To accomplish this, it is necessary to create and execute a marketing strategy, which includes content production and other actions, as a way to prospect consumers.

It works like a conversation, allowing you and your audience to build a relationship.

However, will your strategy ever work if you try to talk to everyone?

No, because if you decide to speak to everyone, nobody will hear you. The reason for that is simple: people have different needs, opinions, pain points, and challenges. So, if you want their attention, they should see that you understand their particularities and want to help them.

To achieve this objective, and accurately reach your audience, you should start by building a buyer persona, also known as a persona. Creating it is the basis of a Digital Marketing strategy.

This content will cover the following topics:

What Is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer. 

Creating it requires careful work that includes market research, customer data that you already have, and even some assumptions.

Check out this animated infographic to get a clear picture of what we are going to discuss in this article:

Once you build your persona’s profile and describe its characteristics in detail, you will be able to address your Marketing efforts to the right people.

After all, if you know your ideal customer “in person”, it is easier to talk to them about things they are interested in.

The concept of buyer persona was created by Alan Cooper, a software designer, and programmer. It became popular with Inbound Marketing.

Nowadays, it is helping businesses and marketers all over the world to reach customers, establish a relationship with them, and make more sales.

Now that you know the theory, how about understanding the concept of persona in practice?

First of all, imagine a company that offers CRM software. How would its persona look? Let’s see the following topic.

Buyer Persona Examples

First, we would like to recommend you take advantage of the Buyer Persona Generator from Rock Content. Use your creativity and try to connect the personas to your business.

William, 35 years old, married, has a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and a busy professional routine, although he tries to find a balance between work and family.

He works as a Marketing Manager for a company that supplies kitchen equipment to restaurants.

Pain points

Since the company’s early days, he has been working with spreadsheets to keep track of its customer base, which is growing fast.

Thus, he realizes that an old method is no longer an efficient tool, and the members of his team are complaining about their difficulties in using spreadsheets.

For this reason, he has been talking to the CEO about the possibility of acquiring a CRM system.

However, his boss thinks that spreadsheets are still an effective method of tracking sales and keeping a good relationship with customers.

Communication

William frequently searches CRM-related terms on Google, aiming to find the ideal solution for their problem.

He even asks for more information when he finds a system that he likes, and also wants to complete his benchmark by email.

He is on LinkedIn, where he regularly consumes content to keep up with his area, as well as on Facebook, which he uses for personal purposes. Also, Willian likes to watch the news on YouTube.

Solution

Because their business involves a lot of transactions and communications with customers, as well as orders with special requests, they need a CRM system with some specific characteristics.

For example, it must be easy to use and intuitive. Besides, it should be scalable, since the company will keep on growing.

Also, the software has to integrate with their email solution so that they can automate communication with leads and customers.

Finally, it must offer segmentation features, which will facilitate the Marketing and Sales departments’ work.

Below, you can find another three examples of buyer personas. They’re more concise than the one presented above and suggest a slightly different structure, also valuable.

1. Martin Mann

Target Product Line: Household Appliances and Equipment

• Martin’s Details ‒ Martin is a working dad with two children, ages 8 and 3. He is 36 and lives with his wife Paula in Georgia. They have a combined household income of $100,000. The family rents a home in the suburbs.
• Martin’s Pain Point ‒ As a busy dad, Martin is looking for products to help him squeeze as much time out of his day as possible. He wants to spend more time interacting with his kids, but he also has a household to keep up with.
• Martin’s Objections ‒ Even with a decent household income, money is always tight because of high bills. He wants affordable products that won’t put him into debt.
• Martin’s Goals ‒ He wants to be able to take care of household chores as easily as possible and spend more time with his kids.
• Potential Sales Pitch ‒ Cooking products that allow Martin to prepare meals faster and more efficiently. Also, cleaning tools to help with children’s toys and household items.

2. Samantha Grey

Target Product Line: Outdoor Equipment

• Samantha’s Details ‒ Samantha is a working professional who is single but actively dating. She is 28 and lives in an apartment in Los Angeles. She makes $85,000 a year.
• Samantha’s Pain Point ‒ She loves to go hiking and exploring, but it’s tough to plan a trip to the mountains. She wants to have convenient outdoor gear, so she can go whenever the opportunity arises.
• Samantha’s Objections ‒ She doesn’t want gear that is too heavy or takes up too much room in her bag. She also doesn’t want to waste money on cheap products that won’t last.
• Samantha’s Goals ‒ To spend more time outdoors hiking, biking, and exploring more of the natural wilderness. She has a few dream hikes she’s planning for the future.
• Potential Sales Pitch ‒ Hiking boots and clothes that are low-maintenance and built to last. Also, outdoor equipment can come in handy for her long-distance dream hikes (i.e., backpack, mini camp stove, etc.).

3. Jennifer Jewel

Target Product Line: Fashion and Accessories

• Jennifer’s Details ‒ Jennifer is a manager at a tech firm, and she’s actively dating and looking for the right guy. She is 31 and rents an apartment in a swanky part of New York. She makes $180,000 per year.
• Jennifer’s Pain Points ‒ She likes looking her best when she goes out on the town, but she can’t afford luxury prices at the moment. She doesn’t want cheap-looking products, either.
• Jennifer’s Objections ‒ If a piece looks too chintzy or cheap, she won’t want it. She also wants items that she can resell on consignment to fund her next batch of clothes.
• Jennifer’s Goals ‒ She wants to make enough money to have the wardrobe of her dreams, and she wants to travel more with a special person.
• Potential Sales Pitch ‒ Trendy accessories that can accentuate haute couture outfits. Clothing that is both functional and chic, and will last long enough for Jennifer to resell it at a decent price. Travel accessories and clothing may also be a good fit.

What Are The Types of Buyer Personas?

This could be a tricky question. If you look for off-the-shelf persona models to implement in your strategy, you may miss most of the benefits we have covered in this text.

This is because, as you know, each business has its particularities that must be considered when defining the objectives. Therefore, they must also be taken into account when developing the buyer persona. 

In other words, do not look for ready-to-use personas. Instead, build your own based on the specifics of your audience and of your business. 

Having said that, there is a way to categorize buyer personas. First, you should know that there is a big difference between B2B and B2C customers, so personas for these two business modalities have some details that differentiate them. 

B2C personas

If you are in the B2C market, you are dealing with the final buyer of a product or service. In other words, your consumer wants to satisfy their own needs and desires.

B2B personas

B2B transactions involve buyers who not only have individual characteristics but also carry the needs and conditions of the companies that employ them. 

In this way, B2B personas might be considered a bit more complex. They blend the particularities of the types of businesses that might be interested in your solutions with the individual traits of the people responsible for closing deals.

What Is a “Negative” Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is designed to be a depiction of what you believe your ideal customer looks like. A negative buyer persona, on the other hand, is a representation of what you do not want your ideal customer to be.

For instance, a negative buyer persona may include people who are within a lower income bracket and are unlikely to afford your product. It may also include prospective customers who are simply too expensive to acquire.

More often than not, the information needed to create these negative personas will be found within your customer service and sales departments. You want to hone in on the traits of customers who had high acquisition costs, took a long to close, were just simply challenging, etc.

By creating negative buyer personas along with your regular buyer personas, you can better understand and identify those who are and are not a good fit for your service or product. You can fine-tune your marketing messaging and strategies to bring in a higher number of qualified leads.

Now, when it comes to the negative buyer persona, make sure to create it last. You want to focus on your ideal customers first, and then you can turn your focus to creating a profile for potentially problematic customers.

In the end, negative buyer personas will save you both time and money by not focusing on prospects who aren’t a good fit.

Target Audience vs Buyer Persona: What’s the Difference

I know we’ve already mentioned it here, but are you truly familiar with the concept of a target audience? It is important to know the differences between it and the idea of a persona.

Firstly, a target audience includes more general data, that is, demographic information of people that are more likely to become your customers.

A target audience profile can also include socioeconomic and behavioral aspects, although not as detailed as the persona’s characteristics. It has been widely used in offline marketing campaigns.

Some target audience examples to help you understand the concept:

• Marketing managers, 35 to 45 years old, working in companies in the state of New York;
• Men and women, 30 to 40 years old, middle class, owning dogs;
• Women, 25 to 35 years old, middle class, interested in DIY (do it yourself).

As you can see, a persona’s profile gathers much more information about the people you want to reach. But why is it so important?

9 Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas

Because they have such an impact on the Marketing department, it is natural that buyer personas benefit the business as a whole.

Of course, more efficient Marketing strategies expand the company’s reach and enable it to attract more customers, which consequently results in profits. But the introduction of a persona in your strategies brings advantages that go beyond the fulfillment of commercial goals.

1. Higher ROI

The idea behind creating a buyer persona is to facilitate the segmentation of the public so that the brand directs its Marketing and communication efforts to people who have a real possibility of becoming customers.

This means not only an increase in profits from sales but also an even greater growth in your ROI.

This effect is a result of the increased efficiency of the actions directed toward your audience. The persona serves as a guide to make these efforts in the most accurate way possible, avoiding spending time and resources unnecessarily.

If your ideal client is not a Facebook user, for example, there is no reason to allocate employees to produce content for this particular network. That way, you can find more effective means of investment.

You can also fit the persona into a paid ads strategy. As you know, tools like Google Ads and Facebook Ads allow you to target your campaigns to specific audiences, which you can customize according to interests and demographic factors.

Thus, if your business takes the buyer persona’s characteristics as the basis, you will ensure campaigns with much higher ROI levels.

2. Greater market authority

A company that can impact the right audience tends to grow quickly, gaining market share.

The persona helps you communicate more effectively with your potential consumers, conveying your brand’s values and visions through a solid, consistent approach.

The natural consequence is that people will start talking about your business, generating what we know as Word of Mouth Marketing.

In the age of consumer 4.0, this generates immeasurable benefits for the company. If your message impacted your persona, they will mention your brand positively in forums, social media, and other communication channels.

Today’s audience places a lot of importance on recommendations from other people, and they tend to share these recommendations with others. This creates a cascade effect that helps consolidate your company as an authority in the market.

3. Generation of brand advocates

Brand advocates are customers who grow so loyal to a brand that they become its staunchest advocates.

Not only do they fill social media with positive comments and share your content, but they also form a loyal buyer base. No matter what happens: they will continue to consume your products.

Great, isn’t it? But creating these advocates is a huge challenge for any company.

The Buyer Persona works as a facilitating tool in this process. By relying on the semi-fictional character to create content, develop products, and position itself with contemporary issues, the company can address its main pain points, needs, desires, etc.

In this way, you create a bond that goes beyond the customer-brand relationship, paving the way for high loyalty levels.

4. Improved communication with the public

The persona serves not only to guide the communication efforts made by the marketing team but by the entire company.

This involves, for example, customer service. This is one of the most critical points of interaction with the public, since it is usually the channel where customers go to make complaints and solve doubts.

Therefore, it is necessary to intelligently define the approach that will be used in this medium, including issues such as tone of voice and recommended expressions.

