How can you create a B2B content marketing plan that targets multiple buyer personas?

Defining your buyer personas is a crucial first step. But let's not stop at semi-fictional representations. The real magic happens when you cross-reference them with real-world data. Imagine this: You've crafted a detailed buyer persona of a Tech-savvy CEO, values innovation, and is struggling to streamline their sales process. Great! Now, how do you find this person in the real world? LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to filter through millions of profiles using specific attributes that align with your buyer persona. By creating a list in Sales Navigator, you're essentially bringing your buyer personas to life. You're not just dealing with hypotheticals anymore; you're looking at real companies, real people, and real challenges.

My team and I tried to decode our buyer personas desires a few years ago. We had data and insights, but a piece of the puzzle needed to be included: keyword research. Imagine marketing without truly grasping your customers' needs. It's like solving a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. Stop making educated guesses, use data! Keyword research offers a clear window into the customer's mind. Using tools like ChatGPT, I unearthed nuanced customer interests. The next step? Keyword research with SEMrush. Remember, sometimes, a group of related search terms reveals more than a single keyword. In short, to truly connect with your audience, delve into keyword research: People's searches reflect their needs. Let keyword research guide you.

B2B marketers truly understand their target audience when they visit the target audience in real life alongside the sales managers. Unfortunately, too few marketers do this. Only after that, marketing truly comprehends what the content should revolve around. The challenges, problems, and needs of the customer are given a literal face through this, and that becomes the foundation of your content.

Data is our best friend in this journey. Recent trends show that B2B buyers are consuming content more voraciously than ever before, with a 15% increase in content consumption over the past two years. But it's not just about quantity; it's about quality and relevance. Tailoring your content to address the specific needs of each buyer persona is what sets a successful strategy apart. Looking ahead, I believe that personalisation will be the linchpin of successful B2B content marketing. We're moving towards a future where content is not just tailored to industries or roles, but to individuals, with AI playing a pivotal role in making this a reality.

This is what worked for me almost every time. - Breakdown industry based on differences, not similarities. When you segment based on similarities, you miss out on a lot of the things that a business's vision collides with which results in people not being able to close deals. When you segment based on similarities (based on differences), it gives you a better idea of solving a real problem for the company. - Creativity and imagination is the key to building an authentic persona. These personas have to be data-backed but at the same time should have a human element to them. - Go for value addition. Talk about how your plan is implementable across multiple industries with minor changes/additions. Generic content works pretty well.

For most companies, the so-called 'Buyer's Journey' is a different perspective of their marketing and sales stages. If you want to define a real buyer's journey - you need to look at it from the buyer's point of view. Not TOF, MQL, SQL. But instead, what triggered the procurement decision? Then comes 'Problem Identification' - 'Solution Exploration' - 'Requirements Building' - 'Supplier Selection'.

Use interviews, surveys, and analyze the data at your disposal to get the information you need. Involve customer service, sales, and all areas that interact with the customer, including the quality department. This is the only way you'll be able to find out what's really important, rather than guessing. Customers don't always say what they really think. And the information passed on is usually not 1 to 1 the necessary information.

Mapping the buyer journey is akin to charting a course through a customer's decision-making process. It's essential to understand the touchpoints and stages a potential client goes through, from awareness to consideration and finally to the decision. By understanding this journey, we at 8leads.io have been able to position our content effectively, ensuring we're providing the right information at the right time, nudging prospects closer to conversion.

With content marketing (and more specifically SEO-focused content marketing), you're ultimately creating a path to purchase through search. Start with the fastest route to revenue — solution-focused articles that are targeted at your personas that are in-market now and have the highest chance of capturing demand. From there you can start thinking about future demand and mapping the buyer journey up to the point they're in-market. This should educate them about the challenges they have in their role (that you solve) and how to solve it, without pushing your solution — it's a trust-building exercise. And when they do become in-market to buy and start searching for solutions — guess who's already ranking?

Most PLG SaaS companies have two customer journeys to pay attention to. Here at PandaDoc we have a sales-assisted buyer journey and a "self-serve" buyer journey. I would encourage you to map them out separately because their behavior will look very different.

Try to define and schedule content pillars and blocks in your content plan. Then add extensions and specifics for individual audiences or buyer personas. Also consider creating libraries of content assets to help you manage your content efficiently.

When aligning content with your buyer’s journey, we need to remember two things: 1. Search intention: the goal behind their looking up. 2. Search mindset: all the other factors that made them look up and also form the goal. When these two factors are researched properly, targeting the right people with your content and making them take the desired action becomes easy.

To resonate across buyer personas, add macro and micro themes to your B2B content marketing plan for brand consistency and to reflect nuanced needs. For instance, a software company targets C-suite executives and e-commerce practitioners. Overall themes are efficiency and agility. Executives seek growth and cost savings, and practitioners value smooth processes and time savings. Another company targets entertainment lovers and executives in select cities. The overall theme is exceptional events. Entertainment lovers want fun and ease, and executives value networking opportunities and exceptional service. Use overarching themes and a lens for each buyer persona for a B2B content plan that empathizes with different audiences’ needs.

Alignment is the key to ensuring your content hits the mark. Once you've defined your buyer personas and mapped their journey, the next step is to ensure your content speaks directly to them at each stage. For instance, a top-of-funnel piece might focus on industry trends and insights, while a bottom-of-funnel content piece might delve into specific solutions and case studies. At 8leads.io, we use AI-powered email marketing to deliver hyper-personalized content, ensuring maximum relevance and engagement.

It helps to find commonalities in the buyer personas that you are targeting. Highlighting relevant needs and interests of different people can help you find overlapping areas for which you can produce valuable content.

