Learn about leads by the content they read

Buyer personas and profiles are sometimes seen as valuable and sometimes regarded as just one more complexity that bogs down the marketing process. I mean, it'd be much easier if a potential buyer would just send you an email that says something like:

Hi Mr. Company,

I'm an IT Manager at a midsize financial company with 500 employees and I need to figure out how to roll out patches without knocking down my end user's machines because last month we had a terrible mess on our hands with the latest antivirus updates.

I'm not the decision maker on this deal, but I can influence the guy who signs the checks and I need the career boost of a win, so can't you just tell me how to get this right, minimize the associated costs and never have to fight this break/fix battle again? Oh, and yeah, the budget is approved, but the big guy is going to want TCO stats. So get back to me, please. I've got application updates in the queue.

Thanks,
Joe

Wouldn't that be wonderful? Chances are that doesn't happen very often. Marketers need a strategic approach to how they can learn about their leads by the content they read. With a 9 month average buying cycle for complex sales and buyers entering the sales cycle later, marketers often feel like they're flying blind.

But it doesn't necessarily need to be that way. With the advanced website visitor tracking tools and marketing automation gaining ground, monitoring navigation paths is one way to find out how buyers make the shift from reading your content to speaking with your salespeople.

How you structure your content and the way you link one piece to the next can provide insights to buyer problems and interests. Think broad to narrow and consider natural thought progression. The way you build your content is a progression and can lead buyers straight to the conclusion that your company is who they need to pursue to overcome their challenges.

Let's take a product example. Utilize your buyer personas to focus on the problem/solution scenarios a potential buyer may be facing. Provide a link to more information about each one of those scenarios.

Once the buyer clicks on the link show them content that breaks down the problem into addressable chunks with more links to explain related specifics.

Do you see where this is going?  Narrowing with each click to get them to more in-depth, focused and high-value information about exactly the issue they have on their minds.

One of the benefits marketers have is the lack of time and attention many of your buyers are willing to expend digging through long product pages that overwhelm with product details when they're searching for nuggets of useful information. So get focused and help them out.

In the early stages they want to know about what concerns them, not what your product does. Give them what they want and they'll click deeper into your world.

Getting the thought process right can be challenging, but with real-time analytics insights to website behavior, you can easily regroup and rearrange the steps to match their needs.

Remember to give them a way to move around between the pages of the story they're in. If they fear they'll get lost, they'll hesitate. If your hyperlinks aren't motivating, they'll pass. If your content is all about your products, they'll lose interest.

Content is a valuable tool for marketers to gain insights about how their buyers think about, identify and explore the solutions to challenges they're facing. It's all in how you present the information and the ways you choose to monitor your buyers' interactions with it.

You need to think about content from two sides - benefits delivered to your buyer and the intelligence you can extract from their interaction with it. Do that, and you'll start seeing those personas and profiles paying off—and even expanding with your added insights.