For this reason, we recommend creating a style guide that covers all areas of the company and clearly defines how employees should behave while interacting with people.

This guide should be based on the persona’s main characteristics, just like in a Content Marketing strategy. With positive interactions, you pave the way for a more long-lasting relationship.

5. Enablement of Smarketing strategy

The processes that involve the attraction, qualification, and conversion of leads become much more effective if they involve the Marketing and Sales departments working together.

The alignment of these two sectors is what we call a Smarketing strategy.

This approach aims to exchange insights between salespeople and marketers, facilitating the creation of experiences and triggers capable of moving the lead along the sales funnel and enabling its conversion into a client. 

The structuring of a persona is fundamental in this process since it allows members of all teams, both in Marketing and Sales, to have the same ideal customer as their primary reference.

This way, in addition to maintaining constant communication and pursuing the same goals, both departments can create more accurate strategies to achieve their objectives.

6. A better understanding of your customer

Imagine you’ve just met a person and you want to establish a pleasant conversation. Maybe you agree that you will be more likely to accomplish that if both of you share common interests, right?

So, as the person talks about their interests, goals, and challenges, you can tell them your opinion and even offer suggestions.

In the relationship between your business and your customer, the same occurs. Once you have a complete profile of your ideal client, you will be more likely to be empathetic, and your prospect will feel you understand and want to help.

7. Higher efficiency

Directing your Marketing efforts toward a persona will help to save time and money. You will have a higher chance of reaching people who have the exact problems your product or service is meant to solve.

Thus, with less time and money spent, the cost of attracting each customer is lower.

8. Accurate segmentation

If you have a buyer persona, you can segment your communication according to people’s preferences. Think, for example, about the language you should use.

Do your prospects like to talk formally or informally? What vocabulary do they use? Do they prefer reading a text with technical terms? Would they like it if you use emojis?

Segmentation also includes appropriate content, according to the customer journey stage that your lead is in.

For example, if the person is at the awareness stage, he needs more educative and general content, which is present in blog posts and infographics. At the decision stage, interactive calculators and case studies would be welcome.

When you have a buyer persona, you can answer all these questions. Thereby, you will help your customers to move through the customer journey, which will increase the number of sales and, of course, revenue.

9. More persuasive approach

Because objections are a natural element of a negotiation, you must be prepared to clear up your prospects’ doubts.

However, if you have a persona in mind, it is also possible to predict issues that may come up and cover them, for example, in blog posts, ebooks, and case studies.

Besides that, you will be able to clear up possible questions in the content of your emails, so your approach will be more persuasive. If you do so, your email marketing strategy will be more effective.

Localization and International Buyer Personas

If you’re running a business with customers around the world, you must take an even more careful approach to creating buyer personas. While the broad details may be similar across borders and continents, there are a few other factors to consider when developing international customer profiles.

Search trending keywords

People may search for products and services with different keywords in their home country. What you can do is use Google with an anonymous browser window and the country’s extension code. For example, in the UK, the code is .uk, and in Chile, the code is .cl.

Searching for trending keywords in each country will help you identify how people search in the region, which can give you insight into their thought processes. Also, you may discover that some topics or products are trending much higher in one country than another.

Look at competitors

The top brands in a country can tell you a lot about how people shop and browse products in that country. So, doing some competitor research can tell you what’s working and what isn’t. While you don’t want to copy any of your competitors directly, you can pay attention to elements like:

• Color Schemes ‒ What colors are used for logos and ads within your industry? Colors can have different local connotations, sometimes by association with a particular brand or product.
• Copy ‒ What kind of slogans and copywriting do local competitors use? Are there turns of phrase that locals understand that would be lost on a different audience? Does the copy change from one region to another (i.e., North India vs. South India)? Also, keep in mind that direct translations are often incorrect. Instead, it’s better to have a native speaker translate ads to catch any nuances or context clues.
• Imagery ‒ What images or graphics are used in advertisements and content pieces in your target region? Do companies rely on photos or illustrations more? What about the typography?

Conduct audience research

Finally, the best way to develop a buyer persona is to speak with individuals from the region. You can do this via surveys or questionnaires, but make sure to incentivize respondents so you can get as much feedback as possible.

In addition to surveys, A/B testing can help you refine your messaging and landing page layouts to see what elements attract the most attention.

The 2 Most Common Questions When Creating a Persona

Let’s get to it:

1. Do small businesses need a buyer persona?

It is easy to understand how this tool can help giant companies with large numbers of employees and customers. But is it suitable for smaller clients? The emphatic answer is yes. 

Even a self-employed dog walker needs to better understand their audience if the goal is to extend their customer base and increase their revenue. 

2. How many personas should be created?

Should I create only one? Can I create as many as I want?

At this point, it is necessary to act according to your reality. If you sell products/services to audiences or markets with different characteristics, it makes a lot of sense to create more than one persona, so you don’t need to limit it to one. 

However, it is essential not to exaggerate. Working with too many different personas can lead to confusion in your communication strategy and weaken your messages.

With this in mind, you can work out the ideal number for your company. 

What Are The 5 Main Errors When Creating A Buyer Persona?

You already know the main steps to creating effective buyer personas. Now, it’s time to understand some of the worst mistakes companies make in this process. This way, you can prevent them and ensure better results for your strategies.

1. Using too many assumptions

Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters. This means that you should not develop them based on assumptions but rather through serious behavioral research and data analysis. 

To get relevant information for creating your persona, it is essential to conduct interviews with real people. We will talk more about this later. 

2. Overusing demographic information

Using demographic information is undeniably vital for building a buyer persona. However, you should not pay too much attention to this factor.

Your persona should get as close as possible to your potential customers’ real conditions, highlighting their pains, desires, needs, dreams, hobbies, and many other elements that cannot be captured purely by demographic research. 

3. Interviewing the wrong people

When setting up interviews to collect data for your persona, it is essential to properly define the people that will participate in the process.

You know that the goal is to find your ideal customer, but who exactly is that? You need to think about this question and define, first of all, to whom your company wants to sell its products and services. 

When defining the interview list, many companies stick to the customers they already have. Although they are important in the process, limiting yourself to interviewing current clients result in inferior buyer personas.

4. Having Too Many Personas

There is no one-size-fits-all number when it comes to the number of buyer personas you should create. There are several factors that contribute to the number of personas you need. These may include the different industries you serve and the number of offerings you have available.

However, creating too many personas, especially in the beginning, can overwhelm you and be incredibly distracting. Further, a high number of buyer personas will divide your marketing efforts, keeping you from focusing on the necessary actions to drive optimal results.

This is especially true if there is any overlapping between the profiles. After all, each buyer persona should be unique to ensure your message is vastly different and tailored to that specific persona. You need to be able to create content that will resonate with potential customers and not confuse them.

Ideally, you should start with no more than three different buyer personas. These should focus on the ideal customer segment that provides the greatest opportunities and value for your business moving forward.

New buyer personas can be added at a later date if you want to expand into a new market or target a new audience when your product offerings grow.

5. Making Profiles Based Just on Stereotypes

When profiling your target audience, it can be easy to rely on various forms of stereotypes. If you allow bias to enter your buyer persona profiles, you will not be creating a realistic image of who your ideal customer is.

Instead, when stereotypes and personal bias enter the process, your personas will be reflecting the desires and wishes of the company. The use of real data can help reduce the risk of bias being injected into your buyer personas.

How Does a Persona Affect Your Content Production?

When you have a persona and know your prospects and customers, you can understand the purchasing process.

This knowledge will affect your content production because people need different types of content as they go through the stages of the customer journey.

Awareness stage

Think about a person who has just found your blog. To solve a problem, they probably searched a keyword on Google and found you.

Because he is at the awareness stage, he will need educative and more general content, which he will find in blog posts, infographics, and videos.

Evaluation stage

As the prospect goes to the evaluation stage, you should offer, for example, ebooks, webinars, whitepapers, and newsletters, among others.

Decision stage

Finally, the person gets to the decision stage, where they need to make a decision: to buy or not.

To help them make the best decision, there are some appropriate types of content, such as case studies, free trials, discount coupons, and even a chat with a consultant.

You can see that the type of content depends on the customer journey stage the person is at. If you build your persona properly, your content strategy will be more effective, and you will be more empathetic and engaging.

What is The Relationship Between The Buyer Persona And The Buyer’s Journey?

Just like the persona, the buyer’s journey is a very widespread and relevant concept in the Digital Marketing field.

Both ideas are interrelated within any mature strategy since they have to do with the efforts to approach leads in the best possible way.

Thus, the buyer persona establishes who to approach, while the buyer’s journey indicates when to approach them. 

It is vital to understand how the two tools are intertwined. If you have a strong buyer persona, you can map out effective ways to influence their buyer’s journey.

In turn, this journey needs to be closely monitored to ensure that the lead has access to the right content at the right time.

If a lead is still in the awareness phase and receives content from the bottom of the funnel, for example, the whole strategy may lose its effectiveness.

How To Create Great Content For Your Persona?

Once you have established your persona(s), it’s time to create impactful content that resonates with them.

The first step is to define the channels where such materials will be available. The ideal is to be present on all networks where your persona has the habit of browsing, as well as establish a blog to centralize your content and increase your digital authority. 

Although every channel is essential, in some cases, it is necessary to focus on just a few.

If your persona is a young adult, for example, she’s probably not a Facebook heavy-user. In this case, producing content for Instagram and YouTube would make a lot more sense. 

In addition, you need to define the content format. Some people are more attracted to videos than text. Others prefer reading an article while commuting to watching a webinar. It is essential to understand these particularities to improve your approach constantly. 

In the bigger picture, we can say that creating great content depends on identifying trends that appeal to your persona and offering unique experiences.

You can accomplish this through Interactive Content, which generates about 88% more engagement than static content. This is a trend in the content sector and will help you capture and retain your ideal customer’s attention. 

You can also count on content creation platforms like WriterAccess and connect to thousands of freelance writers, editors, strategists and proofreaders that can craft the ideal content for your persona.

How To Create a Buyer Persona In 4 Steps!

As we already said, to create a buyer persona, we can’t rely on assumptions alone. Some inferences may indeed be necessary, but most of the work depends on surveys, which can be done using interviews or forms.

If you ask the right questions, you will be able to gather all the information you need to build an accurate buyer persona. Let’s take a look at some steps that you need to take.

1. Collect data

What would be the best source of information to create a profile of your ideal customer?

Your customer base, of course.

In fact, you can interview not only people that have already purchased your solution but also your prospects. So let’s discover some methods for collecting data.

Researches

You can analyze your customer base to discover trends regarding how they consume content.

Besides that, landing page forms can be used to collect useful information. Interactive quizzes are a great way to do that because they are attractive, engaging, and even fun.

Talking to experts can be helpful too because they have a better understanding of your audience.

So, ask the sales team, trainers, tech support, and writers who write copy for your audience, among others, for information about the people you want to reach.

Besides that, Google Analytics and competitive analysis can offer you useful information about people who could become your customers.

