Today’s B2B buyers have higher expectations for relevant, personalised content that speaks to their specific needs and preferences. Generic marketing simply doesn’t cut it anymore in capturing their attention. To truly resonate with audiences, brands need deeper insight into their ideal customers. This requirement means getting to know your personas on a granular level, mapping out their winding journeys and shaping content accordingly.
Personas provide a window into your buyers’ worlds
Thorough persona development is essential for creating content that aligns with your customers’ values, pain points and motivations. Go beyond basic demographics to uncover their challenges, goals, buying criteria and psychographics. What information sources do they rely on? How do they prefer to engage? Where are they most active online? Build personas as living documents that evolve through ongoing qualitative and quantitative research.
Map journeys to meet customers where they are
Next, map your personas’ journeys to pinpoint their questions, concerns and content needs at each stage. Awareness requires different messaging and formats than consideration or retention. Identify the information they seek around problems, solutions, vendor selection, implementation, usage and more. Audit your existing content assets against these needs to reveal gaps and repurposing opportunities. Use journey mapping to develop an integrated content calendar that nurtures customers through each step.
Expand beyond traditional B2B Marcom to fuel journeys
Today’s fragmented media landscape requires a diverse content mix aligned to personas’ preferences. While long-form assets like whitepapers and eBooks still have a place, buyers increasingly consume webinars, podcasts, social media and bite-size content. Develop formats that map to your customers’ journeys and community engagement. Meet audiences in their channels instead of solely on your owned properties.
Crafting content for diverse preferences
In the deep-tech B2B realm, it’s essential to consider the varying preferences of your audience, especially when it comes to different generations of engineers. Younger engineers tend to gravitate towards video-based, concise content that is community-focused with a strong emphasis on peer-to-peer learning. On the other hand, older engineers may prefer more traditional formats.
Understanding these preferences is crucial in shaping your content strategy. Incorporate short, engaging videos that facilitate peer-to-peer learning within your community-focused content. Doing so can bridge the generation gap and ensure your content appeals to a wide range of engineers.
A strategic approach to researching personas and journeys
A comprehensive approach includes in-depth workshops to uncover pain points and content needs for each persona at every stage of their journey. Existing assets can then be thoroughly audited and mapped to the journey to identify gaps precisely. This level of research enables highly tailored content creation that seamlessly guides customers through their entire journey.
Persona-driven journeys create tailored, impactful CX
In summary, personas and journey mapping work hand in hand to provide a complete view of your customers, their needs and the content required to move them from awareness to advocacy. By investing time upfront in targeted research, you gain the insight needed to deliver consistent, tailored messaging across every touchpoint in their journey. When customers feel truly understood through relevant content, you earn their engagement, trust and loyalty. This approach fuels seamless customer experiences, brand affinity, referrals and conversions. Put in the work to intimately know your buyers, and your content will speak to them like no other. A meticulous, strategic approach to persona and journey mapping research enables brands to create this level of customer intimacy and impact.
