Where do you start when building an Inbound Marketing Strategy? Before you can create compelling, helpful content, you need to know who you're creating it for. You want your content to reach a specific audience. Namely, you want your content to reach your ideal customers. Developing a Buyer Persona can help you identify your ideal customers. Through probing interviews, you learn more about your ideal customers and are then better able to craft content that will resonate with them. Think about your customers that are the best fit today. Start building a Buyer Persona by reaching out to those customers and asking them about the following things (note: these questions work especially well with B2B customers):

FOR YOU: Download Our Guide To Creating Buyer Personas

Roles 

What is your ideal customer's role? What does he or she do every day in his or her organization? Knowing all about your ideal customer's role can give you insight into the general pressures and objectives associated with that role. That, in turn, can help give you a solid idea of what your ideal customer is looking for help with and what kind of answers you can give them by creating and distributing content. 

Goals 

What are your ideal customer's goals? Once you know what they consider a success, you can start creating content that helps them towards it. If they want to cut costs (a common goal), for example, you can center your content around strategies for doing so. By aligning your content with your ideal customer's goals, potential new customers will find you more easily and be drawn in by your content when they do. 

Challenges 

What are your ideal customer's challenges? Similar to understanding your ideal customer's goals, it's important to understand their greatest challenges. Knowing pain points will help you create content that seeks to solve them. Your ideal customers will be turning to the Internet, searching for solutions to their problems. If your company is able to provide that solution, let your ideal customer know with informative content.  

Personal Info

No, no social security numbers or anything instrusive. You want to ask your ideal customers about their personal lives so you can understand them better! Asking about family, age, hobbies, interests, living space, and more, can help you create content that your ideal customers relate to. You want your content to be conversational and enjoyable to read, so you need to know what type of person you're trying to appeal to. 

Watering Holes

Where does your ideal customer go for information or answers to questions they have? Your Inbound Marketing Strategy depends on making sure your content meets your ideal customers where they are. You need to find out where that is. Is it trade magazines? Is it social media (if so, which platforms)? What do they type in when they go to Google? Finding out these details can help in your keyword research and help your content reach its intended audience. 

To develop a winning Inbound Marketing Strategy, you need to build Buyer Personas. Personas are representative of your ideal customers, built through interviews and information gathering. To start the process, identify your ideal customers and start searching for the information outlined above.