We all know that customers can’t buy things they don’t know exist. Identifying and reaching them is crucial to the success of any business. With this in mind, defining buyer personas is the foundation for your enterprise inbound marketing strategy, and is crucial for creating and disseminating content that will appeal to and reach your target audience. Let’s look at out how to create your buyer personas and consider the people in and outside your organization that shape your content development process.
Who is Your Customer?
Who are your customers? If you’re unsure of the answer to this question or the answer is a little fuzzy, you likely need to step back and define your business’s buyer personas. Why? How can you target your customers if you don’t know who they are? Create persona sheets that define who your customers are with facts. These sheets might include demographics like age and gender, geographic locations, where they shop, their occupation, and where they spend their off and online time. You should also identify their pain points, such as what they worry about and their wants and needs. All of this will enable you to put together a pretty good picture of your customers and allow you to craft and target your content accordingly. Not sure where to start? Try interviewing current customers, looking at your leads, and talking to marketing and sales.
Internal Players: Keep Everyone in the Loop
Inbound marketing can be a confusing concept for some. It’s important to keep everyone within your organization “in the loop,” while clearly defining each department’s roles and responsibilities. A few considerations for specific people:
- The Captain: This person steers your marketing ship. He or she is likely a Director or VP that communicates with PR, IT, and other internal groups at an enterprise level. They should ensure roles, strategies, and goals within the marketing team are clearly defined. This is particularly important if the team is transitioning into enterprise inbound marketing program.
- Legal: Keep legal in the loop. They need to vet certain content and claims before they’re released. Run content by them before posting and allow extra time for this in your content creation processes.
- Human Resources: When implementing enterprise level programs, HR can help shape performance metrics and how inbound leads are approached. Getting everyone on the same page as far as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) go is important and training might be necessary. Sales can’t call MQLs when they won’t be ready to buy. Marketing should have scoring and automated processes in place to pass leads on at the appropriate time.
Moving Leads Down the Funnel
A great lead nurturing campaign not only has clearly defined buyer personas, but also has clearly defined content. Content should reflect the different stages of the buying cycle that your leads are in, and be targeted accordingly. You have customers that roughly fall into three stages: interested, looking to buy, and looking to buy from you. These are your top, middle, and bottom of the funnel prospects. Automate processes that send leads the appropriate content for their stage. Usher leads down the sales funnel by sending them the next level of content after a few interactions – send top funnel prospects middle funnel offers and middle funnel prospects bottom funnel offers. This takes customers from intro level materials like general blogs and eBooks focusing on your industry to content that focuses on your company and offers.
An internal team on the same page and a lead nurturing program built on buyer personas and targeted content delivered at the appropriate time are key to enterprise inbound marketing success.
About Digital Impact Agency
Digital Impact Agency is a creative firm specializing in interactive media and inbound marketing strategies for manufacturing and technology companies, professional service firms (architectural, engineering, construction, legal and consulting), nonprofits and enterprise companies. We are a team of innovative entrepreneurs focused on creating the most strategic and effective communication channels for our clients.