Justin Simon taught me this. But rather than just focusing on funnel stage/persona -- I have two types of content I create. One bucket of content is designed for "scrollers" (people who are on social media platforms and the content is designed to stop them mid-scroll to pay attention). The other type of content is for "searchers" people who are looking for content that answers a question, solves a problem, or teaches them something they need to know. I've found this method of content classification is less confining and more helpful for how we script and distribute.

Early leading indicators should map to actual consumption of the content. - Did our target accounts watch the video? - Did the right personas read the whitepaper? - How many members of the buying committee consumed it? The metrics you choose, especially during the first 30-60 days in market, should help answer these questions. Most will skip right past consumption metrics and only consider whether or not the prospect landed on the website or took another measurable step. Start with consumption.

Without clear goals and metrics, content marketing can become a shot in the dark. It's crucial to set tangible objectives, whether it's driving website traffic, generating leads, or building brand awareness. At 8leads.io, we're data-driven. We routinely monitor key metrics like reply rates and conversion rates to gauge the effectiveness of our content. Remember, what gets measured gets managed. Regularly review and adjust your strategy based on data insights.

No strategy is useful if you don't have goals to define them, and no metrics to measure those goals. Now, the metrics for content marketing depend solely on the approach and type of content you produce and promote for to achieve your goals. For example, you are producing blogs and promoting them, your metrics should be: Visits on the blogs, leads generated from those blogs, source visits on the blogs, and so on and so forth. For example, you are doing email marketing to generate leads, your metrics should be: No. of emails delivered, no. of emails opened, click-through rate, no. of replies received or interests received/forms submitted, etc. This way, decide on your metrics based on your goals and approach you took for content marketing.

The whole point of content is to engage your audience, educate them, offer informative and helpful insight, address their pain points & help nurture them as a part of your sales play. So, you need to focus on metrics, but which ones? I would focus on the following categories: Consumption metrics – How many people are consuming your content, what channels are they using and what’s the frequency of the consumption? Sharing metrics – What is being shared, who is doing the sharing, how are they sharing it and how often does sharing take place? Lead metrics – How is the content supporting your demand generation and lead nurturing? Sales metrics – How is the content influencing prospects within your sales funnel at the various different stages?

My current work is to market to PMs and Devs at same time, for different value propositions, (API and product feature) all for the same product. Having different TG, I can't go to a single platform like LinkedIn (where PMs are primary TG), and put in dev's messaging. That's where a buyer's journey can help separate the messaging and TG channels. Distribution of content for the relevant TG on relevant channel/ platform with relevant messaging, is what should be baked in your distribution process. Not to mention, distribution doesn't have to be created separately, it should be the start of your content creation process. Figure distribution first, as it should be baked in your content creation only, rather than being separate.

Planning and execution go hand in hand. With a clear plan in place, we can create content that resonates with our target audience and distribute it through the most effective channels. Our AI-powered email marketing strategies allow us to deliver content that's not only relevant but also timely, ensuring maximum engagement.

If you want to distribute to multiple buyer personas, you need to make sure you’re providing a number of different ways to consume your content. For example: Podcasts - audio version for deep fans of your content. YouTube - for shorts and long form video that will promote to net new listeners (if you make great stuff!) Social Media - for impactful but quick consumption. Newsletter - to engage the audience you’re building. Whatever combination makes up your Media Brand, you want to create a funnel where anyone can discover and consume your content regardless of how they like to take it all in!

ICP and persona analysis are crucial for any type of content: - Homepage / website copy - Blog posts - Events - Social media content - Demos - Sales collateral And so on. In product copy you can use your persona findings to stress their pain points, highlight the value you offer and so on. In content that has the goal of getting traffic from SEO, you can use those pain points to fine tune your keyword and topical research, and come up with new ideas. So there are multiple ways you can use that data, and with different goals (conversion, generating interest, or driving acquisition).

Executing content for several personas can be tough for smaller organizations. One approach is to have a core piece of content and adapt it for each persona. It’s still work because the challenges, use cases, pain points will be different. However, it’ll save some time since you’re not starting from scratch.

Creating a B2B content marketing plan targeting multiple buyer personas involves thorough persona identification, understanding their pain points, and goals, followed by a content audit. Map content to each persona's buyer journey stage, perform keyword research, and create personalized, solution-oriented content. Distribute content through appropriate channels and utilize email segmentation for personalized outreach. Regularly measure, analyze, and adapt based on performance data, feedback, and A/B testing to ensure your content effectively addresses each persona's needs throughout their buyer's journey.

Having a compelling company vision is just the beginning. The next crucial task is pinpointing potential creators within your team. Valuable internal contributors are those employees who resonate with the company's vision and can infuse their content with genuine enthusiasm. Discover these distinctive perspectives and empower these hidden creators. Tapping into this potential necessitates identifying their talents and nurturing their development. Offer constructive feedback, provide essential tools, and allocate dedicated creation time. Encourage them to pursue their passions, and in all likelihood, they will reciprocate by promoting the company.

Beyond the strategies and tactics, it's essential to remember the human element in B2B content marketing. Building genuine relationships, understanding the unique challenges of each prospect, and offering real value are the keys to long-term success. At 8leads.io, we prioritize these principles, ensuring our clients not only get leads but build lasting partnerships.

From a video content perspective, remember that your buyers are humans. They like stories, they like to be entertained, they like different perspectives themselves. You're not catering to a specific subset of people who all think the exact same way, when you lose sight of creating something meaningful above all else, you have failed.

It’s important to remember the whole journey so without traffic, shares and expanding the reach of your content you’ll never be able to scale the volume of conversions. If you’re not tracking a variety of metrics for your content and your campaigns, it will be extremely difficult to fully understand the ROI of individual content campaigns.