What is Inbound Marketing?

• Location
• Job Title
• Annual Salary

But buyer personas are more than a bullet list of demographic information. They should document real customer’s pain points in the language they use. These might be in the form of a question, like: “How do I reduce inventory levels?” Or they might look more like business goals: “I need to increase sales by 5% over the next three months to meet my revenue goal for the year.”

Step Two: Attract

If you want to attract your ideal buyer, you have to know exactly what it is that they are looking for—what job is it that they hire your solution to do? Armed with this knowledge, you can now start creating content that speaks to and helps solve their problems. Content can be anything from a blog post or email to a video, social media post, or webinar. The format of the content should also be determined by the buyer’s preferences.

Pro Tip: Optimize

There’s a few ways to optimize your content, but they all start with knowing how your customers communicate problems related to your industry. Using language your customers don’t know won’t get their attention. Spend some time doing keyword research with a tool like Moz or SEM Rush, and search topics and hashtags on social media to see how people talk about your industry.

Optimize your content with your research findings. Search engines are better every day at understanding intent, so you don’t need to (and shouldn’t) stuff your content with the same keyword. Connect related blogs and articles on your website together with internal linking to help search engines understand your authority on a topic. On social media, use hashtags to help people find your content.

Step Three: Engage

So you’ve got some new visitors to your website and social media pages—now what? Traffic and likes are a great step forward, but to really engage with new visitors, you need to know a little more about them. Let’s start with a name and an email address.

All the content you put out should be helpful and informative, but perhaps you’ve got something a little more in-depth, like a white paper, original research, or an ebook. Use more comprehensive content by gating them, that is, offering them in exchange for your site visitors’ email addresses and turn them into leads.

With contact information, you can enroll your leads into nurturing workflows. Not every lead is ready to buy, so giving them helpful information via email over a scheduled period of time can keep them interested until they’re ready. Then they’ll be contacting you when they want to buy.

Pro Tip: List Segmentation

Segmented contacts are important in this process, and you can base workflows around the content offer they downloaded or signed up for. For example, if you manufacture doors, someone who signed up for an informative webinar about door installation will want follow-up content that builds on installation. They might become unengaged if their follow-up nurture content is about doors for different types of weather.

Step Four: Delight