Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Too many businesses dive head first into inbound marketing without doing all of their homework. Content marketing requires much more than hiring an intern to write and publish your blog posts. You've got to have a plan, and it begins with a laser focus on the basics of inbound marketing strategy.

One of the most important things you need to do before launching an inbound strategy—before blogging, partaking in social media marketing, creating email marketing campaigns, etc.—is to create buyer personas....

Buyer personas help you target prospects with surgical precision and nurture them with custom content they care about.Picture your customers. Not just their industries and business functions. Not just their geographic locations and levels of seniority — although all of those things are important. But picture them.

What motivates them? What are their pain points? Who are they?This extremely specific description of your model customer is a buyer persona. Buyer personas help you target prospects with surgical precision and nurture them with custom content they care about.Read on to learn seven tips for integrating buyer personas into a lead nurturing campaign

Building marketing personas can help improve the way you solve problems for your customers. Here is a blueprint and beginner's guide to getting started.

I am writing this post to Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel—one of whom is likely you.

You see, Dan, Mary, Steven, and Rachel are personas, created with a combination of raw data and educated guesses, representing slices of this blog’s readership. Dan could be you, and Mary could be your coworker. What these sketches provide is a touchstone forcreating content: When I can put a name and a background to the people reading what I write, I can hopefully meet their needs even better.

The same holds for marketing and sales. Building personas for your core audience can help improve the way you solve problems for your customers. The process of creating personas is well worth the time. Here is a blueprint and beginner’s guide to getting started...