Don’t live in the dark. And don’t take guesses. Your marketing initiatives – from creation to execution to the technology you use – require quite a bit of investment. So to make the most of those investments, put time into understanding your buyers, and then apply those awesome insights to every decision you make. By knowing your buyers’ needs and preferences throughout their buying journey, you’ll maximize the effectiveness of all your marketing programs.
In our previous post, Examples: How to Apply Marketing Strategy Elements like Buyer Personas to Content Marketing and Product Marketing, we provided a few examples on how your marketing strategy elements like journey maps, buyer personas, and targeted messaging can be applied to content marketing and product marketing. So to continue on with that theme, we’re providing some examples on how to apply your marketing strategy to demand generation and social media.
Demand Generation
Successful demand generation produces high quality leads and works effectively with Sales to convert those leads. Here are examples on how to apply your marketing strategy to designing campaigns and CTAs.
Campaign Design
To whom are you targeting your campaign? Your personas and journey maps will inform you on which personas you can group together for a particular promotion. If you’re promoting a whitepaper that addresses a particular concern or challenge, you’ll know, for example, that this will resonate with your warehouse manager and supply chain executive personas, but your IT director persona will require something different. With this understanding, you can stay focused in the messages you use and the outlets in which you promote the whitepaper.
Creating Calls-to-Action
A powerful CTA is one of the most critical—and often one of the most internally debated—aspects of an email nurture or content asset. When you know exactly which persona you are targeting and at which journey stage, you can create a CTA that is aligned to the needs of the buyer. What information does the buyer need next? What are they doing next and with whom are they engaging? What are they looking to learn as they continue moving forward in their buying process? This is critical knowledge to creating a CTA that keeps your buyers engaged with you.
Social Media Marketing
Social media channels have become a primary way to establish brand awareness and thought-leadership with your target audience. See how you can apply your marketing strategy to your social content strategy and audience engagement execution.
Social Content Strategy
Your journey maps and personas reveal how your buyers view each social channel, whether as a way to search for solutions, gain expertise on a particular topic, learn best practices, validate brand credibility, or network with others. You’ll also learn what types of content your buyers seek and engage with in different social channels. Together these insights will guide which content topics, content formats, and messages to share by buyer persona and social channel. For example, your buyers will likely prefer educational whitepapers and case studies on LinkedIn, and shorter how-to blogs, articles, and infographics on Twitter. How buyers are using social media channels at each journey stage will also shape the content you share and the messages you use. Buyers may, for instance, leverage social media for best practices early on in the buying journey, but they may use it to validate brand credibility in the middle stages. This impacts everything from what you share to how you organize content on your corporate LinkedIn page.
Audience Engagement Plan
How active are your buyers in each social channel? Which influencers do they follow? What are popular hashtags they use and LinkedIn groups they belong to? What activities do they engage in within each channel and what is their purpose? Your personas and journey maps will tell you how, when, and where to engage with your audience on social media.
These are just a few examples, but hopefully they’ve illustrated how your buyer insights can inform every decision you make across all of your marketing initiatives. So take the time to know your buyers, and if you already have personas and journey maps (and they’re very detailed and current!), then don’t forget to leverage them in everything you do.
View our Toolkit:
Example Journey Map and Persona and How-to-Guides for Building Them