Content Strategy Step Two: Know Your Customer

Table of Contents:
Introduction
Step 1: Know Thyself
Step 2: Know Your Customer
Step 3: Determine Your Content Marketing Goals
Step 4: Search Engine Optimization
Step 5: Perform a Content Inventory
Step 6: Content Mapping
Step 7: Creating Content
Step 8: The Right Content in the Right Channel
Step 9: Measuring Your Content Strategy’s Success
Some Final Thoughts

Once your business is large enough to warrant a content strategy, you should have enough of a customer base to know some things about them, such as what verticals and business units your solutions fit into. You will also have a good idea of who your users are and the people within your target customers who make purchasing decisions. 

But with very few exceptions, it’s rarely a single person making the decisions about large technology purchases.  If you sell server-side software into enterprises, an IT Director might ultimately make the call, but only after input from others on the team, and probably after a good bit of personal research by visiting similar vendors’ websites, reading customer reviews, and seeing what the analysts in your industry have to say about your company and your product roadmap.

Understanding the parties involved in buying decisions helps you create content specifically for them. And that’s why we build “personas.”

Personas help us categorize customers by:

  • Company type
  • Company size
  • Job title
  • Job duties
  • Challenges they’re facing (which your solutions solve)
  • How they consume content (which web sites, do they open email, which social platforms are they most active on)

Gathering this information requires a thorough review of all available sources of information. Talk to your sales teams. Follow your customers on social media and listen to what they say. Tap your existing customer relationship management (CRM) system and see what content your current customers consume. In general, look for commonalities among your customers. If you don’t have a ready supply of data, you can send out a survey and simply ask. 

Once you’ve gathered information about your customers, you can create profiles based on the similarities you identified. These personas will inform your content strategy helping you better focus your content efforts on the right kinds of content pushed through the right channels to reach the decision-makers at target companies.

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Chris Souther's avatar

By Chris Souther

Chris joined the Air Force out of high school. After four years of supporting communications for the Department of Defense, the White House, and stations around the world, he left the military and moved to Atlanta. For the next six years, Chris continued working in the telecom field, eventually traveling around the country teaching companies like MCI, Nortel Networks, and Cabletron, how to do what he did. When the dot.com crash happened, upon recommendation from his wife, Chris re-enrolled in school and earned his B.S. in Communications (PR & Marketing). Since then, he was worked in network security, healthcare, banking and finance (and FinTech), general high tech (AI/ML, Cloud, IoT), and most recently, application development fields. Now, with more than 15 years of both Marketing and Communications under his belt, he helps organizations grow their business through the proper application of marketing, communications, and content. And he blogs on the side. It keeps him sane.