Surveys and interviews

It is essential to have in mind that customers have different levels of engagement. Depending on the size of the form, some of them may not be so interested in helping you.

On the other hand, a small form or interview will not supply you with the necessary information.

Create smart questions, which may be arranged into four categories: demographics, personal data, content consumption, and challenges. Take a look at the following examples.

Demographics:

• What are your gender, age, and education?
• Where do you live?
• What do you do at work? What is your job position?
• What is your company’s industry?
• What is the size of your company?

Personal data:

• What are your goals?
• How is your routine?
• What are your responsibilities?
• What challenges do you have at work?
• What does success in work mean to you?

Content consumption:

• What social networks do you use?
• What subjects are you interested in?
• What content formats do you like?
• Where do you find information that is useful to your work?
• How do you learn and acquire new skills?

Challenges:

• What challenges did you have before finding us?
• How are we helping you solve problems?
• What characteristics of ours do you like the most?
  

Who to interview?

You may be wondering about who exactly to interview. Well, you may get tempted to talk only with “good” customers, that is, people who love your business and its solutions.

However, “bad” customers, who are not so satisfied with your service or product, can offer valuable information. Indeed, interviewing them could even help you to improve your solution.

You can also interview people who have not yet purchased your solution, especially if your business has just started, and you still don’t have a customer base.

How many people to interview?

There is no definitive answer to that.

However, as you do interviews, at some point, you will start to predict the responses of interviewees. You will notice patterns, so if you start to precisely predict what the person will say, you may stop and go to the next step.

2. Analyze the collected data

Now that the interviews are done, you have a lot of information to analyze and arrange.

How exactly could you do that? Search for common characteristics among interviewees, and what problems and challenges were mentioned the most. Thus, you will understand what type of content could be more relevant to them.

After, you need to decide how many personas your business will have. Is it possible to gather the information for only one persona? Or would it take the creation of more profiles, maybe two, three, or more?

Regardless of the number of personas, remember that your Marketing strategy should include all of them. So, there must be blog posts, ebooks, and nurturing flows, among others, for each persona, ok?

3. Build the persona

Now, turn all the selected information into a person. Open your text editor and build a profile with name, age, and occupation.

Besides writing about their day-to-day life, you can even create a quote, relying on the interviews of course, as if the persona itself was telling you about their challenges and goals.

Next, arrange the information according to topics such as personal and professional goals, as well as pain points and challenges.

After that, as the grand finale, choose a name and include a photo of a person, because it will help you to see your persona as a real person.

4. Share it with your team

Once the profile is ready, save and share it with your team.

All of them should know the persona and give suggestions, which could even lead to some changes if it is necessary.

If you create yours, you will get to know your customer much better, and the Marketing team will be able to produce relevant and useful content.

Besides, the sales team will develop a more efficient approach, which will increase its efficiency.

Check out our buyer persona generator to make this whole process easier.

How To Find People To Interview For Your Buyer Persona Research?

The primary source for your interviews during the buyer persona creation process is, without a doubt, your customer base.

After all, it is formed by people who already have a proven interest in your products and can indicate important characteristics to shape your strategies.

However, as already mentioned, you should not restrict yourself to these people. 

Besides already active customers, interview your prospects. If they are included in your nurturing flow or follow your social media profiles, you can be sure that they already know a lot about your business, even if they have not yet made a purchase.

To better define which leads can serve as good interviewees, use the data collected from the various channels in your strategy. 

Another way to find people to include in interviews is to resort to referrals or third-party networks.

The latter is differentiated by the fact that it involves people entirely outside your company’s environment, which requires greater care in selecting interviewees.

Examples are Craigslist, which allows you to post ads for interested parties, and UserTesting.com, which enables you to receive real-time feedback remotely. 

AI-Powered Persona Creation

Learning about your audience is a time-consuming process, particularly because there is so much data to analyze and sift through before you can create a compelling buyer persona.

Fortunately, AI tools can help expedite this process and deliver targeted results much faster than a team of people could. There are a few AI tools that can curate data from tons of different sources and develop buyer personas for you.

However, you still want to conduct your own research to understand how people will interact with your business.

Here are some ways that artificial intelligence can help you build better buyer personas:

Analyze online habits across platforms

Modern consumers don’t just use one website or platform to search for products and services. In some cases, they may use multiple sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more. Individuals may also look at different shopping sites to read reviews and compare prices before making a final decision.

AI tools can help keep track of how a customer moves from one site to the next and the actions they take on each site. For example, someone may start their search on Google, but then transfer between different e-commerce sites, looking for the best deal. The person may also look on review sites to see what other people are saying about the product or service.

Getting a comprehensive view of your target customer can help you pinpoint how you want to present your brand on the buyer’s journey. Since the goal is to get them to purchase from your brand, you need to know what factors will get the customer to buy right now instead of searching elsewhere. AI can give you better insight into those factors.

User context based on keyword searches

During a customer’s research phase, they may search for different keywords related to the product or service. Some of these keywords may have stiff competition, but others may not. AI can help you discover related keywords that people use to make purchase decisions. Knowing these keywords can give you valuable insight into the thought process of your target audience.

For example, maybe customers are most concerned with the durability of a product, so you can leverage that within your advertising. Alternatively, some people might focus more on the price, so you can target them with sales and discounts. In each case, AI can give you far more context beyond surface-level search keywords.

Bonus: 3 ways to use buyer personas for better campaigns

Finally, let’s briefly discuss how to use your personas to improve your campaigns. The most important thing is to establish the use of personas as something intrinsic to the corporate culture, involving this concept in all internal processes.

1. Identify your leads by persona

From the first interaction with a new lead, categorize them according to the buyer persona that best fits their characteristics, assuming you have more than one. From this action, you will be able to direct all subsequent efforts to better meet the lead’s specific needs, directing them toward conversion. 

2. Use a CRM to track leads

The use of Customer Relationship Management tools is a must to keep the necessary monitoring of your leads. The success of a strategy based on personas also depends on the understanding of the phase in which she is in the buying journey. The use of a quality CRM facilitates this type of analysis and allows the involvement of all team members.

3. Use different marketing funnels

If you can identify your leads by persona and closely follow their journey, it is valid to make use of different marketing funnels. This way, each of your personas will aggregate leads with similar characteristics, which can be included in the same funnel.

Therefore, you create a very effective segmentation system, which enables the production of really relevant content and campaigns. 

Wrap Up

Including a buyer persona in your marketing strategy is a key step toward achieving your goals.

These semi-fictional characters serve as the foundation for your audience’s communication efforts, granting your company greater reach and authority.

Use this step-by-step guide approach to create your buyer personas and enjoy all the benefits of this method. 

With the proper creation of a persona for your business, your strategy will reach higher levels. To increase these results, even more, download our free ebook with everything you need to know about buyer personas!

The post Buyer Persona: A Step By Step Guide To Build The Perfect Persona For Your Business appeared first on Rock Content.

To get people interested in your business and, as a consequence, sell more, it is essential to create a sales enablement strategy.

After all, with so many resources and tools available in the market, it is necessary to take advantage of each one of them to meet the goals and demands of your business.

The main objective of developing a strategy is to prepare the sales team, to create the most favorable scenario for conversion.

However, do you know what it takes to create an efficient sales enablement strategy for your business success and what skills are needed to play a productive role in that process?

Keep on reading to get all your own on the subject and boost your sales performance!

What is Sales Enablement, and What are Its Benefits?

Before we show you how to apply a sales enablement strategy, it is essential to understand what it means.

In a widely contested market, consumers increasingly value a positive experience in every single contact with companies.

Therefore, the objective of applying a sales enablement strategy is to facilitate and bring closer together the relationship between the two parties, empowering the sales potential of the team.

The main benefit of this strategy is to increase the effectiveness of your company’s actions. The idea is that the salesperson has as much information as possible about the lead, because of the integration between the Sales and Marketing teams.

The alliance between the two areas tends to generate more useful information for your company.

It aims to avoid wasting time and resources on useless content, which, according to a SiriusDecisions survey, represents 60% of what is produced by companies.

Thus, you can offer content that is relevant to the consumer and, in addition to the lead generation work, facilitate your team’s negotiations.

Who is Responsible for Sales Enablement?

As mentioned, sales enablement is a collaborative effort between the marketing and sales team. The marketing team is a crucial source of resources used to sell products or services.

When creating a sales enablement strategy, you need input from both marketing and sales to make it work. For example, you need the marketing department to provide videos, blogs, and product guides that help to support customer interactions.

You also need the sales team to fill in the holes in the marketing effort. They deal directly with customers and have many insights to offer.

What Must a Sales Enablement Professional Bear in Mind?

Sales enablement professionals need to keep in mind their main challenges and tasks. The first of these is to create content that is relevant to the audience and that can be used by the salesperson.

In addition, it is also up to them to prepare the professionals involved in the process to use the solutions correctly.

It’s also the job of this professional to find and use strategies that increase the chances of doing new business, such as cross-selling.

What Skills Do You Need to Succeed in This Job?

Some characteristics are fundamental for the professional who assumes this position, so they must be trained to improve the performance of the sales team.

Here are the five most essential skills for those who want to succeed in sales enablement:

Be a good communicator

Communication is fundamental for the professional responsible for implementing a sales enablement strategy to be successful. After all, he needs to deal with numerous professionals and make connections between different sectors of the company.

Communication, therefore, must be as transparent as possible to ensure that everyone understands their roles.

Develop organizational skills

It is necessary to organize all the required functions, so the sectors work in an integrated way, avoiding rework and planning errors that harm the whole strategy.

Be a data-driven thinker

It is essential to rely on technology and the enormous amount of information generated by a company.

Therefore, a necessary skill to succeed in the function is to be data-driven, that is, to use data to take more precise and efficient decisions, always based on detailed studies and analysis.

Get along with the team

Whether onboarding a new member or getting the most out of each salesperson, it’s essential to know how to deal with who is part of your team.

The professional responsible for implementing the sales enablement strategy needs to manage people well.

Always look for improvements

In other words, it involves not being satisfied with the achieved results and constantly looking for tools, solutions, and ideas that can make the work done even more efficiently and accurately.

In such a competitive market, this is a very important skill.

How to Create a Sales Enablement Strategy from Scratch?

How can you create and apply an efficient sales enablement strategy within your company? To help you do that, we will present below a step-by-step guide with all the tips and points to look at if you want to start your own strategy from scratch and get more sales.

Step 1 — Set goals

The first step in implementing an efficient sales enablement strategy is to determine your objectives with these actions.

In other words, do an in-depth analysis and find out errors, failures, and difficulties. Then, think about the situations you intend to improve.

Step 2 — Talk to the sales team

Next, it’s time to understand the difficulties of the department that will benefit most from the implementation of this strategy: the sales team.

Thus, talk to them and identify what you can do to improve the sales approach and, of course, to increase sales. They will give you insights to make your strategy really efficient.

Step 3 — Understand your audience’s behavior

Understanding the behavior of your audience is another fundamental point. It involves not only demographic data and information but also what they’re looking for and their pain points.

