Inbound marketing is difficult. You've got to get visitors to come to your website, look at your content, and keep coming back for more. More importantly, you want those people to become customers.

Personas are an essential component of marketing outreach and, in our ebook: SEO Analysis to Drive Lead Generation, we recommended updating existing, or creating new personas every time to launch a marketing campaign. Personas define the prospects you're trying to reach, their challenges, goals, even the keywords they use to find products and services. They help your marketing team create content that interests the prospects you’re trying to attract.

We find that many personas come up short. They're often good at informing top-of-funnel (TOFU) content. However, they do a poorer job informing middle-of-funnel (MOFU), and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content. MOFU and BOFU content, and content offers are critical to turning leads into opportunities and opportunities into customers. In this article, we'll explain how funnel stage personas can help you create the right content, for each stage of your inbound sales funnel.   

Personas 101

Personas usually contain information about your ideal customers such as:

• Roles they serve in their organization

• Goals, including task based, personal career goals, and organizational goals.

• Challenges that make their role more difficult or impedes them from reaching their goals.

• Demographics so that you can understand how to speak to these prospects, and what social networks they use.

• Common stories to bring everything together including their role, tasks, challenges, and goals.

• Marketing related information such as the keywords personas use to find products and services you offer.

You might use the challenges document in your personas to generate a topic list, and pain points to build compelling titles. As prospects move down the funnel, you need to do more than articulate the problems, you need to showcase the solutions offered by your products and services so they’ll become your customers.

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Understanding your sales funnel is critical to content marketing

Some sales funnel fundamentals are in order at this point:

There are different stages of the funnel, and each maps to different types of content:

• Top-of-Funnel (TOFU). Content at this stage educates users about problems (those challenges faced by your personas) and solutions. In this awareness stage, prospects are doing research and looking for answers and insights.

• Middle-of-funnel (MOFU). Content at this stage needs to explain your unique value proposition. How your service solves your persona's problem, and why your solution is better than your competitors. At this stage, your leads are evaluating solutions to figure out which is the best for them.

• Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU). Content at this stage is more interactive and may not even be content. It may be a coupon, a demo, or a free consultation. At this stage, your opportunities are making the decision to buy services.

There are lots of great articles on the types of content that work well for each stage of the funnel. Hubspot's Amanda Sellers wrote an excellent article with content ideas for each stage of the funnel. Juan Mendez wrote a good article on how to create video content for each stage of the funnel. Barry Feldman also wrote a good article on the types of content that work well as lead magnets (content offers) as part of a content marketing process. 

The bottom line is, the content you create has to map to what your personas are looking for at each stage of their buyer’s journey. That's where we find that traditional personas and how they're typically used, fall short. 

Messaging is key for MOFU and BOFU content

Personas can fail to properly guide middle and bottom of stage content due to a number of reasons. One common reason we've found is that personas contain a lot of information about content that will attract visitors to your website, such as challenges and pain points. They often contain less information about how prospects evaluate and select products and services. There’s often even less information about what compels them to buy. This leads to content that attracts lots of visitors but doesn’t convert very many to leads, and fewer still to paying customers.

Let's be clear, messaging is the key to creating middle and bottom of funnel content that converts leads to customers.

For example, if your persona evaluates solutions based on price, and sees price as a barrier to buying the services, that information needs to be included in the persona. It needs to be included in such a way that your content team recognizes it as a critical piece of information for middle-of-funnel offers. In the case of the cost conscious consumer, if your services are on the lower end of the pricing spectrum compared to competitors, providing "bang for the buck" messaging might keep your services in contention for an eventual purchase. If your services are on the higher end of the pricing spectrum, your content had better make the argument as to why paying more now, provides better value and ROI later. 

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Funnel Stage Personas

One way to address this issue is to create what we call Funnel Stage Personas. They are similar to the standard type of personas described above, with three important differences:

• We take the time to research additional information about what's important to each persona in the evaluation (MOFU), and decision making (BOFU) stages.

• We break out the information within the persona, to make it clear what key issues content must address at each stage.

• We also validate content against persona stage information to make sure it's meeting those key issues prior to release.

To do this you have to research and understand your persona's entire buyer’s journey. In the persona information targeting marketing services to a CIO it might look like this:

Buyer Stages:

• Awareness: Challenges include goals not being set, doing social media for the sake of social media. Activities aren't tracked, measured, or reported. Activities are not aligned with other marketing or sales activities. Unsure of the correct audience, platform, persona usage. Wants to have better rich media content. Needs help with content curation and content ideas.

• Evaluation: Needs to be educated in the difference between content creation and an inbound marketing process. Has to justify the budget, so any solution must show good value. It helps if ROI can be mapped to head-count, and improved capability to reach common goals such as lead generation.

• Decision: Evidence is key for this buyer to move. Case studies and testimonials can compel action. Mapping concerns such as initial cost or retainer based services to reduced costs and better performance overall can help compel action.

With this information broken out, we find it's easier to create content that speaks to the prospect’s mindset at the stage they’re in. It’s also easier for content creators and reviewers to know know what each piece of content is supposed to do so that messaging is appropriate.

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Where to do the additional research

How do you find out about what personas are thinking when they're evaluating different solutions, or deciding which solution to buy? There are lots of places.

Start by interviewing your current clients and asking them how they evaluated your products and services to other vendors, and why you won. Then ask them what made them actually decide to buy.

Run focus groups with people who match your personas is another great way to get information on the buyer's journey.

Look at discussions in LinkedIn and Facebook groups, as well as published case studies. 

Conclusion

A fundamental goal of your social media marketing efforts beyond attracting visitors should be to keep leads moving down your funnel. To do that, you have to fine-tune content to match the different stages of your prospect’s buyers journey. Funnel stage personas break out key information, by stage, can help your content team produce content with messages that speak to needs while educating at the awareness stage, address barriers and concerns in the evaluation stage, and compel action in the decision stage.