the most important aspect of buyer persona strategy. It shows you vital information about your audience and ensure you create the right persona. Most companies interview their current customers to find out where they discovered the content, and why they interact with it.
Using analytics tools will show you how each audience group interacts with your content. This is important because it highlights if a certain group stop reading at a point, and can help you see what you’re missing.
One of the best ways to gain valuable insights is through interactive content. Creating polls and surveys means you receive important information from the customers themselves. Once you have this basic information, you can progress into building your buyer persona strategy.
Who Are They?
Building a buyer persona should be based around two key areas of individuals lives. Their demographic information and how they behave.
Demographics should include job titles, financial status, marital status, whether they have children and their daily responsibilities.
Behavioral information focuses on the issues consumers face. What makes them worry? How do they sleep? How do they consume content? What are the answers they’re looking for?
Defining What’s Important
Buyers all have different needs, but every single person is looking for an answer. Whether it’s the perfect product, advice on how to do something, or to expand their knowledge they’re searching and for someone to provide it. If you can give them an answer, they’ll come back to you again.
A great example of this strategy is Google Maps. Before satellite navigation and Google Maps people relied on road signs and reading maps. It was a tedious task and caused plenty of arguments during family road trips! Google Maps gave consumers the answer to easier journeys, and people use it today.
Use case studies, market research tools and get feedback from your sales team about what your customers are looking for.
Using A Buyer Persona Strategy
Now you know how to create buyer personas, it’s time to learn how to use them. Doing this correctly will keep your audience interested and give you a larger following.
Tone and Style
You wouldn’t expect a middle-aged mother and an 18-year-old college student to have the same interests. Your writing style and tone must suit your target audience and resonate with them. Millennial audiences use different wording to older generations, so you should incorporate this into your content.
Keyword Research
We all use search engines, but do we write the same thing? No. Your keywords should reflect your target audience. For example, a 60-year-old man wouldn’t search for “awesome gardening tips” would he? A 16-year-old boy might. Find the best keywords for each buyer persona and use a mix of popular and long tail phrases.
Topic Choice
Buyer persona strategy is all about giving consumers what they want. Finding the right topics is difficult, but by using this technique you can interest consumers. Your topic choice is vital for success, and many readers will decide if they want to engage with your content based on the topic choice.
Your Website Design
We talk about content a lot, but if your website isn’t designed for your target audience, the content won’t matter. People don’t want to stay on a poorly designed website, regardless of how good your content is. Research similar websites and see if you can offer something extra with your design.
Strategize Your Social Media
Your users will have certain online behaviors and a buyer persona strategy can help you find where and how to reach them. Your content needs to be accessible to your target audience. Research which platforms your target group use and if they’re members of any groups. You’ll be able to create an effective social media strategy.
Reel Them In and Keep Them Hooked!
Personalized content will continue to grow, and buyer persona strategy is vital to reach consumers. An Infographic published on HubSpot shows that personalized content is 18 times more popular than traditional content. It will never be a simple task, but engaging readers and keeping them interested is the only way to grow a business.
What do you think about the buyer persona strategy? Have you used it before? Let us know!