Thus, find out what gets their attention and solves their problems, which will increase the chances of selling.

Step 4 — Don’t forget the customer journey

It is also important to set up your sales enablement strategy in synchrony with the customer journey. Analyze the sales funnel and bear in mind your leads’ needs at the moment.

As a consequence, you will also be able to identify more precisely which contents are the most appropriate.

Step 5 — Select content

Now it’s time to determine what content you will use in the sales enablement strategy. What will be efficient at each touchpoint?

How will the salesperson use this content to further the conversation and increase the prospect’s chances of making a purchase?

Step 6 — Prepare the team to work

When you finish defining your strategy, prepare all professionals to put these actions into practice. Marketing professionals, for example, must create content with a specific objective.

At the same time, salespeople need to understand that they should always be analyzing their conversations to identify areas of improvement.

Step 7 — Take your tools

The next challenge is to gather all the tools you’ll need to put your sales enablement strategy into action. What resources and solutions can be used to facilitate human work?

These points need to be carefully evaluated, especially to choose useful tools for your goals.

Step 8 — Analyze

Even when the strategy is in place, the work is still far from being finished. Now is the time to regularly monitor the results.

What difficulties came up? The analysis needs to be constant.

What Formats of Content You Can Use in Sales Enablement?

Now that you know what a sales enablement strategy is, why it is important, and how to implement it, how about checking out some formats of content you could use?

Content for lead generation

The goal at this stage is to get the user interested in your company and help them to solve their problems. To enhance lead generation, you can write blog posts, white papers, and case studies.

Other forms of lead generation content include:

• E-Books – Marketers often make e-books downloadable in exchange for contact information.
• Courses or webinars – Potential customers often crave information. Courses allow them to learn something constructive. To sign up, they must provide contact information like an email address.
• Demos or freemiums – Demos and freemiums, like trial subscriptions, allow potential buyers to try something out. It also gives salespeople a way to contact them to discuss the experience.
• Contests – Everyone likes to win something. They will often give their contact details to take the chance.
• Guides – Guides provide instructions on how to do things in depth. For example, a hardware store may provide a guide to building a deck and then offer the supplies needed for it. Downloadable guides will also provide contact information.
• Templates – Templates give readers the infrastructure to create forms like calendars or presentations. Like most things downloadable, they need to provide contact information to gain access.
• White papers – White papers are more formal and informative than e-books. They are often academic and contain statistical data on a subject relevant to the ideal buyer. They can download the white paper in exchange for contact information.

Interactive content can capture what buyers are interested in and worried about. Then, Ion can collate that data to give the sales team a more comprehensive and easy-to-understand view of their buyer.

The objective of a sales enablement strategy is to give the sales team tools they can use to get conversions. That takes input from both marketing and sales, though.

It is common to assume marketers are responsible for creating the content that gathers information, but the sales team should contribute too.

Content for team support

As we’ve said, it’s important to prepare your team to handle sales, once only 16% of salespeople say they’re prepared for the job, according to IDC research, which shows you need support.

To do so, the most appropriate type of content are forms and spreadsheets containing information about competitors’ performance.

Content for sales conversions

Salespeople can use interactive content to understand their buyers and steer their journey toward conversion. Quizzes, for example, answer questions the sales team can use to profile their ideal buyer and follow their journey.

Surveys can show pain points that might stand in the way of a sales conversion. E-Books and white papers can tell the sales team what information matters most to their potential buyer.

It’s a common myth that the marketing department develops content, and the sales department uses it to drive sales. While it is true that the marketing team’s primary role is content development, they need to do it in collaboration with the sales department. It is a cause-and-effect concept.

Marketing creates content. Sales try to convert leads using it. If they work separately, there is no learning process. The better approach is for these two critical departments to collaborate on content and figure out what is effective and what isn’t.

Sales can contribute information that marketing can use about buyer behaviors and the effectiveness of current resources. Marketing can ask questions and learn from the information they get from sales.

An effective sales enablement strategy will increase the success rate in both areas using data and tools that help define content. That’s why Ion exists!

Bottom Line

Interactive marketing resources are growing in popularity because they work.

From e-books to quizzes to cost calculators, they generate data that helps to define the buyer and the questions they look to answer as part of the buyer’s journey.

Interactive marketing takes data analysis to the next level. It goes beyond the current analysis that marketers and salespeople do, such as page turns and ad clicks. That’s where Ion can help.

Understanding these interactive tools isn’t always straightforward. The data can seem to run together.

Ion pulls data from interactive marketing content and collates it into an easy-to-understand visual tool that sales can use to understand their leads’ behavior and buying process.

Request your demon and learn more about Sell-Side Experience offered by Ion today!

The post Become an Expert on Sales Enablement Strategy appeared first on Rock Content.

No one wants to put money towards an activity that doesn’t work, but teams also need a budget to experiment and see what types of initiatives will be successful.

Finding the perfect mix of tried and true budgetary expenses and leaving enough for new ideas is a difficult balance to try and meet, but it’s important that you do your best to avoid overspending. 

While there is no method set in stone for how to allocate a budget for digital marketing programs, there are some best practices and steps you can follow. 

Check them out below:

How Much to Spend on Digital Marketing

Setting a digital marketing budget is often the responsibility of team leaders in the marketing department. 

While budgets will need to be approved by accounting, finance, or upper management teams, it’s the job of the marketing leadership to provide a budget outline and an explanation as to why certain activities require the requested amounts of money.

A common rule of thumb that most brands use is to spend around 7-10% of the overall revenue on marketing activities. 

Of that amount, around half of it should go toward digital marketing initiatives.

With that in mind, it’s important to note that every company and industry is different. Some organizations will require much more to go towards digital or will spend a higher percentage of the overall revenue on marketing activities.

Adjust your budget to account for your marketing goals and the priorities that you determine matter the most.

You’ll need to know what’s standard in your business and what expectations are set for you before you begin.

Consequences of an Incorrect Budget

It’s important to do the best you can to get as close as possible to the money you will need during your budget planning. 

If you miscalculate, there are several consequences that you might face. 

The first risk is your personal reputation as a leader.

Your teams and your bosses won’t have as much trust in you if you fail to allocate the right resources properly to the different campaigns and initiatives you want to have. 

You’ll also potentially put your department up on the chopping block when it comes to budget slashes if upper management thinks that you don’t know your numbers. 

Another potential consequence is not having the budget you need to achieve important digital marketing goals. 

For example, if you have a goal of getting a certain amount of new leads through advertising but don’t have the budget set to run ads long enough to get leads, you’ll end up either overspending or losing out on important digital marketing opportunities.

Best Practices: How to Allocate a Budget for Digital Marketing

Understanding the best practices for how to allocate a budget for digital marketing activities can be as simple as using the above formula to find the percentage of overall revenue you want to spend on digital tactics. 

However, you will likely be required to come up with a more detailed breakdown of spending and activities. 

Here are some of the top best practices to keep in mind as you consider how to allocate a budget for digital marketing initiatives. 

Use these to guide your planning and strategizing around budgetary matters and set your team and department up for success.

1. Outline Your Sales Funnel

Before diving into the numbers, take some time to step back and look at the big picture of your digital marketing funnel. 

What steps along the process are important touchpoints?

Knowing how customers find you and what they need to understand about the brand before they convert helps you know what activities are priorities to invest in.

2. List Your Operational Costs

Operational costs are non-negotiable in a budget. These costs need to be taken care of and should be set up first so you know how much budget is available for other activities. 

Operational costs can include website hosting, SaaS subscriptions, platform costs, or other taxes and fees.

3. Review Last Year’s or Quarter’s Results

One final set-up task you’ll want to do is look into the metrics and reports from previous quarters and years. 

Were the campaigns successful? Did you reach goals or receive an ROI for initiatives? 

If you know what worked and what didn’t, you can start to add or eliminate specific activities.

4. List Your Goals

Knowing your goals for the year is crucial to allocating a budget for different activities. 

What do you want to achieve, and how much revenue do you need to bring in? Are you looking for leads, conversions, or sales? 

Having goals in place helps you understand which types of activities are most beneficial for your budget.

5. Drill Down to the Details

After setting your goals, it’s time to drill down into the details. 

How do you want to achieve those set goals? What types of activities have proven or do you believe are going to be the best ways to go about reaching your goals? 

Detailing out your marketing plan gives you direction on how to allocate a budget.

6. Select the Best Channels for Your Business

There are many different types of channels that you can use for your marketing initiatives, but not all brands need to have an active presence in each channel. 

Pick what channels are the best fits for your business and look at the costs associated with operating in each channel.

7. Determine the Cost of Marketing Activities

Once you know which channels you want to focus on, take a look at the costs of marketing activities within those channels. 

Do you want to grow on social media? Then how much does it cost to run ads and promote posts? Make sure your marketing activities fit into your set goals.

8. Scope Out the Competition

Your competitors can be a great resource when it comes to determining how to allocate a budget for digital marketing. 

What methods of marketing are they investing in? How do those methods help them gain a bigger audience and close more sales? 

Examine their marketing and advertising strategies to help you know what channels and campaigns work in the industry.

9. Create Your Marketing Plan

With all the preplanning and research out of the way, it’s now time to actually create your marketing plan. 

Whether you are planning for the year or for a quarter, build out each of your initiatives based on the goals that you have, the tools you’ll need to achieve those goals and the channels you need to focus on to reach your audiences.

10. Estimate Your Budget

Once your marketing plan is built, you need to go estimate the cost for each activity. 

Take a look at what is required to get a reasonable ROI and then an exceptional ROI. Estimate as close to the dollar amount as you can for every step of the plan and finalize your budget.

11. Make Every Decision Based on Data

You’ll likely be required to present your budget to upper management or leadership in your organization. That’s why it’s important to have clear data to back up every decision. 

Don’t just say that you think it will cost a certain amount to run ads — have research and studies and past data to show exactly how much a successful ad campaign costs. 

This helps create trust in your plan and your leadership skills.

12. Measure Results

After your budget is approved, you still need to monitor your spending closely and look at the results you are getting. 

Were you off in any estimation? What was the reasoning behind the miscalculation? 

Use the results going forward into next year’s budget, and help create a system that gives you the best budget allocation possible.

Prioritize Budget for Content Marketing

Once you’ve figured out what your digital marketing budget will be, a large portion of that should be dedicated to content.

Anywhere between 25-30% of your digital marketing budget should go to content creation efforts.

Without a heavy investment in content marketing, including social media and SEO, it will be nearly impossible to attract your target audience’s attention and generate leads.

One way to get the most out of your content investment is to outsource your content creation.

Rather than hiring someone in-house and paying them a full salary and benefits, you can hire freelancers who have content creation experience on a platform like WriterAccess.

You can get a free 14-day trial to test the platform before you invest your content marketing budget.

Invest in Digital Products

Your marketing budget also needs to be allocated to technology solutions and digital products.

You need to have the right platform to accurately manage digital marketing strategies and collect essential data for analysis.

