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Squaredot provides persona research for clients and it’s often seen as one of the agency’s most valuable elements, explains managing director Ian Blake

There are many moving parts to B2B digital marketing, but at its core is creating content for your ideal buyer or buyer persona, so you get their attention, build brand awareness, demonstrate thought leadership and ultimately generate leads.

Do you know your buyer?

One surprising insight from our client engagements through the years is that sometimes the persona initially identified (and often assumed) is not the actual persona we end up focusing on. The reason for this is that companies sometimes focus on the persona that signs the order rather than the one who researches your product.

The best way to answer this question is ask yourself the following: if you were to fill a room with your ideal buyer, who would that be? Bear in mind, you can only choose one.

Pro tip: Get a list of your last 100 pitches or orders and ask who was the person who led the purchase (on the customer side), not the person who signed the order.

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Research your buyer

Talk to your sales and account management team and ask them what questions their buyers ask most? What do they Google? What are their pain points? Conduct telephone interviews with eight to ten customers and ask them what their main challenges are, what would help solve those challenges, what influencers do they follow, what content formats and channels do they prefer? This will help your distribution strategy.

Conduct desk based research, based on the information gathered from the interviews, on your buyers’ industry, groups and associations they are in, and look for content that is trending — Google Trends and Buzzsumo are great tools for finding these trends.

Try to identify psychographic indicators. Are they introverted, risk averse, head down, stay out of trouble types, or more extrovert, centre of attention types? This can be valuable information when thinking about your marketing.

Bringing it all together

Document your research. To help, grab a copy of the First 12 Weeks on Hubspot ebook on our website, which has a persona research template on pages 8, 9 and 10. Use this to inform your marketing campaigns and your distribution and amplification strategy across all relevant digital channels.

At this point you’re ready to flesh out your campaigns, knowing that your content will resonate with your audience. But you still have many milestones ahead.

Nobody ever said this was easy!

Squaredot is a creative B2B digital marketing agency. Our services include:

Insights — persona research, online intelligence, social media research, industry trends.

Strategy & Planning — aligning marketing with business goals, persona development, messaging.

Creative — creative concepts, idea generation.

Content — video, ebooks, blogs, infographics, tip sheets, websites, presentations.

Digital Execution — SEO, PPC, social, paid social, marketing automation, email, inbound management.

Outsourced Marketing Department — combination of all services to address all digital marketing needs.

Inbound Consulting — lead follow up, social selling, lead scoring, email workflows, marketing and CRM set up and reporting.

• Contact us at www.squaredot.eu or phone: 01 524 2731