Buyer Centricity: The Missing Piece in your Content Marketing Puzzle

Your marketers are typically capable of producing good marketing material. From website content, blog articles, social media updates, online advertisements to emails, surveys, newsletters, brochures and eBooks. As a business owner you review the material and most of the time you’re happy with what they’ve produced. It is well designed, it has your brand name and logo, it describes your product / brand clearly and it is interesting. You believe your company has produced a great piece of marketing material. But there’s one problem: this material might not be good enough for your buyers.

It may not generate new leads. It may not convert your existing marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads. Essentially, it may not be successful in moving your buyers forward on their buying journey.

So, what’s missing from your content marketing?

Buyer-centricity

You had great design, good logo placement and excellent product descriptions and that’s great but these are important to you, not your buyers. It doesn’t matter to your audience that your content looked great.

Your buyers will only pay attention to your content if it is relevant to them. With so much content in the online world and target audiences dismissing everything except what they want to see, relevance is key to engaging your buyers and generating results from content marketing.

We outline the main steps to take to ensure you are producing buyer-centric content:

1. Know your buyers

It all starts with an in-depth understanding of your target audience. You must know exactly the role(s) you target, the verticals / industries they are in, their company size(s) and their locations to begin with.

Then build your buyer persona, which essentially is a complete profile of your target buyer. Your buyer persona should capture further detail about your buyers such as their buying process, events that trigger action and other stakeholders typically involved in the buying process.

2. Pinpoint the problem

Knowing your buyer profile isn’t enough for successful content marketing. It is important that you understand exactly the problem your buyers face which you solve with your product or service. Speak to your internal customer experts such as salespeople or customer service officers or even existing customers, to understand the core problems faced by customers, that brought them to you.

Through a detailed understanding of the problem your buyers face you can also work out what they need to solve the problem, i.e., your solution package. With this knowledge in hand you can tailor your content to address the exact problem and need your buyers have.

3. Target them at different stages of their buying journey

Once you understand your buyers’ problem and need, your content will undoubtedly be more relevant to them. But for ultimate buyer-centricity your content marketing strategy must take into account the stages your buyer goes through in their buying journey.

It is widely known that buyers go on a journey to make a purchase. In the simplest sense, there are three main stages: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Again, draw insight from your internal customer experts or existing customers to map out the stages your buyers go through when buying your product or service.

Then, work out the questions or concerns your buyers have at each of these stages. Your content can then be centred around topics that address these questions or concerns.

Of course, buyer-centricity doesn’t stop after content has been produced. You must then share and promote this content using a distribution strategy based on your buyers’ online behaviour. Therefore, in your buyer persona, it is important to note your buyers preferences in terms of the platforms they most visit and the social networks they mainly engage on.

To learn more about content marketing mistakes, refer to our blog on the top 9 mistakes commonly made by organisations. Or, to gain a deeper understanding of buyer-centricity, download our whitepaper on the Buyer’s Journey below.

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