To save money and protect your budget, it is helpful to find a digital solution that covers a lot of ground — for example, Rock Content’s Content Cloud.

This all-in-one package includes our individual offerings: WriterAccess, Ion, Stage, and Studio.

WriterAccess will help you scale up high-quality content production.

Ion will allow you to create interactive content without coding.

Stage will handle all the tech involved in hosting your WordPress website.

Finally, Studio will facilitate your project management.

This package can take care of nearly all of your content needs, so click on the link to learn more.

Budget Calculation Tools

Trying to calculate a budget without the help of technology can be difficult. Here are some tools that can facilitate the process.

1. Google Sheets

The simplest tool out there is Google Sheets or Excel, where you can use formulas, plan out your budget, and share it with your team.

2. FreeAgent

This tool is a great option for small businesses that handle their own finances in-house. It helps with managing expenses, statements, taxes, and invoices.

3. Allocadia

Allocadia is a tool that helps you plan your budget and collaborate with team members on the best ways to allocate your marketing dollars.

4. HubSpot Templates

When you just need a guide rather than a complete budgeting solution, HubSpot Templates is a great choice. You can download free templates to help plan your budget for your digital marketing goals.

5. Knowlium

This tool can create budget plans for you with the use of a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and a detailed financial dashboard.

6. Hive9

This tool helps you allocate your budget strategically and plan for potential “what-if” scenarios that could disrupt your original plans.

7. Billdu

Billdu is a budgeting and financial tool that simplifies expense tracking and invoice management for small businesses. It’s user-friendly and helps keep financial records organized and accessible.

Wrap Up

Knowing how to allocate a budget for digital marketing programs is a key component of being a great leader and setting your marketing teams up for success. 

Without a balanced budget that your teams can work with, you’ll find yourself struggling to reach any goals you have set for the quarter or the year and risk overspending. 

Planning a budget requires you to follow best practices to satisfy both upper management and your employees. 

It helps to have digital tools that can give you additional support as you create a yearly or quarterly budget.

Finally, investing in contention creation should be a priority and WriterAccess can save you time and resources. Try it free for two weeks!

The post How to Allocate a Digital Marketing Budget for Your Business? appeared first on Rock Content.

Demands for a good sales enablement strategy are always on the rise, as more businesses understand the need for providing their commercial teams with more valuable information to make smarter sales.

Besides that, having a sales enablement content strategy helps define the purpose of your creations and how they allow you to reach your goals. 

Both marketing and sales teams can benefit from this, as they’ll all become able to deliver better results. Sadly, few businesses understand the value of this.

Such a strategy allows you to deliver the right piece of content to your potential customers to draw them closer to conversion. For that to work, marketing and sales need to work together toward the same goals.

In this article, you will see:

What Is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the term used to refer to the process of providing the best information to the sales team that might help sell more effectively.

Such data allows for more strategic approaches, smarter ways to engage a potential buyer, and understanding of the customer’s cycle better.

To generate the benefits this strategy is capable of, your sales enablement strategy needs the right focus: the buyer. For instance, say you’re working on a B2B marketing plan. 

It involves understanding the people the sales team will engage with, their needs, motivations, and fears. Sales enablement is all about offering the right tools for the salespeople to close more deals.

We cannot discuss sales enablement and ignore the importance of good content. 

Salespeople need content to engage with potential buyers in effective ways, depending on how close they are to converting. Also, the way your customers use your content can even inform you about their needs.

Measuring the right data is essential to a good sales enablement strategy. It involves tracking the metrics related to sales cycles, reached quotas, and average deal size.

You also need to consider the goals of your business and the numbers that help you understand your success.

Principles of a Sales Enablement Strategy

Here you can find a summary of the principles that will guide a good sales enablement strategy.

Commitment to the Process

To work properly, a sales enablement strategy needs commitment.

That means building a working structure based on the best practices this approach requires.

It’s also a continuous process that requires constant improvement as it evolves through time.

Top-down team involvement

Working with sales enablement can be a big change for a business, depending on how far behind it is in terms of strategy.

A top-down approach helps to set the priorities right with the rest of the sales team, so everyone gets their priorities aligned.

Success metrics measurement

What goals do you have?

A good sales enablement strategy can help you reach them, but that requires measuring the right metrics. 

Keep in mind what your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are, like traffic generated, lead generation, average deal size, attainment, time to close, and others.

Bite-sized and timely content

You must learn your potential customer’s needs and expectations to provide just the right content for that state of mind.

This means an approach focused on bite-sized and timely content, instead of long and large presentations that won’t keep their attention.

Why Is a Sales Enablement Content Strategy Important?

A sales enablement content strategy involves looking at the customer journey and determining which touchpoints may require additional content to help the sales team move the customer through the funnel.

Then, the sales team can provide input regarding what should be included in that content to accentuate their interactions with the customer.

Finally, the content delivery team can create these pieces for sales reps to start using immediately.

There are five reasons why it’s crucial to develop a comprehensive sales enablement content strategy:

• Empowering your sales team – No longer rely on individual skills, but rather the quality of your content.
• Ensuring consistent outcomes – If all sales reps use the same content pieces, you can expect similar results from everyone.
• Better customer interactions – Most customers prefer to do their research, and this content allows them to go at their preferred pace.
• Makes your brand more competitive – Sales content can make your brand more appealing than companies relying solely on sales calls.
• Cohesive messaging between marketing and sales – Facilitate better collaboration between these teams for a smoother customer experience.

There are several types of content your business can use to affect your audience positively as it becomes closer to conversion. Those will allow you to provide value to your public and solidify your presence as an authority in your field.

Build a Sales Enablement Content Strategy in 7 Steps

Now that you understand the importance of a good sales enablement content strategy, the next step involves learning how to do that the right way.

Your success depends on how well you’re able to align your content to your target audience’s expectations to get information for a good sale.

Check out the right steps towards how to build a strong sales enablement content strategy for your business.

Step one: determine your goals

First and foremost, what do you want this content to do? Move customers through the funnel, close deals, or help qualify leads?

Also, remember that individual pieces of content can be used for specific goals, so only some things have to focus on the same objective.

For example, a white paper may move a customer to the next stage of the funnel, while a sales presentation is designed to close the deal.

In this case, the sales team should develop the goals so the marketing team can create targeted, high-value content to deliver them. You can also use a marketing calculator to determine an estimated ROI.

Step two: outline the customer journey

It takes up to eight touchpoints on average before a lead converts to a customer.

The exact number may be higher or lower for your business, but it’s crucial to outline them within the sales funnel.

In this step, the sales reps can dictate which points require additional content to help them move the prospect to the next stage.

Reps may also collaborate with the marketing department to develop some rough ideas.

Step three: choose the right content types for each touchpoint

As we’ll discuss later, there are tons of options for sales enablement content, including blog posts, white papers, and more.

Some touchpoints may need multiple content pieces, while others are best left undisturbed.

In this step, sales and marketing teams should collaborate to discuss what will work best and the type of information that should be included.

Step four: rank content pieces by priority

At this point, you should have a laundry list of content pieces to produce.

Since it’s impossible to create everything simultaneously, your sales team should rank these pieces by priority.

That way, the marketing team can focus on the most valuable content and work their way down the list. You can also use sales enablement tools to develop your rankings.

Step five: start producing content at scale

Realistically, it’s best to produce as much content as possible so your sales team can start converting more leads. Fortunately, it’s easy to outsource content production with sites like WriterAccess (for blog posts and content writing) and Ion (for interactive content). This way, you can produce multiple pieces simultaneously and quickly knock out the list.

Step six: use a sales enablement manager for smoother implementation

With both sales and marketing departments working on this strategy, it’s easy for problems to occur with so many people involved.

So, it’s best to appoint a sales enablement manager who can have a bird’s-eye view of both teams to ensure everyone stays on target.

This manager can also verify progress and step in to solve any problems that occur along the way.

Step seven: analyze results via customer feedback

Ideally, your sales enablement content will generate results immediately.

However, you may need to tinker with some of these pieces to make them more effective.

After implementation, the sales team can provide feedback based on their interactions with customers or solicit feedback from customers directly.

Then, the marketing department can make changes as necessary.

Choose the Types of Sales Enablement Content Your Team Needs

Thankfully, plenty of content types can help your sales team move customers through the funnel. Here’s a list of 13 options you can use:

1. Blog posts

Your company’s blog will be an invaluable resource for marketing, and sales reps can link to specific articles or use snippets in their interactions with customers.

2. Case studies

Sales reps can show prospects how your company has helped other clients succeed. This real-world validation is more likely to convert a lead into a satisfied customer.

3. E-books

Research is a critical part of the sales process; customers are savvier than ever. Providing a comprehensive e-book gives them more information to decide if they want to move forward or not.

4. Testimonials

As with case studies, customer testimonials work as social proof that your brand delivers results. Be sure to have your sales reps request reviews and testimonials from your current customers, so you have as much content as possible.

5. Email marketing campaigns

Your sales team can segment prospects based on preliminary data; the marketing team can send targeted messages to help them move through the funnel.

6. Interactive content

Improve customer engagement with interactive content that they want to see. Products like Ion make it super easy to incorporate this content type into your sales enablement strategy.

7. Sales playbook

This content is designed for reps, not customers, but it can still be a valuable tool for your team. A sales playbook offers guidance and tips on addressing specific questions or concerns a prospect may have. This way, your reps are prepared for any situation that arises.

8. Pitch deck

A pitch deck is a condensed package that shows all the products your company has to offer (or those that may appeal to a specific customer). These informative and engaging decks can enhance a sales call with high-quality visuals.

9. Explainer videos

Video content is always valuable; you can create videos explaining your products or the value they can bring to your customers. Animated videos are engaging and easy to produce quickly.

10. White papers

A white paper helps position your brand as an authority within the industry, which can instill confidence in a prospect that you’re the best option for their needs.

11. Product sales sheet

This content is a page from an enormous pitch deck. It highlights the features and benefits of a product and can even be used for marketing purposes.

12. Sales presentation

Instead of relying on in-person sales presentations, you can create a video and share it with prospects for a more streamlined approach. This option works well because you can combine audio and visual elements into a complete package.

13. Webinars

A webinar is like a video version of a white paper, but it can also be more promotional. A webinar aims to be informative and answer potential questions that a customer may have about your product.

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The post How To Build a Strong Sales Enablement Content Strategy appeared first on Rock Content.

The journey toward digital transformation is one that needs to be started as soon as possible or financial companies risk being beaten by the competition, dropping off the radar in the industry, and losing their bottom line.

When this transformation is done correctly and well, the company, customers, and overall society can experience significant benefits.

What Is Digital Transformation and Why Does It Matter to Financial Companies?

Digital transformation can be defined as the process of adopting digital technologies to modify existing or create new business processes, company culture, and customer experiences to match the ever-changing requirements of the business and market. This reimagining of a business in this growing digital age is digital transformation.

Digital transformation will go beyond traditional roles like customer service, marketing, and sales. It begins and ends with everything surrounding your customers. You have to rethink how you do business, in addition to how you engage your customers.

