Creating target personas helps marketers tailor their content and messaging to resonate with a specific group of people that are a good fit for their solution. By understanding the needs and pain points of these personas, marketers can develop personalized content that addresses their unique concerns and improve the effectiveness of their lead gen strategies.
Target personas in a nutshell
Target personas are the topical, demographic, firmographic and geographic elements you value most. These personas are often the people who you imagine as the ideal customer for your solution or the audience most likely to turn into prospective buyers. Promoting content in your lead gen campaigns that is well-suited to your current target(s) will ensure you capture the most applicable leads for downstream conversion. Whether your goal is targeting a specific industry vertical like healthcare or retail, engaging managed services providers (MSPs) or end-user organizations, getting in front of specific job functions or departments, or region-specific leads, you should tailor your content for your intended audience to maximize engagement with that content.
Broad vs. narrow targeting: Why you should avoid over-filtering your audience
Before getting started building out your lead gen campaign, we caution you to be mindful about over-filtering your campaign. Over-targeting your audience – by overlaying multiple filters – may unnecessarily limit your reach and exclude otherwise high-quality leads actively researching a campaign’s subject matter. While you may have a specific persona or set of personas in mind as your ideal lead, over-filtering often restricts your outreach efforts. We commonly see marketers make assumptions about their target audience due to outdated and unresearched views about modern buying teams (e.g., only large enterprises have the budget for our solution; only C-suite titles have the purchasing power; only IT titles care about cybersecurity). Bottom line: Be smart about who you target and why.
Content selection: Choosing content that aligns with your audience
The three most common areas we see used to create target personas are industry, regional filters, organization size and job function or department. You can use these same areas to help identify and create the content you want to include in your lead gen campaign. Below you’ll find key questions to ask yourself that pertain to each of these three areas, as well as some examples while you work through content selection.
Industry: Is our content tailored to the specific vertical(s) we’re targeting and includes industry relevant discussions, case studies and pain points? A couple examples include:
- Managed Service Providers (MSPs): Content should explicitly address MSPs/service providers orgs and flesh out themes such as business expansion, market opportunities, onboarding, internal and customer data security, etc.
- Healthcare: If messaging healthcare organizations is your focus, assets should cover current healthcare trends (e.g. HIPAA compliance, interoperability, patient engagement and experience, telehealth, etc.).
Regional filters: Does our content language appropriately reflect the region(s) to which we are promoting?
- Do we have in-language content for EMEA, LATAM, and/or APAC targeting?
- Does our content or messaging inadvertently exclude audience members due to leveraging region-specific phrases, idioms, acronyms, etc. that don’t align with our filters?
- Does our content strategy integrate reports with in-region statistics, survey data identifying regional buying trends, and/or case studies that call out organizational success stories from countries in that region?
Organization role: Which roles or job titles are we targeting and does our content reflect their needs and wants? For instance:
- CIOs typically engage more with content that addresses higher-level business needs vs. in-the-weeds IT admins who respond better to technical content.
- Keep security and financial concerns the centerpiece of content tailored to CISOs and CFOs, respectively.
- Line of business (LOB) users prioritize simplicity, ease-of-use and self-service capabilities in potential solutions and methods, which empower them to work more seamlessly without requiring assistance from IT or other support departments.
While these lists are not exhaustive, they are designed to kick-start brainstorming to ensure your ideal audience is always top – of mind during content development and promotion. Keep your target role(s), industries, regional filter(s) and organization size in mind – but don’t over-filter – when selecting content for your lead gen campaigns, and you will be well on your way to educate and capture those sought-after prospects.
To read more on this topic, hop over to our Factors to Consider when Selecting Lead Gen Campaign Content Checklist, which spotlights six essential questions to ask yourself and your team when selecting content for your lead gen campaign – from authorship to content type, content volume and maintaining an “evergreen” content approach.
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