The key to successful content marketing is integrating search engine optimization with significant research about the target buyer persona. Remember, content marketing begins and ends with a perfectly constructed persona. Without one, content marketing is a waste of money.
A recent article on the Content Marketing Institute website discusses how marketers need to perform more technical research and analytics to create precise buyer personas, which actually hit the mark.
“Content … often fails because it is built upon faulty buyer personas that, in turn, create a weak foundation,” the article says. Using Google Trends, Google Analytics, a bit of social-media monitoring and a few demographics to craft the target persona just isn’t enough because it’s “based on guesswork.”
A highly functioning buyer persona, on the other hand, is based on interviewing and talking to the buyer persona. That’s the most critical thing any content marketing expert can do in building buyer personas. They need to get the buyer on the phone and talk about what’s top of mind for them today, and then develop a profile around that discussion.
With this in mind, the Content Marketing Institute provides 10 great tips for content marketing experts on how to use analytics to deepen the quality of buyer personas.
- Collect analytics data from your website to see what keywords you’ve already got. Most people use Google Analytics to collect at least one year of data. Here is how: “Traffic Sources > Search > Organic, and set the correct date range in the upper-right corner.”
- Check your keywords for categories and patterns to establish “small buckets of intent.” The purpose of this is to find themes from the data.
- Use these themes to build a buyer persona. These targets represent the most likely intent of the keywords and will help you decide what content to publish for each “bucket.”
- Discover order of search engine queries that your target buyers perform. Cross-reference the buyer with the keyword list. Your search funnel is your buyer; it’s the same thing as the sales funnel.Your search funnel is about what people search for as they move through the sales process. This is a critical gap in persona development. As people step through the buying process, what keywords are they using to do that? You need to identify the questions that people are asking.
- Figure out the opportunity for each keyword in a search engine. Click here for directions on how to use a spreadsheet and Google Keyword tool to do this.
- Determine who your competitors are by looking at the first search result page of any major search engine, such as Google. Use the keywords and target terms for your buyer persona and use a rank tracking tool to see how they stack up.
- See how the content on your site compares to the content on your competitors’ sites. What kind of content do these companies have on their About Us pages and FAQ sites?
- Take note of your existing content to integrate search engine optimization efforts with content marketing. Again, use a spreadsheet and list the type of publication, such as article, video or infographic.
- Take a step back and identify weaknesses. This is the most important part. If you have gaps in your content versus your buyer persona and the questions they’re asking as they step into the buying process, you’re likely going to lose them. You must have content that helps them walk through the buying process.
- Figure out where you should create content. Read here for more information. The key is to start at the top of the funnel, move to the middle of the funnel and then go to the bottom of the funnel.
Source: Content Marketing Institute, July 2013
