Marketing Research and Web Development

Defining Ideal Customers

Target Accounts and Buyer Personas

Who is your ideal customer? For inbound marketing to be truly effective, you have to know who you are talking and selling to.

Put simply - you need to focus on attracting more visitors from companies that are most valuable to your business. Your content strategy should be centered around producing the right content, for the right people, at the right companies.

Below is a summary of the process we use to align your B2B marketing strategy to your ideal customer's wants and needs.

We define your

Target Accounts

Company Buyer Profile

The ideal buyer profile defines which companies are a good fit for your offering and which ones are not.

Through industry research, discussions with the leadership team and workshops with the sales team, we’ll help you identify or build on your ideal buyer profile. These are profitable customers that fit well within your business model that you enjoy working with. They are the companies that are most valuable to your business.

It is around this buyer profile that we will base our research to define a content marketing strategy, which is the backbone to all other inbound marketing strategies (website, SEO, PPC, social, email, blogging, etc.). Without the right content, your other marketing assets won’t have the staying power to accomplish your goals.

We define your

Buyer Personas

Your Ideal Individual Customer

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating a buyer persona(s), consider including:

The person’s role
Summary of responsibilities
Location: can your ideal customer be anywhere in the world? Only in your city?
Psychographic: behavior patterns, motivations, what they care about
Demographic
Goals, needs, challenges
Why they may object to your product/service
Where they go for information, where they spend time online
How best to appeal to them with branding, content and messaging

funny-market-research-cartoon

The more detailed the buyer persona is, the better. From there, you’ll document the personas for your business as semi-fictional characters that represent your ideal customers. It may sound strange, but it’s best to assign a name to these people so everyone is on the same page: Owen the Owner, Landscape Architect Larry, Procurement Paul, Emily the Engineer, etc.

This foundational buyer persona work ensures that our content marketing strategy is centered around the challenges that your prospects face everyday. Relating the challenges of your ideal clients to the solutions that you offer will provide the best opportunity for measured ROI.

We dig in by

Reviewing Marketing Assets

WHAT'S WORKING AND WHAT ISN'T?

Looking at strategies that have performed well, we'll help you find a way to "pour more fuel on the fire." We may have our own ideas around what inbound marketing tactics will work well, but we’re not blind to your past marketing wins.

Conversely, if the stats show a lack of results from past or current marketing investments, we need to drop those and move on to something that will show a return.

To build a website that can actually accomplish these tasks, we have developed a specific process

We’ll begin with an audit of your existing website design, content, and calls-to-action to best get our heads around what is currently working and what site elements may need a refresh. This audit will inform how we will create a sitemap to outline:

1. The pages your new site will contain, and
2. The desired path your visitors will ideally take when visiting those pages.

Next, our design team will build raw design concepts for the pages to be approved for design elements while our writing team will begin working with you on copy updates and how specific conversion elements, like calls-to-action, will be handled.