How Buyer Personas can Make or Break your Content Marketing Strategy

Would you ever go into a business meeting with a potential new client without knowing who they are, what they are looking for from your business, or the challenges they are facing? Probably not. So why should your content marketing be any different?

At the other end of the computer screen or mobile, it is still real people reading your content – it’s just another form of business to business communication. In content marketing, your target prospects or ‘personas’ will (or should) form the foundation of every marketing activity you perform. Without a buyer persona, every aspect of your inbound marketing is likely to suffer, and so too will sales for your IT reseller business. 

Before we create content, we always refer back to our buyer personas to ensure we are writing with them in mind. This is because buyer personas aren’t simply a box-ticking exercise, to be done and forgotten about. They need to be at the forefront of your marketing strategy and continually tweaked as your customer knowledge develops. In this blog post, we explore the reasons why buyer personas are critical to content marketing, especially in the competitive IT reseller market. 

Improve lead conversions by solving your persona pains

Working with various IT resellers in the past and present, we’ve come to realise that solving persona pains is the most important job of content marketing. If your content doesn’t achieve this goal, it is unlikely that prospects will buy from you. The majority of your prospects are reading your content for one specific reason. This is to seek clarity for a problem they have been experiencing and to find a potential solution. To achieve this, you need to pinpoint your persona's specific pains and identify how your service offers the best solution over competitors. In the IT industry this can be difficult, considering that there are various competitors selling identical software as your business. In order to differentiate yourself, you need to showcase your unique industry expertise. 

For example, say your buyer persona is a finance director working in a manufacturing firm. His main pain is his struggle to minimise the risks involved in financial reporting. In this instance, an IT reseller who specialises in the manufacturing industry, and has experience in leveraging real-time data analysis to shrink the length, risk and cost of financial reporting, is going to resonate with this persona better than a generic IT reseller. 

Which media types get your persona’s attention?

While your content may resonate with prospects on a topical level, the type of media you use can make or break your chances of lead conversion. Let’s take the finance director example above. Managing the financial operations of a large company places him under pressure, while his role is very time-intensive. As a result, he needs to find a solution to his pain that has proven results, as quickly as possible. For this persona – long, complex guides are unlikely to result in a lead conversion, as the prospect will not take the time to read it. On the other-hand, an infographic, or a slideshow with short points and hard facts is going to be more useful to this persona. He will be able to quickly identify benefits and be able to make a strong case to his boss for using your business as a service provider. 

Talk in a language your persona understands

During your persona research, you will have likely identified patterns in your prospects’ education, job experience, hobbies, income and technical knowledge. This insight should dictate the language, jargon and touch-points you use within your content. 

A persona who has limited technical knowledge of your software (a more senior persona for example), will feel alienated by excessive use of IT jargon. For this persona, content will need to explain software features in more detail, taking care not to isolate or confuse the reader. A persona who is degree qualified in a related field to your software, and spends his or her time reading about the latest tech developments, will be much more comfortable with jargon terms. In fact, a lack of technical language for this persona may put them off your business, as you may appear to not have enough knowledge to meet their needs. 

If you still haven’t created a persona for your next content marketing campaign, or your current personas are gathering dust and providing little value to your content marketing, use our detailed guide to creating personas for IT resellers to kick-start your efforts.