By doing everything digitally, from planning and building, you will set yourself up to be flexible, agile, and ready to flourish in the future. You can also expect a much higher ROI over the next few years once you execute your digital transformation strategy successfully.

54 percent of financial services firms have started the development of a digital transformation strategy, whereas 68 percent have actually developed their strategy. However, only 14 percent of financial services companies are working to implement their digital transformation strategy.

With consumers becoming more digitally savvy than ever before, financial companies must be ready to step up their game and meet the demands of this new type of consumer.

Real Cases of Financial Companies Going Digital

On average, 70 percent of companies who attempt digital transformation fail. It is not easy, nor is it an overnight feat, to begin the merger of your physical and digital components in an effort to address new consumer needs.

However, it can be done, and these financial companies are proof.

DBS Bank

Based in Singapore, DBS Bank was the first to launch a digital-only bank. At the beginning of their journey, they knew they needed to focus on three essential elements:

• How they digitized to the core
• How they could embed themselves within the customer journey and push customer-journey thinking within the entire organization
• How they could change the company’s culture to not only make it feel, but also operate, like a startup.

DBS Bank knew they wouldn’t get far if they focused only on the actual digital processes and set the necessary organizational change on the back burner.

They spent the initial years of their digital transformation setting up the groundwork for their future implementation, including the placement of common platforms that worked with all of their banking locations.

This allowed them to start thinking about how to become nimble, boost speed to market efforts, and increase their pace.

They developed some helpful acronyms that aided in the entire organization getting onboard with the digital transformation.

• RED – Respectful, Easy to deal with, and Dependable—all related to the customer service aspect
• ATE – Acquire, Transact, and Engage—customers do all of these things digitally

DBS Bank ensured their team had clear missions to work around and towards. In the end, they found scalability, speed to market, experimentation, and more. One example of their success was the mobile bank offering in India.

DBS Bank wanted to scale their presence in India, as they had limited branches in that area of the world. With so many people in that market, they had to figure out a way to reach them all. And that’s when they developed a mobile-only option.

They learned as they went, tested and learned, tested and learned some more, and finally found success with their mobile launch in India.

ING Banking Group

The approach ING took toward digital transformation allowed them to improve time to market, increase productivity, and boost employee engagement.

They began their journey in June 2015 by implementing an agile way of working. They saw that the behavior of consumers was changing, and they knew they needed to figure out a way to adapt to this or otherwise get left behind in the industry. They realized that thinking traditionally wouldn’t get them far, and instead, they needed to fully understand and focus on the customer journey in a new Omnichannel environment.

The company boasts their transformation success on four pillars that they used to develop and implement their strategy.

• An agile way of working – this led to all of the company’s employees, regardless of department, working together in a swift, efficient manner.
• Organizational structure – With any transformation, there is change that must be dealt with. This includes new roles and governance. Agility is hindered by having different departments and managers in place, so they managed that.
• DevOps and IT delivery – They worked on going live with their new releases more frequently (every two weeks as opposed to every couple of months). Integrating IT and product development operations helped ING position themselves as the main mobile bank within the Netherlands.
• New people – The company focused on how all employees dealt with the knowledge they were equipped with, rather than assigning status and salary based on the number of employees under them or the size of individual projects they worked on. ING wanted to ensure that there was a decent mix of expertise and knowledge throughout.

ING’s primary objectives were to increase employee engagement, be quicker to market, reduce handovers and impediments, and improve the overall client experience. They were successful in all respects.

Final Thoughts

There are indeed obstacles that financial companies face as they embark on a companywide digital transformation, but in the end, you can expect your business to be far more innovative and employee-engaging while also increasing the offerings available to your customers.

When you invest in digital transformation, you are investing in your company and employees to be adaptable, agile, and competitive.

The post How Financial Companies Are Going Digital – Real Success Cases appeared first on Rock Content.

This funnel represents the different stages that a prospect will go through from first hearing about your brand to making the final conversion to customer. 

By giving your leads the right content at the right moments of their buyer’s journey, you can help guide them through the funnel and increase your total conversions. 

But why does the bottom-of-funnel require special dedication when it’s not a lead generation stage for customers? 

What tactics are most helpful while planning your bottom-of-funnel strategies, and why is it important to invest in the bottom of your marketing funnel? 

In this article, we’ll answer those questions and provide you with the best content formats to push for that important final conversion to a customer in your marketing strategies.

What is Bottom-of-Funnel Marketing?

Bottom-of-funnel marketing is the final step in the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel can be divided into three stages: 

Top-of-funnel

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, where your audiences are becoming aware of your brand and what it is you can offer them.

Middle-of-funnel

The consideration stage of the buyer’s journey, where your audiences start to learn more about your brand and what sets you apart from your competitors.

Bottom-of-funnel

The decision stage of the buyer’s journey, where your audiences are making their final deliberations before choosing what brand they will become a customer of and buy from. 

Each stage of the marketing funnel plays a key role in the process of turning a new lead into a loyal customer. 

The final stage, the bottom of your funnel, is also the narrowest. Those who have already decided not to purchase from you have left the funnel, so all that is left are a few, highly-qualified leads that are close to their final decision. 

Nurturing those leads and helping them make the final conversion into a customer is key to bottom-of-funnel marketing success. 

However, there are challenges that you’ll face as audiences in this stage want specific, detailed content that can address their final questions and concerns about your brand. 

If your bottom-of-funnel marketing strategy isn’t optimized, you can lose those highly-qualified audiences right before they make a final decision. 

You’ll need to be problem-aware, solutions-focused, and available in order to push your leads through to the final conversion.

The Importance of Investing in the Lower Funnel

As the final stage before a purchase decision is made, the bottom of your marketing funnel requires detailed planning in order to convert your leads to customers. 

It’s the last chance you get to make a final impression on your prospects before they make a decision. 

You’re fighting tightly against your competitors to get the sale, and often don’t have much time to convince them to convert. 

Your lower funnel efforts also have a major effect on the first two stages of the marketing funnel. If you can’t close the deal at the end of the funnel, it can make your earlier efforts feel like they didn’t amount to anything. 

That can decrease your ROI on top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel activities, lower your team’s morale, and make it hard to focus on lead generation strategies.

Why Bottom-of-Funnel Matters

When you can succeed in bottom-of-funnel marketing tactics, you are able to create a refined lead nurture strategy that takes new leads through the buyer’s journey and turns them into loyal customers for your brand. 

Bottom-of-funnel marketing is much more like sales than the other parts of the marketing funnel. 

This is the stage where you can deliver hard pushes to make a decision, offer limited-time deals, and get into the specific details of your brand’s products and services. 

Successful bottom-of-funnel marketing tactics will be the final push audiences need to become a customer. 

When combined with successful middle-of-funnel and top-of-funnel marketing strategies, it doesn’t need to be too hard to make that final argument go in your favor.

5 Bottom-of-Funnel Tactics to Increase Conversions

Now that you understand why the bottom-of-funnel marketing strategies you create matter to your brand’s goals, let’s take a look at some of the tactics you can use to increase conversions and seal the deal on your decision stage marketing efforts.

1. Give Detailed Product Comparisons

While highlighting the negatives of your competition in the early stages of your marketing funnel can come off as aggressive and unhelpful, the final decision stage is a perfect time to give your leads some detailed product or service comparisons. 

“Product A vs. Product B” or “Brand A vs. Brand B” keywords are great for SEO, so you can help garner organic traffic that cares about how you stand up against the competition. 

However, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t create a bullying page that reads negatively to audiences. 

Instead, focus on what makes your brand, products, and services great and how the things you do make you stand out.

2. Offer Promo Codes or Special Discounts

Sometimes leads need a little extra help before they make the decision to become a customer. 

Offering a promo code or special discount can give your audiences an incentive to become a customer and encourage them to make their final decision in your favor. 

Whether it’s a once-only discount or a promo code that doesn’t expire, you can be certain that offering money-saving incentives to customers works. 

And, if your product then delivers on promises, you can bring that customer back as a return customer at full price later on.

3. Hand Leads Off to Sales Team Members

Your bottom-of-funnel marketing is a great place to improve your marketing and sales handoffs and communications. 

If you have a lead who is nearing the end of their marketing funnel journey but has specific questions or concerns that they want to continue addressing, it might be time to get them in touch with a salesperson. 

Your sales team can offer one-on-one attention to a lead and answer specific inquiries and concerns that they might have without needing to make an entire blog or infographic to address the issue. 

It also helps create better cooperation and a seamless transition between your internal sales and marketing personnel.

4. Provide Detailed Use Cases and Testimonials for Your Audiences

When a lead nears the end of their buyer’s journey, they are faced with the hard decision to make a purchase choice. 

Whether your products or services are expensive or lower in the price range, it’s still a monetary commitment from a customer. 

That can make it hard for your leads, especially if they are new to your solutions. 

Case studies allow you to give a detailed use case of how your products or services bettered a previous customer’s life or provided a solution to their pain points. 

It helps your new leads picture themselves in the previous customer’s shoes and visualize how your brand’s solution can help them address their own problems and concerns. 

In addition to use cases, you can also give testimonials to your audiences that showcase exactly what people who have bought from you think about your brand. 

Combining a powerful case study with a testimonial from a customer can be the final push a lead needs to make a purchase decision.

5. Build a Powerful Pricing Page

Your pricing page is a key conversion tool that can impact your bottom-of-funnel marketing efforts. 

A pricing page helps your audiences see exactly what they are getting for when they pay for your brand. 

This helps them understand how to budget for your products or services and gives them reassurance about what they will receive in exchange for payment. 

You’ll want your pricing page to be easy to understand while being honest and truthful about the pricing. 

You’ll also want to have a clear call to action, as the pricing page may be the last thing a lead looks at before making their final call.

Bottom-of-Funnel Content Ideas

Now that you know the tactics that can help you improve your bottom-of-funnel efforts, you can plan out your strategies with more effectiveness. 

But you’ll also need the right content formats. Here is a list of some of the best content ideas and formats for bottom-of-funnel marketing strategies: 

• Case studies
• Product and service comparison pages
• Testimonials
• Webinars
• Detailed videos
• Product demos
• Free trials
• Promo codes and discounts
• Paid advertisements
• Pricing page

Wrap Up

The bottom-of-funnel marketing tactics you employ are the final step to pushing a lead through the funnel to become a loyal customer of your brand. 

By spending the time required to create high-value content pieces, you can maximize your opportunities for conversion and optimize your marketing funnel process. 

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The post Bottom-of-Funnel Marketing Content Ideas and Tactics to Finalize Brand Conversions appeared first on Rock Content.

It is a visual representation of the process your prospects move through as they become a customer of your brand. Because of this, it helps you understand the mindsets of your buyers and where they fall in the journey. 

However, oftentimes you’ll see companies put more effort into their top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel marketing, leaving middle-of-funnel marketing off to the side. 

This is a big mistake, as each of the three steps of the marketing funnel needs equal attention in order to convert the highest number of leads into customers. 

