Personalization doesn’t stop with the creation of content; it should continue throughout the distribution process.
Understanding how to build buyer personas helps us reach the right people and focus on topics your target buyers care about during their purchase journey. We use buyer personas to create content that’s useful, furthering the intended message and giving buyers the information they need to progress down the funnel.
Strategic content distribution means targeting buyers based on how and where they engage with content. It takes the personalized content that you’ve developed and tailors it via, selective distribution channels. In this way, your messages may actually reach your intended audience.
Buffer Sets a Good Example of Developing Buyer Personas
Buffer, one of the top 50 content marketing brands, offers great insight into the questions a content marketer needs to ask about the buyers they’re targeting. Buffer demonstrates beyond the basic understanding of each persona’s needs and interests, you might want to consider these additional aspects of your buyer persona:
Strategic content distribution means targeting buyers based on how and where they engage with content.
- Computer literacy—How adept are your buyers at using technology in their lives? Are they comfortable signing up for a webinar, or do they know how to use Twitter and LinkedIn?
- Where they get their news—This takes into consideration how a persona seeks or receives trusted information. Do they get a newspaper everyday or scan their Facebook feed for the latest news about whatever topics interest them?
- Online community — Which blogosphere circles do your buyers interact with? What are the qualities and personality traits of the online communities that they engage in? And, more importantly, what motivates your buyer to belong to that community?
Dell Demonstrates Tailored Content Distribution
Once you’ve identified your buyer personas (and the online spaces that they hang out in) the next thing to do is distribute content in a manner that resonates with the platform.
Use Dell as an example.
Dell uses Facebook to engage users with beautiful visuals, inspiring quotes, and fun technology-related trivia—because that’s the kind of content that works for Dell on Facebook. Take, for example, two of their recent Facebook posts:
Dell’s figured out that engaging people with interesting questions, presented visually, activates their user base to engage with the content. For them, visual, quirky questions take advantage of the strengths of Facebook as a distribution channel.
To figure out how the strengths of each of your specific distribution channels, try thinking through some of these questions:
- On each of our content distribution channels (email, social, blog, video platforms, etc.), which content assets have historically seen the most success?
- Are there any patterns across top-performing assets for specific channels? For example: do images work well in email? What about social? Are short blog posts driving more leads than long-form?
- What are our competitors doing, and what seems to be working for them?
- Are there tactics we haven’t tried, but should?
By asking yourself these questions, you’ll get a better sense of what resonates with your audience on different channels.
How @dell and @buffer target the right people, on the right channels, with the right content.
When you’re ready, put your content to the test. Develop a strategy around distribution channels, the buyer personas on those channels, and the kind of content that should be created to match the style and tone of each channel. Don’t forget to write your strategy down!
Record data and metrics as you execute your strategy to track your success (as see if your initial strategy is working). As you test, don’t forget to iterate based on what you discover. Use this information to add details to your personas so you can create even better content on the channels that matter to them.
Has your organization integrated personas into your personalized content distribution strategy? What are other key aspects of each persona that determine when, where, how and why a specific customer type gets content delivered to them in a certain way?