Patrick: I see it pretty frequently, actually. You can usually tell in the content itself and also on their websites. Probably one of the biggest failings that I see is when I'm looking at different B2B businesses out there. Their websites, when you get on their homepage and you dig into their service pages, it's all about them. They talk about what makes them amazing along with the different features of their products and services.

Never once do they really address the customer and what their problems are. So in other words, instead of being really customer-centric, they're much more focused inward. They're missing an opportunity to connect with their customers in a more meaningful way. This is really evident in their content marketing (i.e. blogging, social media, etc.) as well.

Chris: I've seen a lot of technology sites that are like that as well.

Patrick: Absolutely, it happens often. A lot of content creators talk about having a buyer persona. But oftentimes any sense of the customer goes out the window once they actually start writing. They're much more focused on the mechanics of the blog post. Are the keywords in the right places? Are they mentioning the keywords often enough? Are they mentioning them too often?
What they often forget about is that there is a purpose to why they're creating this content. That is to meet a very specific buyer at a very specific part of their journey. I would say probably eight times out of ten, blog posts completely fail to make this connection.

Chris: I would agree. I've seen a lot of companies, especially in the B2B realm, that will just ask for generic blog post pitches based upon keywords, but there's no tie in to their strategy or buyer persona. So when the writer doesn't magically guess what ties in to their persona, you end up with poor ideas that never get approved.

Chris: How can buyer personas help you create better content and improve the content strategy?

Patrick: This is where a lot of brands go wrong. They need to take a hard look at the buyer personas that they’re targeting. They need to ask themselves, "Could this very same buyer persona be used by a landscaping company and a software development company?" If the answer is yes, then chances are good that they're getting their buyer persona wrong.
A common example of a profile that people create is, "Okay, so I'm targeting CEO Charlie. And CEO Charlie is very short on time. He's got a busy lifestyle. He lives and dies by email. He's always on his phone. He's very hard to connect to. He's highly concerned about team-building, maximizing revenue and keeping expenses low. CEO Charlie makes $200,000 a year and he's got a border collie and he likes to pick up Thai food on his way home."

You get stuff like that.

The point is that while a lot of these profiles are very well intentioned, they're completely generic. Where they miss the mark is that they don’t tell the marketer any useful information about how the customers buy the product or service.

Why focus on their income? I don't want to know what my buyer persona makes in a year. It has absolutely no relevance to me. There might be some success factors that they're looking for in my product that will allow them to earn more money. But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what they eat for lunch.

What matters is the process that they go through when they're evaluating a service and a solution like I provide. And that's really what's most important. The ways that a properly researched buyer persona can improve your content is that it gives you really great insights directly through interviews.

I always advocate for getting all of this information directly from people who buy the products and services and really understand what are called the five critical buying insights. This is something that I've learned from the Buyer Persona Institute. They do fantastic work and I've learned a lot from them. I highly recommend checking them out.

Chris: Sounds good. Was there anything you wanted to add related to how personas can help you map content to your buyer's journey?

Patrick: Oh yeah, absolutely. There are basically three very general stages of the buyer's journey. There's awareness, when a buyer realizes that they have a challenge or an opportunity, although they haven't really put a name to it yet.
They realize that there's an issue here that needs to be addressed, so they start doing some research. And now they've basically started their own journey toward what will hopefully, eventually be a purchase from you.
But as they move toward the consideration phase of a solution, now they're pretty immersed in it. They've read a few blog posts and maybe some white papers. They have a better sense of what really is the challenge and they know a little bit of jargon. They understand the issue on a much deeper level now.

As they move further down the journey, they're actually comparing solution providers. They have a better sense of what sort of factors they're looking for and what elements will make a really good solution for them.

Really, they're just weighing the pros and cons of each solution and trying to arrive at what's going to be the best fit for them. For instance, when you've got a buyer persona through speaking with customers and non-customers, what was the catalyst? What changed within their business that made researching this problem a priority?

I'll give you an example: maybe the company needs a new CRM and they've needed one for many years. What created this need? It can usually be traced to an actual event. It sometimes takes a little probing to get to this. But what was the catalyst that made them get off the fence and think,

"Okay, we’ve got to address this issue?"

After that, you’ll also want to know how they began their search. Is it just as simple as Googling? Or, did they have some resources in mind to do some research? And if so, what influenced the decision? What were the things that they learned that had an impact on the direction they went in?
In one of the most obvious, but also often missed things about this is, how were they envisioning success? What features and benefits are they really thinking about as they move through their journey and what became important to them as they were evaluating different solutions? Because oftentimes, you don't get this feedback.

The sales team might be thinking, "I know our customers inside and out. I know what their pain points are. I know what their challenges are, what their aspirations are in life." But the simple fact of the matter is, when you have a sales relationship with a person, that is a very specific relationship that has some filters in between the giver and the receiver of information.

While sales people can often provide some insights that'll help you construct a really good buyer persona, they certainly don't know the whole story. This is especially true for those deals that they lost to a different solution provider.

Obviously the sales person always tries to find out why someone left and they might get an excuse about budget or timing or whatever reason. But you can bet your bottom dollar that there's probably more to the story than what the customer is telling them.

That's the sort of insight that you want to get at with buyer personas. You want to find out what was going on behind the scenes as they're evaluating solution providers. Even more importantly, what are some potential barriers? Why would they not want to do business with you?
With enough of these interviews, you can start to see some patterns. You'll see some threads that start to pull everything together and really give you a better picture of what's happening with your customers. As you’re mapping the customer journey with buyer personas, you have a better sense of, as you work through the process, what are some of the things that are going to be important to them at each stage.

This is where you really begin to look at your own brand and your advantages and disadvantages. You look at all this feedback that you've gotten from buyer personas and really just try to find the intersection between your messaging and their needs and ask how can we make that better?

Chris: That was fantastic. While we’re on the topic of content, how can personas turn website visitors into customers and ultimately help sell more?

Patrick: I think about that on a couple of levels. One is that if you’re understanding critical success factors and also where your organizational weaknesses are, you can basically do one of a couple of things. One, you can pivot a little bit and discover, "Okay maybe there are opportunities with other market segments that we hadn't thought of before."

A better way is that you understand the success factors and also barriers, and typically the people that are doing the research for a B2B solution are not the ultimate decision-makers, right? They usually have two or three people that are involved in the decision making process, but one person is basically spearheading the research. You really need to understand all three of these roles, although you don't need to understand them all equally.

Trying to do a buyer persona profile on CEOs is extraordinarily hard. One, because most of the time, they refuse to make themselves available to do the research. Frequently their roles are pretty much limited until the end of the process. They're the ones that give the ultimate nod, yes or no, to the solution. So their role really isn't that important until the very end.

What's important for the marketer to understand is, at what stage does the CEO become involved? And what was important to him or her? Were their priorities somewhat different than the manager of purchasing or operations, or whoever it is that's doing the primary research on the solution?

As you understand all these different roles that are involved, you can develop individual buyer personas about them. You can address all of those concerns in your content at each stage of the journey and ultimately win the business.

If you want to reach Patrick Dodge, you can find him at Creative Side Marketing. http://www.creativesidemarketing.com/