Diamond HubSpot Partner

Producing helpful content that buyers want starts with knowing who they are and what motivates them. Buyer personas are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers. They’re based on your real customers and include information such as:

• Location
• Age & Gender
• Job Title
• Annual Salary

Buyer personas are more than a bullet list of demographic information. They should document real customer’s pain points in the language they use. These might be in the form of a question, like: “How do I reduce inventory levels?” Or they might look more like business goals: “I need to increase sales by 5% over the next three months to meet my revenue goal for the year.”

There is an old saying: “You can catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.” The problem is that bees make honey, so they are not attracted to it. If you want to attract your ideal buyer, you have to know exactly what it is that they are looking for. Armed with this knowledge, you can now start creating content that speaks to and helps solve their problems. Content can be anything from a blog post or email to a video, social media post, or webinar. The format of the content should also be determined by the buyer’s preferences.

Pro Tip: Optimize

There’s a few ways to optimize your content, but they all start with knowing how your customers communicate problems related to your industry. Using language your customers don’t know won’t get their attention. Spend some time doing keyword research with a tool like Moz or SEM Rush, and search topics and hashtags on social media to see how people talk about your industry.

Optimize your content with your research findings. Search engines are better every day at understanding intent, so you don’t need to (and shouldn’t) stuff your content with the same keyword. Connect related blogs and articles on your website together with internal linking to help search engines understand your authority on a topic. On social media, use hashtags to help people find your content.

You’ve got some new visitors to your website and social media pages—now what? Traffic and likes are a great step forward, but to really engage with new visitors, you need to know a little more about them. Let’s start with a name and an email address.

All the content you put out should be helpful and informative, but perhaps you’ve got something a little more in-depth, like a white paper, original research, or an ebook. Use more comprehensive content by gating them, that is, offering them in exchange for your site visitors’ email addresses and turn them into leads.

With contact information, you can enroll your leads into nurturing workflows. Not every lead is ready to buy, so giving them helpful information via email over a scheduled period of time can keep them interested until they’re ready. Then they’ll be contacting you when they want to buy.

Pro Tip: List Segmentation

Segmented contacts are important in his process, and you can base workflows around the content offer they downloaded or signed up for. For example, if you manufacture doors, someone who signed up for an information webinar about door installation will want follow-up content that builds on installation. They might become unengaged if their follow-up nurture content is about doors for different types of weather.

Congrats—you’ve started closing more deals with inbound! But inbound doesn’t stop at a signed contract and a handshake. You probably already know that it is 25 times cheaper to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one, so this step is all about customer satisfaction.

Content stored in a knowledge base can help customers with general self-service questions, and chatbots  or live chat on your website can assist customers whenever and wherever they are. Additionally, listening on social media by monitoring comments and mentions of your brand can help identify customers with questions.

Listening to customers and helping them as best you can to help them succeed with their purchase is important to retaining them and earning their loyalty. Happy customers offer opportunities for upselling and the greatest marketing of all: referral.