Marketers and businesses are continually evaluating key demographics to create and understand buyer personas. Factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, income, marital status, and geographical location are critical to the success of today’s marketing strategies. Understanding a buyer persona will drive better content creation, landing page designs, website layout, and especially improve SEO. It will address and connect the right people during the planning and evaluation phase of their buying cycle and boost your ROI.
B2B buying behaviour changes constantly especially as technologies become readily available. B2B marketers and businesses therefore, need to think about SEO, social media, and content marketing in a way that satisfies a more diverse set of requirements across various personas. This will impact the way you structure and execute your SEO strategy across all aspects of your website.
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What is a buyer persona?
It is a representation or a profile comprised of different factors that impact purchasing behaviour. This profile is built on gathering insights through designed buyer scenarios, mapping behaviour/ thoughts through the buying cycle, and mental analysis on what motivates the prospect throughout their day. This may sound like a therapy session, but the process will help you develop who you need to target to better understand what motivates your target audience.
Identify your buyer personas
As stated before, understanding personas needs to be a continuous process as they evolve over time. It is important to challenge existing models when launching new marketing campaigns to ensure you are proactively aligned with the characteristics of the target audience you are trying to attract. Questions that will help to steer your SEO strategy and/or content are:
“What keywords would they use to search for a problems related to the solutions our business provides?”
“Where would the buyer look for information on a solution like ours?”
“What is a problem in the industry that our business can solve?”
Having answers to these questions will help drive quality leads not only to your website, but to landing pages and targeted social ads through quality SEO tactics.
Aligning personas with your SEO
A mature B2B website should already receive a decent percentage of organic traffic from search engines and, in theory, quality lead opportunities as a result. However, the lag in quality conversions could mean that your SEO discovery needs to be more integrated with your broader B2B marketing efforts/campaigns. This is where answers to the questions above come into play. Understanding the psychology and needs of your personas will build the list of keywords and content needed to attract and increase quality leads.
If you understand the pain points of a potential customer, you can create content that addresses their needs; the associated keywords included will then boost your overall SEO. It’s a complementary cycle that will propel your ROI and optimise your campaigns.
In summary
How effectively are you tying in keyword planning to your content development and how is it associated with B2B buyer intent? If you haven’t clearly outlined your personas then the time is now. Write out a list of questions that will supply answers geared towards keywords you can apply across your strategy. Start incorporating your findings into your website copy, new and current assets, social posts, or any outbound communications.
About the Author: Jenni Jaques, Managing Director
