Tailoring Your Content Marketing Strategy To The Right Buyer Personas Of eLearning Niche

Tailoring Your Content Marketing Strategy To The Right Buyer Personas Of eLearning Niche
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Summary: Creating buyer personas is key for your content marketing strategy. Marketers can focus on audiences that are likely to prove fruitful while helping their organizations pursue a common goal. In this article, I'll share useful tips on tailoring content to preferred audiences so that marketers have a strong foundation for an effective content marketing strategy.

How To Tailor Your Content Marketing Strategy To The Right Buyer Personas

Great content is all about great context, but identifying buyer personas is also fundamental for your content marketing strategy. A brilliant piece on how to crochet likely won't appeal to an audience interested in Formula One racing. Though there are always exceptions to any rule. To find the perfect balance of quality and relevance, marketers must create buyer personas.

eBook Release: Digital Content Marketing Strategy For eLearning Marketers: An Essential Guide
eBook Release
Digital Content Marketing Strategy For eLearning Marketers: An Essential Guide
Find out what to consider as eLearning Marketer when developing your Content Marketing plan.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal, and realistic customer. Comprehensive personas include research on several factors. For example demographics, behavior patterns, and goals can create a clear picture of who might buy a product or service. By creating buyer personas, marketers can focus on audiences that are likely to prove fruitful. This marketing strategy will help their organizations pursue a common goal.

For content marketing, buyer personas tell brands what people want to see and where they want to see it. An on-the-go businessperson might love infographics delivered by email. Stay-at-office Learning & Development managers might prefer longer pieces of content on the finer points of lawn maintenance.

Sadly, marketers who create excellent personas don’t always leverage them to the fullest. They continue to rely on their intuition, allowing carefully crafted personas to wither away. Creating buyer personas is not just an exercise, it’s a creative process that results in a useful tool.

Creating Useful Buyer Personas

To get started with buyer personas, look within your company’s database. It is crucial to analyze trends in content consumption. Which pieces perform best? On which platforms do those pieces find the most success?

Answers to questions like these exist in several analytics tools. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google provide detailed information. They offer insight into who visits websites, who engages with posts and which search terms they use.

Your sales team should also know quite a bit about what your clients want. Marketers need to learn more about their prospective audiences. It is key to pick the brains of the people who talk to customers on a regular basis. What questions do people ask about your product or service? What content does your sales team use when making a case for your brand?

How To Identify Buyer Personas For Best Results

Think about the buyer environment, too. Consider the laws and industry-specific pressures buyers might face. Ask buyers directly about which needs your company fulfills. Don’t limit this research to happy customers, ask the grouchy people too. Feedback from all avenues can lead to a more accurate buyer persona. It will also help you address common concerns.

Every good marketing tool requires routine maintenance. As such, you’ll need to update and revise buyer personas as needs and tastes change over time. Sometimes a buyer persona might attract more attention but not more sales. When this happens you need to examine the identifying factors. This will help you figure out how to distill that persona down to paying customers.

One of the best ways to test the quality of a buyer persona is by leaning on content. If a target audience loves the content and converts, your persona is doing its job. If expectations are unmet and your buyer persona is sound you need to optimize. The problem might be that you aren’t creating the right content for that audience.

Why You Should Leverage Buyer Personas In eLearning

For eLearning companies, buyer personas offer an excellent way to identify lookalike customers and target audiences. Untapped market segments that match existing buyer personas provide obvious opportunities.

B2B selling is a complex process, and no two buyers are identical. In fact, the average B2B purchase involves an average of 6.8 decision makers [1]. Rather than a win over one person, eLearning companies must woo several people who have different priorities and responsibilities.

That’s a big challenge. While no salesperson can convert seven people at once, content can work wonders. One well-written article can address the concerns of an entire boardroom at once. High-quality content works best when it aligns with in-depth buyer personas. In this way, eLearning companies can substantially improve their odds of closing deals.

Tailoring Content To Preferred Audiences

With buyer personas in hand, marketers have a strong foundation for an effective content marketing strategy. The eLearning marketplace shifts at a rapid pace. This means marketers must stay updated on their audiences. Find out what those audiences want to know, and how they want to receive that information.

Consider this 3 step process as an overarching strategy for content fueled by buyer personas.

1. Research And Identify Timely Themes

Set regular meetings with company stakeholders to select content themes. Decide and prioritize over the next month or quarter. Personas reflect the ever-changing needs and wishes of your customers. This is why marketers must maintain regular contact with the people closest to those needs.

This process should not end with a list of specific assets to create. Instead, this research period should help marketers discover the questions their audiences want to be answered. By working with sales teams, service teams, and niche trade publishers like eLearning Industry, eLearning marketers can step up their game. It is important to stay in touch with the desires of real buyers. Thus, extending your marketing collaborations is vital.

2. Turn Knowledge Into Assets

With research complete, for the moment, transform your chosen themes into actual assets. Consider each stage of the buyer’s journey and how different pieces speak to different prospects at different times.

Lean on buyer personas to inform the tone of your content. Someone just discovering your brand might not be ready for sales-forward language. However, someone heavily interested in your company might be receptive to stronger offerings. Try to keep everything relevant. This way you will ensure your content comes across as helpful rather than salesy.

3. Design A Distribution Strategy

No content marketing strategy is complete without a matching distribution plan. Use personas to discover where target audiences consume content, and then meet them on their turf.

Data can make this process both easy and reliable. What does web traffic say about how your audience consumes content? Check for referral traffic from the most popular trade publications like eLearningIndustry.com. Which outlets perform better? What about survey results and social media data? If your company lacks sufficient information, conduct polls or user surveys to fill in the blanks. Even if you’re merely guessing at the audience for your content, at least take steps to make an educated guess.

Why You Should Focus On Your Buyer Personas

Real-world buyers rarely match a buyer persona to a T, but your personas don’t need to be perfect to be useful. Buyer personas will help you visualize your audiences more clearly. They will also empower you to create and distribute content those buyers will love. Better personas lead to clearer insights. So, do everything you can to ensure your research is as accurate as possible before you begin to create content.

Content Marketing serves the purpose of improving conversions using a very strategic approach, connecting and supplying leads and potential customers with real value. Download the free eBook Digital Content Marketing Strategy For eLearning Marketers: An Essential Guide to delve into an excellent method to start building long-lasting relationships by establishing trust, and see conversions skyrocket by giving users the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision.

References:

[1] The New Sales Imperative

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