But what is middle-of-funnel marketing, and why does it matter so much to your brand when it isn’t generating new leads or closing deals? 

Learn more about it in this blog.

What is Middle-of-Funnel Marketing?

The marketing funnel, sometimes referred to as the sales funnel, is a tool used to help understand the buyer’s journey and the process a prospect will take before becoming a customer of your business. 

There are three steps in the marketing funnel: 

Top-of-funnel

Lead generation and brand awareness marketing, also called the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey.

Middle-of-funnel

Lead nurturing and educational marketing, also called the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.

Bottom-of-funnel

Lead decision-making and closing marketing, also called the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. 

The middle of the marketing funnel is the stage in which leads who are aware of your brand start moving closer to buying your products or services. 

Prospects in this stage are looking for more detailed and in-depth information about your brand, so educational content is critical in this part of the buyer’s journey. 

The middle of the funnel is also a great time to evaluate the needs of the prospective customer and see if they are a qualified lead that fits into your customer profile. 

If they are, you can qualify the lead and pass them along to your sales team to help them move to the bottom of the funnel and become a customer.

The Importance of Middle-of-Funnel Marketing

The middle of the funnel doesn’t always seem like a valuable place to spend time to those new to the marketing funnel concept. 

After all, doesn’t generating new leads and closing deals matter more than educating prospects and qualifying leads? 

The answer is no. The middle of the funnel serves just as valuable of a purpose as the other steps. 

Without a strategy for middle-of-funnel marketing, your leads can quickly lose interest in your brand and move on to a competitor.

It can also make the handoff between marketing and sales a misaligned and confusing mess. 

Another way to think of middle-of-funnel marketing is this: while sales teams might say they want more leads, what they really mean is that they want better leads. 

The middle of the funnel takes all of the interest you’ve gathered from the top of the funnel marketing and filters through to find the best, highest-quality leads to move through the process to the bottom of the funnel.

What is Lead Qualification and Nurturing?

While generating new leads is important, the next steps you take with those leads are just as critical. 

Lead qualification and lead nurturing strategies help you sort through all the prospective customers you have and discover which ones are actually interested in your brand, products, or services. 

Lead qualification

The process of examining prospects and leads to find out who is most likely to become a future customer of your business and gauging their interest level in your brand.

Lead nurturing

The process of guiding leads through the marketing funnel by growing your relationship with them and maintaining that valuable relationship through marketing, communication, and messaging.

6 Common Middle-of-Funnel Marketing Strategies

As mentioned above, middle-of-funnel marketing is often put to the side in favor of lead generating top-of-funnel and sale-closing bottom-of-funnel marketing tactics.

That leaves you in a poor position, however, where your leads aren’t nurtured and never learn enough about your brand to make a sale. 

Here are a few best practices and middle-of-funnel marketing strategies to keep in mind as you build out your marketing funnel tactics.

1. Invest in Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to get your message in front of audiences and keep your brand at the top of their minds. 

While you don’t want to overdo your email messaging and come across as spam, carefully curating emails can help guide leads along the marketing funnel process. 

Avoid pushing too hard for a sale. After all, customers in this stage aren’t ready to make a purchase decision yet. 

Instead, provide product updates, helpful blog posts or ebook links, and individualize the content as much as possible to strengthen the relationship with the prospective customer.

2. Create Detailed How-To Guides

If a lead is interested in your brand’s products or services, they want to learn more before making a full commitment to become a customer. 

Detailed guides, product demos, and instructional papers help to communicate exactly what your products and services do to customers. 

Not only does this provide informational and educational content, it also helps your customers feel at ease with your brand.

It cuts out unnecessary friction points or frustrations that a customer might have while researching your business.

3. Make Communication Easy and Simple

If customers in the middle of the funnel have questions or concerns, make it easy for them to find you. 

A prospect shouldn’t have to make a sale in order to talk to someone at your company or get answers to their questions. Tools like chatbots, quizzes, or FAQ libraries can help your prospects avoid frustration. 

By making communication easy for leads, you also strengthen your relationship with prospects and endear your brand to them. 

After all, leads are more likely to buy from a brand with great customer service.

4. Examine Your CTA Structure

Calls to action, or CTAs, aren’t just random buttons and links at the bottom of blogs and website pages. 

They are important tools that help provide clear next steps for customers and move them along a desired path in the customer’s journey. 

The CTA structure you develop should have a clear goal in mind. 

If you think that leads in the middle-of-funnel marketing step aren’t moving along as you’d hoped, then take a step back and examine your CTAs. 

Do they have logical progression and take your leads closer to making a purchase? Or do they just lead a customer back around to pages that they’ve already seen?

5. Implement Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a process that helps improve your lead qualification efforts. 

By giving new leads a numerical score, you can quickly determine a prospect’s interest in your brand and the potential win rate of the lead. 

You can attribute scores based on the behavior of a website visitor or lead. 

Do they look at high-value pages, or do they just bounce away? Have they filled out a form or followed a social account, or have they unfollowed and unsubscribed?

By adding a score to each lead, you can help your sales team know which leads are the hottest to follow up with.

6. Improve Internal Handoff Procedures

Speaking of sales teams, they play an important role in middle-of-funnel marketing. 

Creating a clear handoff process between marketing and sales can help you determine when a lead is ready to move over to the sales team and when they need more time to be nurtured. 

Improving communication between sales and marketing creates a better working environment and helps avoid any potential slowdowns and friction between internal teams.

Middle-of-Funnel Content Ideas

Now that you understand some of the best practices to keep in mind as you work on middle-of-funnel marketing efforts, let’s take a closer look at some of the best content ideas and types that can help you achieve your middle-of-funnel marketing goals. 

Here are some of the most effective content ideas: 

• Email nurture campaigns
• Detailed videos, webinars, and infographics
• Product reviews
• Product and service demos
• In-depth ebooks and blogs
• White papers
• Industry reports
• Gated content
• Social media
• Solution website pages

Wrap Up

The marketing funnel guides many different practices in digital marketing, and it’s important that each step of the funnel gets equal attention. 

The middle of your marketing funnel helps prospects learn more about your brand, supports their research, and helps nurture your leads into loyal customers.

Planning your middle-of-funnel marketing strategies requires you to understand how to set a strong foundation for your content efforts. 

WriterAccess is a platform that can help you with that. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to experience the content revolution!

The post Learn How to Perfect Your Middle-of-Funnel Marketing Strategies for Prospects appeared first on Rock Content.

This customer journey is also referred to as a digital marketing funnel. 

Understanding the different points in your marketing funnel allows you to know which types of tactics, content, and approaches are going to resonate with your audiences.

It also allows you to learn more about the behavior and decisions of your customers, which can foster strong connections, communication, and relationships. 

But what is meant by top-of-funnel marketing, why does it matter, and how does that play into a well-rounded digital marketing strategy? 

Find out in this article.

What is Top-of-Funnel Marketing?

To understand top-of-funnel marketing, you first need to know what a digital marketing funnel is. 

A marketing funnel refers to a visualization of the buyer’s journey as a standard funnel, starting with the open top of the funnel, narrowing into the middle of the funnel, and ending at the bottom of the funnel. 

Each touchpoint in the funnel correlates to a specific mindset a lead has while going through the process of becoming a customer. 

Those stages each require a different marketing approach to properly address what a customer’s needs are at that time. 

The stages of the buyer’s journey and the marketing funnel break down as such: 

Top-of-funnel

The awareness stage, where a customer becomes aware of the fact they have a need or want and starts looking for resources, answers, educational materials, data, insights, or brands that can help them.

Middle-of-funnel

The consideration stage, where a customer starts to narrow down their options and consider which brand, product, or service will provide the best result for their needs by looking for webinars, in-depth product guides, and ebooks.

Bottom-of-funnel

The decision stage, where a customer is ready to make their final decision and pick which company will earn the sale and their business based on content like testimonials, demos, and pricing comparisons. 

Top-of-funnel marketing focuses on the acquisition of new leads, and often has strong ties to your lead generation strategies. 

But rather than trying to find brand new audiences, top-of-funnel marketing tries to draw in those who have become aware of your brand and encourage them to convert and take next steps down the marketing funnel.

Why Does Top-of-Funnel Marketing Matter?

Top-of-funnel marketing is extremely important to the success of your overall sales and marketing efforts.

It’s the step that encourages prospective customers to engage with your brand. 

By casting a wide net and trying to bring in the most leads as possible, you help increase the number of qualified leads that your sales team can work with. 

In addition, top-of-funnel marketing is often the first touchpoint a customer has with your brand, meaning that it needs to create a great first impression and bring them back for more. 

Finally, top-of-funnel marketing increases your brand awareness and reputation among new leads, which can also help build more trust, authority, and credibility in your business. 

People tend to buy from brands that they are aware of, and the more people you get through your funnel, the more recommendations your brand can get from happy customers. 

All of that makes your brand seem more trustworthy to new prospects.

10 Top-of-Funnel Marketing Best Practices

Now that you know what top-of-funnel marketing is and why it matters to your brand, let’s take a look at some of the best practices that you should employ while creating a top-of-funnel marketing strategy.

1. Know Your Audience

Successful top-of-funnel marketing requires you to have a strong understanding of who your audience is, where they spend their time online, and what their pain points and frustrations are. 

That will allow you to create content that appeals to them personally. 

When a customer knows that they are working with a brand that understands their needs and wants, they are more likely to stay and convert through the marketing funnel to become a loyal customer of your brand.

Try creating a buyer persona to really identify who you are selling to.

2. Map Your Customer Journey in Detail

While the three basic stages of the customer journey — awareness, consideration, decision — will map into the three steps of the marketing funnel, it helps to have the customer journey broken down in more detail. 

That will help you solve for the problems that your customers are having and create more touchpoints for conversion.

3. Create Educational, Problem-Solving Content

The content that your prospective customers are looking for at the top of the marketing funnel isn’t in-depth product details and intensive case studies. 

Instead, they are looking for educational content about their problem at large or content that helps them address their concerns. 

Creating educational content is a great way to draw your customers in.

4. Focus on the Quality of Content

Readers and search engines alike prefer to have content that is high-quality and written to address the concerns of the audience. 

Short blog posts, poorly-written content, or content that doesn’t address the core question will frustrate your readers and hurt your SEO, or search engine optimization, rankings. 

High-quality content will always perform better and deliver more leads.

5. Avoid Pushing a Sale too Quickly

Prospective customers at the top of your marketing funnel aren’t ready to make a purchase decision immediately. 

They would rather educate themselves and learn more about your brand, products, and services. 

Coming across too aggressively or pushing for a sale in your top-of-funnel marketing content will drive away prospective clients and customers rather than draw them in.

6. Include CTAs

It doesn’t matter how well-written and educational your content is — without a clear next step, you won’t be able to gather the leads you need to fill the top of your marketing funnel. 

CTAs provide readers with the opportunity to convert and move through your marketing funnel with clear direction. 

It helps you guide your leads down the funnel rather than leaving them fumbling on their own to find out where to go next.

