Industrial Marketing + Audience Connection

Connection is a part of everyday life. We choose whether or not to connect with certain people and businesses. The reasons why someone connects with a person or business won’t necessarily be the same as those of another person. This same philosophy can also be applied to industrial marketing, albeit, to a much different degree. As previously mentioned, connecting with multiple stakeholders should be top of mind for any B2B company. Instead of connecting with one person as is the B2C marketing focus, industrial marketing often involves multiple stakeholders.  For example, the information that a design engineer is looking for won’t necessarily be the same as that of a purchasing buyer. This is an important concept to remember as you start cultivating content for your website. Focusing on one persona or one type of client can hinder your efforts at attracting the right audience, wasting both time and resources that could have been used creating personas for the audience that you want to attract and convert.

Personas

If people are looking for different types of information at different points in the buying process, how should a business create content that attracts different people at different stages? One of the best ways to ensure you are creating content that attracts the right people, with the right message, at the right time, is to create user personas. Personas are hypothetical representations of users that come to your website. These fictional characters often represent your target audience, or in the case of negative personas, the type of audience/user you do not want to attract.  User personas should include demographic information as well as user goals, frustrations, and motivations. Data procured from past RFQs, customer surveys, even focus groups, can help you create a persona that reflects your target audience in an objective way. It is important to note that once you have your personas in place, this isn’t a one and done type of process. As you gain more insights from your client base, your personas should be continually be evolving. What one persona looks like this year might be the same next year or might be drastically different, depending on the research and the feedback you receive from your clients/customers. [caption id="attachment_5478" align="aligncenter" width="527"] Example of a user persona[/caption]

Personas and Audience Connection

Current research shows that the lines between B2C and B2B are becoming increasingly blurred. According to Accenture, B2Bs are shifting their expectations to a more B2C mindset as far as customer engagement and interactions are concerned. For B2Bs, this means that there should be a concerted effort to focus more on content and connecting with the audience.  No longer is it acceptable to have a website that just lists products and services, scant with detailed information. In order for a business to stay and remain competitive, creating personas should be the first step in audience connection. Having a baseline of personas will allow a business to then start thinking about their persona’s buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey can give added insights into the marketing funnel, which in turn aids in creating a content map that connects with the right persona in a way that converts them into customers.   

All about Strategy

Professional sports teams don’t go into a game without having a strategy. Similarly, a business should not create content without a strategy in place. Having a content strategy helps define and focus a website in a way that should create tangible, actionable metrics by which the business can gauge what strategies are working and which ones need to be revised.  Stay tuned for future blog posts, where we’ll discuss the buyer’s journey, content mapping, and overall content strategy in further detail.  Contact Ecreative to discuss digital marketing strategies for your website that will offer your users and potential customers a personalized, user-centric experience that meets and exceeds all of their expectations.  Written by: Katie Anderson, Digital Marketing Specialist at Ecreative