Buyer personas. Important? Yes! Just read our most recent blog post to learn why! Confusing? Sometimes. Especially when it comes to the stages buyers experience throughout their journey through your inbound marketing-enabled website.
For those of you who don't know about inbound marketing, quick review: visitors to an inbound-enabled website will encounter calls-to-action (often in the form of big buttons that say "Download Here") which lead to landing pages describing an offer and forms requiring their contact information in order to access an offer such as a free eBook. Makes sense, right?
Because of all of those steps, inbound marketing requires a lot of content that will bring in high levels of interaction, from the right visitors. That's where buyer personas come in!
Need an example? Here at Responsive Inbound Marketing we aim to solve the problems of marketing managers and owners of small businesses who are looking to enter the world of inbound marketing but have limited resources. We use our content to discuss and solve these problems. How do we know what these problems are? We define the perfect client! Our ideal buyers are Marketing Margaret and Oscar Owner, we even gave them back stories to better understand their needs! Here is our bio of Marketing Margaret.
Not only does your content have to appeal to your ideal customer, but it has to appeal to them at the stage of the buying process that they are in. What does that mean? You don't want to show prices to a potential customer who is just starting to research a problem, just as you don't want to go on and on about how you address problems to a customer who is at the price-comparing stage. Thus you need to understand the buyer's journey.
What is the buyer's journey, you ask? It is the active research process a potential customer will go through before making a purchase. There are three stages to this process: awareness, consideration, and decision. But let's just focus on awareness for now.
Awareness:
At the awareness stage, a potential buyer is doing preliminary educational research. Often they are trying to diagnose and better understand a problem that they have. Does your company offer a product that can solve their problem? That's fantastic! Content that explains the problem could bring them to your site and introduce you as a thought leader. Just keep in mind that trying to solve their problem too quickly might scare off those in the awareness stage.
What content is appropriate for buyers in the awareness stage? Anything that provides them the education that they are looking for! That can be anything from analyst and research reports to eBooks, editorial and expert content, and White papers. 
Can I give you one more example? Think about why you are reading this post, most likely you are trying to learn more about inbound marketing to grasp what it's all about, not to hire a consultant on the spot. So are we going to push a pricing quote on you? No, you probably wouldn't appreciate that.
So we are just going to offer a link to our LinkedIn page, so you can follow us for updates. Remember, we are only half way through our four part blog series about the buyer's journey, and we publish content answering your most pertinent inbound marketing questions daily. Be the first to know when our future posts are available by following us on LinkedIn!
Need help creating your own buyer personas? You're in luck! Download this customizable template!
