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:
(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.
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:
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.
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.
Further segment your content by characterizing your buyer persona based on their role in the buying 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.
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.
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.
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.