Is your tech company taking a one-size-fits-all approach to content creation? According to our survey “Content Marketing in the Real World,” only 12% of respondents are writing generic content—the other 88% are creating content that’s segmented to a particular group. More specifically:
- 66% of tech companies segment content by industry verticals
- 50% of tech companies segment content by stage in the buyer’s journey
- 47% of tech companies segment content by buyer persona
(Yes, we know those percentages add up to more than 100%. That’s because some tech companies are segmented by multiple criteria—huzzah to them!)
So now that we know why it’s so important to segment content at your tech company, let’s look at some of the best ways to do it.
Tips to segment content by industry verticals
You may have buyer personas, but do you have a customer profile? An ideal customer profile is a hypothetical customer or business that’s basically the perfect candidate for your product. Instead of focusing on targeting individuals within a company as you would with buyer personas, you focus on the company as a whole. Assuming your customer profile will vary, you’ll want to create specific content for each one.
Some of the characteristics included in your customer profile might be company budget, revenue, and size, as well as industry, though there are many more you can add. A customer profile can help you immediately qualify a company as a lead. If they don’t meet your predefined characteristics, there’s no need to spend your sale’s team’s precious time marketing to them.
Once you’ve identified your ideal customers by industry vertical, you can alter your content marketing efforts based on each vertical’s very specific needs and problems.
Some of the different ways you can segment content based on industry vertical include:
- Case studies: A case study that features a hospital system probably won’t be as useful or impactful if presented to a manufacturing plant, and vice versa. Make sure your content is diversified enough to engage each of your potential customer types, demonstrating a problem that was solved through use of your product in your targeted customer’s specific industry.
- Web copy: Depending on how diverse your customer industry verticals are, you might need to create separate web content designed to address each of their specific needs. If your content is too general, your potential customer might not think your product is the right fit. By tailoring your web copy to each vertical, you’ll have a greater chance to keep your customer’s attention once you draw them into your website.
- Blogs: Similar to web copy, your blog post topics should be designed to engage and appeal to all of the customers you aim to serve. As with web copy, if your customer industry verticals are diverse enough, you may need to create separate blogs for each individual audience in order to stay relevant within each vertical.
Though both are used to qualify leads, buyer personas and customer profiles are used to yield different slightly different insights and results. Once you’ve determined a strategy to segment content by industry vertical, you can further break down your segmentation strategy by buyer persona.
Tips to segment content by buyer personas
You probably already have buyer personas in place at your tech company. These profiles help you identify the goals, demographics, and challenges faced by various individuals within companies that are your potential customers.
Tailoring your content to each persona can provide your customer with a more personalized experience and help you map out your content marketing strategy.
While the personas differ based on company, some of the most common roles you’ll encounter within B2B tech companies are listed below. Tailor your content based on their specific interests and concerns.
- CEO: This group will be most concerned with topics like client satisfaction, growth, innovation and ROI.
- IT director: This group is focused on business impact and usability of a product. They also want to know about ease of product implementation.
- Departmental manager: This group likes to read about process improvement, employee satisfaction and ease of implementation.
- End user: This group will typically find content about ease of use and productivity to be appealing.
Further segment your content by characterizing your buyer persona based on their role in the buying journey.
Tips to segment content by stage in the buyer’s journey
Analyzing your decision maker’s point in their buying journey helps to inform your content segmentation strategy as well. For example, a potential customer will be more likely be interested in seeing a live product demo during the final stages of the process rather than reading a white paper about your product.
Here are some tips to help you segment content by stage in your buyer’s journey.
Awareness
During the awareness stage, your potential customer has realized they have a problem that needs to be solved, or have identified an opportunity for improvement. At this point, they start conducting general research surrounding their issues and potential products that will help to solve it.
In this stage of the buyer’s journey, they’ll be looking for keywords like risk, resolve, troubleshoot, upgrade, optimize and prevent. Ideal content formats for this stage are eBooks, blog posts, white papers, reports and other expert content.
Consideration
At this point, the customer is clear on exactly what their problem is, and is actively looking for a means to resolve it. They are gathering all of the information possible in order to fix the issue.
During the consideration phase, include keywords such as solution, service, provider, tool, device and software. Types of content to best address this stage are podcasts, videos, comparison white papers, expert guides and live interactions.
Decision
The decision stage is the last step in the process. The customer has decided how they plan to go about fixing their problem, but they’re gathering final data and documentation to their final decision.
At this point, your buyer will be looking for content with words including comparison, review, test and benchmark. Content to target this stage includes product and vendor comparisons, FAQs, live demos, tutorials and case studies.