7. Improve Your SEO Strategy

Getting found by prospective customers is part of your top-of-funnel marketing efforts, and it requires you to have a strong SEO strategy. 

If leads can’t find your top-of-funnel marketing content, they aren’t going to become a part of your marketing funnel and will instead move to find one of your competitors. 

Using SEO tactics and best practices can improve your brand’s reach and reputation.

8. Reduce Overwhelming Factors

Online users want to find information quickly and don’t want to feel overwhelmed or stressed by the process of researching a brand and finding a product or service that fits their needs. 

Reducing the friction in your marketing funnel will help you attract customers and move them down the funnel to make a sale. 

Too many fields, forms, and on-page advertisements will push a lead away.

9. Partner with Influencers

Sometimes it can help to use the influence of others to fill your marketing funnel. 

If you partner with an influencer, you can tap into their audience and encourage them to learn more about your brand, products, and services. 

Influencers have extremely loyal fan bases, which can help you gain credibility and trust in your top-of-funnel marketing efforts. 

10. Measure the Success of Your Efforts

If you aren’t measuring the effects of your top-of-funnel marketing efforts, you aren’t going to know whether the tactics you implement have any effect. 

Setting goals, tracking the right KPIs and metrics and creating reports to see the impact of your marketing efforts will help you discover what in your top-of-funnel marketing strategy works and what still needs improving.

Top-of-Funnel Content Ideas

Your top-of-funnel content needs to resonate with new audiences who might not be familiar with your brand and encourage them to come back and learn more about your products or services. 

While not every content type is going to be ideal for top-of-funnel marketing, there are thankfully many types of content ideas that can help in your efforts, including: 

• Videos
• Social media posts
• Blogs
• Infographics
• Native advertising
• Paid advertising
• Interactive quizzes
• Checklists
• Kits and packaged interactive tools
• Email marketing
• Press release
• Retargeting

Wrap Up

Top-of-funnel marketing helps you bring in new customers, increase your number of leads, and improve your brand’s reach and reputation.

It also helps you determine what types of content ideas are going to be the most effective for bringing in new customers to your digital marketing funnel.

If you are a marketer who wants to improve your brand’s overall content strategy, you need a reliable team of writers to create your content on demand with a seamless workflow.

You can count on WriterAccess for that. With our freelancer base of thousands of professional writers, you’ll be able to scale your content production and ensure high quality at the same time.

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The post How to Improve Your Top-of-Funnel Marketing Strategy and Gain Leads appeared first on Rock Content.

Organizing all of these elements produces a big challenge for content marketing departments and teams. 

That is why content requires planning in order to be effective. Without the right amount of strategic planning, you’ll end up missing important pieces and losing control of the overall content production process. 

Rather than struggling to meet deadlines and posting last-minute articles, you can have a clear and precise plan that was created months in advance. That’s all possible with the help of a content calendar.

• But what is a content calendar exactly? 
• How does it increase marketing efficiency in a business?
• What needs to be included in one? 

We’ll answer all those questions in this article as well as give you a step-by-step process for creating a content calendar of your own.

What is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar is what it sounds like: a documented calendar schedule of all your content with clear publication dates and delegated subtasks. 

The calendar is a tool that helps you brainstorm, organize, streamline, and schedule all of your content production across all of your channels in a single place. 

Content calendars help you visualize your content plan and output as well as help you understand long-term goals and short-term objectives for your content marketing strategy. 

It also allows every member of your team to have the same amount of information about your content schedule, meaning that your entire team will be on the same page. 

A well-structured content calendar takes away all of the confusion that can come with content planning. No one will be wondering if a Twitter post was sent out or if an upcoming infographic was sent to the design team. 

It helps you create a content production flow that works, and that helps your content marketing strategy grow.

How Does a Content Calendar Increase Marketing Efficiency?

One of the biggest benefits of a content calendar is the increase it brings to your marketing efficiency. 

As an organizational tool, a content calendar creates clarity and provides a clear, visual representation of your content flow. 

It also keeps every member of your team on the same page and ensures that there is consistency across your department. 

Here are a few of the other benefits that come with a well-executed content calendar: 

• Never miss important dates or events.
• See blank spaces in your content production.
• Manage the entire content workflow from start to finish.
• Know where you can mix things up and try new ideas.
• Create opportunities for collaborative efforts.
• Keep on task for all content projects.
• Delegate tasks to different team members.
• Keeps everyone on your team accountable.
• Allows you to see where bottlenecks and production slowdowns occur.
• Have a single, universal source for all content production.
• Gives you a bird’s-eye view of the entire content marketing production process.
• Plan ahead for seasonal trends, major events, and important industry dates.

All of these things work together to create more marketing efficiency and a smoother content production process. 

A content calendar helps you avoid unnecessary stress brought on by poor planning and rushed content production schedules. It gives you control over your content marketing strategies and execution.

Besides a content calendar, you can count with a group of ghostwriters to delegate the production of the pieces so you can deliver everything on time.

What Should a Content Calendar Include?

Content calendars should be customized to fit the needs of your business and include the specific elements that are important to your content production process. 

However, there are some common features that every content calendar should include to maximize clarity and efficiency.

Upcoming Pieces

The first thing that should be included in your content calendar is the upcoming content pieces you want to plan. 

By putting them in the schedule, you’ll be able to see what your current timelines look like and what posting cadence you use. Upcoming pieces can include: 

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Photography
• Videos
• Infographics
• Case studies & testimonials
• Charts
• Ebooks
• News and announcements from the company or the industry
• New product launches
• Press releases
• Seasonal or event-specific content

Status Updates

Any updates or changes to your brand should be included in the content calendar. You want to be able to have a plan for major changes that will affect those internally and externally. 

Customers and clients deserve to be updated on status changes and making a plan in advance can save time and stress.

Promotional Activity

Promotions are a huge part of selling your products and services. 

Without the right planning and content support, promotional activity can largely go unnoticed by your customers, which means you can lose out on potential revenue. 

Planning all your promotional activities in advance and including them in your calendar can help you better organize your campaigns.

Partnerships

Any partnerships with other brands, influencers, or industries should be included in your content calendar. 

Whether it’s a guest post from a writer in your industry or a new product launch with the support of another brand, you want your partnerships to be planned out.

Updates to Existing Content

Content needs to be kept fresh in order to perform well on SEO results. 

If you want to plan any updates to your current content like your website copy, it should be included on your content calendar so you know when a refresh is coming up. 

That also helps you know the lifecycle of your content and when refreshes are in order.

What are the Steps for Creating a Content Calendar?

Now that you understand what a content calendar is, how it helps your marketing team, and what needs to be included in order for the calendar to be successful, let’s take a look at the steps that you need to follow to create your brand’s content calendar.

1. Define Your Goals

Before planning your upcoming content, you need to have clear expectations and goals for that content once it has been published. 

Knowing your goals helps you understand the best channels and format for your content to take and impacts the entire planning process. 

Once you know your goals, you can create each piece of content with a clear purpose.

2. Create a Template for the Calendar

Templates are a great tool for getting started with a content calendar. 

There are many free content calendar templates online which can help you begin planning quickly. 

You’ll just want to make sure that the template includes the specific items that apply to your content production process, like the topic, channel, and publish date of the content.

3. Choose Your Channels

Channels are the different platforms on which content can be published and shared. 

Not all content pieces will perform well on every channel. For example, a detailed whitepaper might not have much of an impact on Instagram and a fun behind-the-scenes photo won’t fit very well into your technical blog. 

Choosing the right channels for content is key to optimizing content performance.

4. Start with the Calendar Year

The calendar year is a great place to start with a content calendar as it will include all of the important events and holidays that you will likely want to build your content around. 

You’ll also want to include the industry and brand-specific days that matter to your company, as well as the seasonal content that you want to produce for the year.

5. Walk Yourself Through the Marketing Funnel

Understanding customers better is essential to creating effective content that resonates with your audiences. 

Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas and think about the specific types of content they want to see at different touchpoints in the marketing funnel. 

You can then start to plan different topic ideas around those important steps.

6. Ask Your Entire Team for Content Ideas

Brainstorming content ideas shouldn’t fall on the plate of a single individual or even a few individuals. 

Instead, let your entire team pitch content ideas for your calendar. 

Not only does this build more cooperation and collaboration within your team, but it lets everyone express themselves and helps the brand find new ideas that will work in content production.

7. Monitor Your Competition’s Content Publishing

Your competitors can be a great source of inspiration when brainstorming ideas for your content calendar. 

Monitor what types of content they are publishing to see if there are big trends of popular topics that you want to include in your planning. 

You can also see how audiences are responding to different topic ideas before you try them yourself.

8. Explore Topic Clusters

Topic clusters are a type of brainstorming tool that can help you increase the number of posts and content ideas you have. 

Start with some big picture topics that are important to your industry and brand, then add more specific content ideas under those big picture topics. 

Then include more under-the-radar content ideas and so on until you have a full list of topics.

9. Look at Popular Content in Your Industry

News and updates that occur in your industry are a great source of inspiration for content ideas. 

You can look at what’s popular in your industry and use that to come up with content ideas that will establish you as an industry leader and authoritative source of content. 

People might even come to your channels to get their industry news if you are successful.

10. Add Your Content

Once you’ve brainstormed content ideas for all the different channels you want to hit, it’s time to start adding those content pieces to your calendar. 

It’s perfectly acceptable to start small and add in more content over time to fill out your calendar. 

As you get started, it’s important to create a flow that you can manage effectively and that you can build out from.

11. Keep Your Content Evergreen

Evergreen content refers to content that doesn’t come with an expiration date and will remain relevant for years. 

This is helpful for your SEO and online visibility, as well as in helping establish your brand as a thought leader and authoritative source. 

Timeless blogs and articles are able to bring in new audiences long after they have been posted.

12. Make Use of Prior Content

If you have a great piece of content that you made a while ago, don’t think that it doesn’t have a place in your content calendar! 

You can use previously published content in new ways. This helps you avoid coming up with new topics all the time and lets your successful content shine in new channels. 

For example, you can take a line from a high-performing blog and turn it into a social media post or email blast.

13. Decide on the Publishing Frequency and Set Time Limits

After all the content has been added to your content calendar, you’ll want to take a look at the publishing frequencies and time limits you want to set for your content. 

Some channels require much more frequent posts than others, so creating a content flow that fits into the expectations of each channel is key to your content calendar’s success.

Wrap Up

A content calendar is much more than just a publishing schedule. It’s an important strategic tool that helps you organize your content in a way that makes sense.

Without it, you’ll likely find yourself struggling to come up with content ideas, missing important dates, and struggling to stay ahead of content production. 

A content calendar is an important component of successful digital marketing, but not the only type of calendar that can be utilized to improve production and create more efficiency in the workplace. 

Marketing calendars are able to organize even more than just your content production. To learn more about them, check out our free marketing calendars resource kit! 

The post What is a Content Calendar? Find out how it improves your content creation appeared first on Rock Content.