Blogging is one of the best—and cheapest—marketing strategies. It is easy, flexible, and sustainable even without much of a budget. Blogging can be fun, informative, and handy for reaching out to potential clients and keeping them coming back to your site time and time again.
To keep your customers interested, you need to find a balance of topics that appeal to them. To get tangible benefits from your blog posts, it is vital to choose compelling topics covering interests shared by your target audience.
Businesses can use blogs to appeal to new audiences and increase targeted traffic. By understanding and adjusting your marketing to match the types of content people prefer, you’ll have a steady flow of customers.
There are some ways to really get to the core of who—and what—you are writing for. The most important thing you can do is define your buyer persona, which will guide your blogging and inform your content.
So, how do you get started? Let’s get into it!
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who will represent your business’s target audience. Your marketing persona is a description of your desired or existing target audience. You may hear it as a customer, audience, or marketing persona. It’s research-based and defines the people most likely to benefit from or use your product or service.
Creating your buyer personas is a way to identify unique marketing and sales approaches for your target audience. In your early planning stages, define what makes each persona unique—this will help provide more significant insights as you build out your strategy.
Another way of looking at it is to consider a buyer persona as a hypothetical buyer. It is the perfect representation of clients who buy your products and services. It’s easier to market effectively through blog writing when you identify your ideal customer. Your content needs to speak to their goals and challenges.
You want to learn as much about them as possible to provide personalized services, relevant content, and helpful sales information. Your buyer persona information is where you can gain insight that can turn into a convincing story for your buyers—through a blog.
How to Identify Your Buyer Persona
First, you need to identify your buyer persona.
Buyer personas allow businesses to target the right customers, who match specific needs and desires.
Today’s consumers are so overwhelmed by digital noise that all they want is personalized marketing messages that echo their own experiences, inform them, or solve a problem for them.
Often, as consumers, we ignore marketing from retailers. But that is because we are not the buyer persona the retailer is looking to target. Likely, we won’t look too closely at anything without compelling headlines, enticing offers, or emotionally-triggering words. However, there are some that you probably don’t miss, and that is because these are sent with you, as the buyer, in mind.
Buyer personas can be a valuable tool for your content marketing strategy. By using research-based characteristics to help frame your overall target market, you are better able to craft the right marketing campaigns.
The buyer persona is used to understand a specific audience’s needs and can help marketers focus their efforts on relevant leads. This means you can use your personas to tailor the blog information you create and publish.
How are Buyer Personas Used to Inform Blog Content?
Blog content is typically shared to educate readers about the industry, service, or product it’s written about. A blog’s goal should be to help educate buyers on what they should be looking for when they are in the market for a particular product or service, show them why you are the expert in your niche, entertain them, or all of the above.
Most people who come across your content are within the awareness stage of the buyer journey. Your customers want solutions but can’t provide them themselves, so it’s up to you to speak to those needs. Helping them successfully get to the next phase in their buyer’s journey will build your position as a thought leader and help you with your marketing strategy.
Blog content is often more professional and offers more value than traditional media such as videos (though videos have their place, too). Blogging is a great way to get your website content in front of readers who may not know your brand but are interested in the products or services you offer. It’s also an effective way to share with and build your audience, sometimes leading to high engagement rates, conversions, and new customers.
There is no need for hard selling at the awareness level, so blog writing is a great way to gently persuade your buyers to learn more about your product and have some fun. It will also help grow their brand awareness and move them further down the sales funnel.
How to Find Blog Content That Your Buyers Want
Typically, businesses use blog posts for everything from providing information about products to launching new products.
You can use the following to discover and create the blog content that your buyers want:
Research
You can utilize analytics from your website, social media posts, or sales figures to learn about your targets’ interests, pain points, and what matters most to them. This will allow you to determine what content should resonate with them.
Business owners need to understand the customer journey and know what a buyer is looking for before buying from them. Buyers spend a lot of time investigating the right company to buy from. The more you understand what your audience is searching for, the better able you will be to provide it.
Ask Your Employees
You can use valuable information from your employees, especially those who deal with customers directly and create a blog that answers frequently asked questions.
This not only creates an opportunity for you to capture organic search traffic, but it also provides an informative post that customer service representatives can share when they have received an inquiry.
Talk to Your Existing Clients
It is good to talk to your clients about their experience with your company. This can help identify any potential areas of interest that they may want help with.
Perhaps they love your product or service but wish to enhance their experience. Maybe they want to add on and wonder if this is possible. Creating surveys to discover this information can be eye-opening and a great way to generate blog topics. Encouraging people to complete surveys, especially early on in the conversion process, can be a helpful tactic. Incentives for completing can include a discount or VIP status.
Define Who You Want as a Buyer
It’s important to consider what type of buyers you want before trying to write content for them. Is there a part of your buyer persona that has been missed? When you discover this, you can create blogs explicitly targeted to that segment.
Check Out the Competition
You shouldn’t steal your competitors’ blogs, but you can use their blog pages for inspiration and build a strategy from it. Studying competitor marketing can help your company reach its ideal target audience and lower advertising costs. It also helps companies avoid targeting audiences that do not have an interest in your company’s products.
Where Do You Want More Exposure?
By focusing your content on the needs of a specific audience, you will be able to tailor your content more effectively. Create content that addresses the needs of your business’ prospective clients to attract new customers.
Organize Your Information
Remembering your target audience is crucial when delivering a marketing message. Tailoring your message to the individual as a whole will increase conversions and customer satisfaction. Combining this information with buyer personas will help you highlight the benefits of your business.
There are a few ways to target your marketing efforts. You can start by focusing on a few different segments of your market and then expand from there if desired. You can change buyer personas based on the data you uncover. Segmenting buyer personas is up to the individual. Some people may find it more helpful to create individual audience segments, while others might use a more holistic approach.
Blogging as a Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy
Once you have identified your buyer personas, you can use this information to create specific marketing strategies that speak to specific buyer intent. When you know their goals, challenges, and roles, you can develop more effective campaigns for each persona.
You have done the hard work of creating these buyer personas, and now it’s time to put them to use!
So, now you know who you are selling to now and who you want to sell to in the near future. You also have an understanding of their wants and needs. Create content that speaks to your buyer personas’ challenges and pain points. If you have already been blogging, review your past posts and make changes to your existing content so that it speaks to one or more of your personas.
okwrite’s proven content marketers offer a voice that rings true to your target audience. With our team on your side, you’ll be able to optimize your content and use it as a mechanism for growth. You’ll see exponential results with content that people are already talking about. If you haven’t yet released anything, our blogs can help. It’s worth looking into how revenue grows when people talk about your company, and we know how to get them there.
