Having worked with your SEO agency on creating “Mr. Smith” – the marketing persona representing your target customer – you’re now ready to start speaking to him directly through your business blog and social media pages.
Your research on Mr. Smith already gives you some basic demographics – his age, his income, his level of education – as well as some specifics that will enter into your blog topics.
Your business blog is all about making connections and fostering trust – no small claim on the Internet. You can use all the SEO keywords in the world to push your blog to the top of a Google page, but if your text consists of nothing more than a sales pitch, Mr. Smith will tune out fast. In any inbound marketing, the focus of the content is toward the customer – his goals, fears and interests. What does he want out of his job? Why did he get into this business? What keeps him up at night worrying? Answer those questions, and you will be well on the way to turning a casual visitor into an interested lead.
Building credibility in your business is a key function of your blog. No reader will stay with a blog that offers only rehashed “common knowledge” information. Instead, go for the unusual –give Mr. Smith industry information he may not know. You can conduct research into your industry’s trends, for instance, and create a viable forecast for next year and beyond. Or you can outline a new or different use for your product or service, one that may have been overlooked in the past.
Mr. Smith has preferences – in social media, in browsers, and in the technology platforms he uses most (desktop computer vs. smartphone or tablet, for instance). So even the best business blog won’t do much good if Mr. Smith can’t find it in his typical online dealings. Your marketing persona research will help you determine whether an early-morning LinkedIn post works better than a lunchtime Facebook update for your target. And if Mr. Smith is on the go, you’ll want to ensure that all your content is device-agnostic, meaning it will appear with equal clarity on a big computer or a tiny phone.
Your blog, video, and other inbound marketing content shouldn’t live in a vacuum. A call to action drives Mr. Smith to your landing page, where he might exchange contact information for premium or exclusive content, or some other persona-targeted freebie. It might also encourage him to comment on or share your blog with his peers – that kind of third-party endorsement builds credibility in a way no paid ad can match.
Creating content for a marketing persona is about building trust, and trust rarely happens overnight. Create months’ worth of good blog content to build a library of reference material that not only establishes you as a thought-leader, it also engages Mr. Smith to seek out more information about your company. At the same time, visit the blogs and social pages the Mr. Smith (and his associates) publish, to see how their internal dialogue can improve your blog even more.
