If You’re Targeting Everyone, Don’t Expect Anyone to Read It
If you’re not using audience segmentation in your B2B content marketing strategy, your investment of time and money will probably not yield the results you expect. Audience segmentation presents a clear way to significantly improve your lead generation and reach the buyers that your company values. Identifying buyer personas, describing them in as much detail as possible, and then writing to them as if they were unique gives your content the personal touch to make it more relevant for your audience.
Who are your buyer personas? Identifying your buyer personas is a critical step for audience segmentation, and there are a lot of tools to help make it a painless process. For example, you can use your existing client base and your sales and marketing department expertise to figure out the simple demographics of your best client. Information like industry, job function, company size, geographical location can be valuable to your lead generation strategy. You can then make use of social media analytics (on platforms like LinkedIn) to explore what groups or organization they belong to and what type of content they like to read or recommend others.
Consider a B2B content marketing example. Imagine that you are marketing a publication to members of the textbook publishing industry. While your magazine may be appropriate for all segments, you’ll want your blog content and other materials you publish to zero in on smaller segments of the industry. Your target audience segment that produces textbooks for elementary schools is going to have different challenges and witness different trends than those that specialize in high school science curricula.
As a result, you may want to spend time focusing on how increased levels of hands-on training in science class is impacting the ways that students interact with their textbooks and their online counterparts. For your elementary textbook publishing specialists, your topics might include discussions about Common Core education or marketing textbooks to charter schools versus public schools.
Get started with your own segmentation:
- Take a good look at the buying process. In B2B content marketing, it’s important to remember that there are likely several decision-makers and influencers involved with any purchase and they hold a variety of roles in the organization. If you’re using three or fewer buyer personas, you need to further embrace the complexity of B2B marketing. Learn more about the types of reservations buyers have, common budget constraints and what your competition offers.
- Take your segmentation a variety of directions. Your target audience can be divided by size of business, industry variations, location and more.
- After you’ve segmented, segment again. Don’t be afraid to keep narrowing your content for a specific audience. Solve unique problems and discuss specific issues.
- Use telemarketing to help you in your segmentation. Each of the above can be aided by the use of telemarketing in your B2B content marketing strategy. Using a personal telephone conversation, you can do the following:
- Identify all the decision-makers and influencers involved
- Find out more about their buying process, including a timeline for purchase, possible budget constraints and key stakeholders that could influence the decision
- Learn more about potential reservations, questions and how you compare to the competition
To learn more about audience segmentation or getting started with an effective B2B content marketing strategy, talk with our team at Blue Valley Telemarketing. Telemarketing can help you reach your target audience and improve your lead generation through audience segmentation. Give us a call today and find out how.