“How does a potential buyer make decisions?” “How can we effectively tell our brand story to increase customer acquisition?” “What will give buyers confidence in our company and our product?”
Here are three things to remember when creating materials promoting your company or product.
Know Your Product
Every young marketer or copywriter has heard the phrase know your audience. A good product marketer will understand the market need for the product, its value to the potential user, and features that make it easier, better, or faster to do something.
As a product marketing manager, CMO, or interim CMO (iCMO), conducting research before any time or money goes into creating content for the company blog, website, email, or social media channels.
Time well spent would consist of the following:
- Researching competitor products and their marketing approaches
- Talking to the product team about the product
- Learning how the sales team (or sales individual depending on company size) positions the product
- Hearing from the CEO about why the product exists in the first place
Know Your Audience
Spend time talking to your ideal customer. The ideal customer can describe their pain points and challenges with what they’re doing today and what they wish existed in the product. Interviews, focus groups, and sitting in on sales calls will give you a better understanding of what your ideal customer looks like, how they purchase, and more, including:
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How they research new products or services
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How they make decisions, and who’s involved
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Where they go for information, and who do they go to for advice
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What motivates them
Asking questions and conducting research are great ways to get to know your audience and the expectations of who you’re writing for.
How to Develop a Persona
A persona represents everything a company knows about its ideal customer. It serves as a guiding document for developing digital advertising, writing emails, posting on social media, and creating promotions, essentially any content needed for marketing communications.
Step 1: To build a persona, you must first know the primary buyer you’re trying to sell to. Is the CFO? The Controller? The CEO or Founder herself? Establishing their role is the first step. You will make a unique persona for each if there are multiple roles.
Step 2: Interview the person who holds this role at companies or organizations that would benefit from your service or product. You can use the questions in the previous section. Perhaps the Product Manager already has conducted this research, but it will benefit your marketing team to hear it directly from the source. Uncover the pain points this individual experiences related to their position. Gain an understanding of their role and industry terminology. Using the correct language in your conversations and writing will help the company establish credibility with its audience.
Step 3: Document everything you find out about your ideal customer, including their education level, their business priorities, their background, and their primary modes of communication.
Step 4: Start writing. Use your gathered information to write targeted messaging that will resonate with your ideal customer(s).
Step 5: Similar to science, marketing is full of hypotheses. Make some, track key metrics, and reevaluate your approach and methods until you reach your goal.
Ready to get started? Download our digital worksheet to develop a persona and take your marketing communications to the next level!
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