Gone are the days when one message was enough.
Every buyer is unique and needs to be treated as so with targeted messages and content.
It’s likely you have a handful of buyer types or personas —buyers with similar problems, needs, wants, demographics and behaviors. LERN, for example, has recreation, community education, association, and continuing education buyer types or personas.
When targeting messages to nurture leads, you’ll want to start by determining the personas of your best and most frequent customers. There is no magic number of buyer personas —some organizations will have three or four, while others may have many more. The needs, wants and problems of each group are probably a little bit different and your messages should acknowledge that. This doesn’t mean that you’ll never create a message or a piece of content relevant to all of your personas, because you will, sometimes more often than not, but those targeted messages will help with customer attraction and retention, as well as sales and positioning your program as the leader in the industry.
Identify your best, most frequent customers in terms of personas using these questions:
- What job does this person have? What is their level within the organization?
- What goal or goals is this person working to achieve?
- What are the biggest challenges this person is facing when it comes to achieving their goals?
- What services, products or solutions can you provide to help them overcome these challenges?
- Does the person in this group skew mostly male/female?
- What is the average age or generation of a person in this group?
After you have identified and segmented your buyers, you can start thinking about your messages.
Answering the above questions will give you a good start, and will allow you to deliver most relevant and targeted content.
For example:
- What job does this person have? What is their level within the organization?
- What information can you offer them on how to be successful?
- What are some of the common pitfalls?
- How is that job changing?
- What would make their job easier?
- What goal or goals is this person working to achieve?
- What are some tools that might help them get to their goal?
- Can you offer or share advice from others who have worked toward the same goal?
- What do you know about the benefits of reaching this persona’s goal?
- What can this persona do after they reach this goal? Are there other goals they should be setting?
- What are the biggest challenges this person is facing when it comes to achieving their goals?
- What tips can you share to help them overcome these challenges?
- What should this persona know about this or other challenges?
- Are things changing in the industry that might make the situation better or worse?
- Do you have any success stories or unique ways others have conquered these challenges?
After you’ve completed these steps, you can take another look at your personas to determine the best delivery method for your message. When doing this, think about how much time this person has to spend with you and what delivery format would be most convenient.
Your targeted messages can come in many forms:
- Emails
- Web pages
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- E-books
- Whitepapers
- Tip sheets
- How-to guides
- Slideshows
- Infographics
- Print newsletters or magazines
- Webinars
Creating targeted messages can seem like an impossible task, but delivering targeted messages doesn’t mean you are creating several versions of every message for each buyer persona. In some cases, one message will be sufficient and satisfy all of your buyer personas. But when you do create targeted messages, think of it as an opportunity to give your customers something they cannot get anywhere else — the customers benefit from the message, and your organization benefits in the form of stronger leads, and better sales and customer retention.