REMEMBER: Consumers don't want to be sold to, they want to be educated.

-- Inbound Best Practices

- Use buyer personas.
- Use the Buyer's Journey.
- Create remarkable content.
- Leverage your content.

--- Use Buyer Personas ---

You need to know who you're trying to reach.
You don't just want traffic, you want the right traffic to your site. You want t
he traffic that will turn into leads and ultimately happy customers.
The right people are your ideal customers. Your buyer personas.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based o
n real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, be
havior patterns, motivations, and goals.
They're created through research, analysis, and looking at who is already buying
from you.
How do you create this buyer personas?
1- Research
2- Identifying trends
3- Creating persona profile stories
Buyer personas must be based off of actual research, not assumptions.
[Sample Research Questions.png]
Make the questions specific to your industry. Always focus on the "why." Dig dee
p.
Start by interviewing your current customers. Reach out to both good and bad cus
tomers.
[Persona Profile.png]
When you research your customers look for trends and patterns.
Buyer personas are necessary for every type of business.
--- Buyer's Journey ---
Is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. Un
derstanding the buyer's journey for your persona will be key for creating the be
st content possible.
Instead of top, middle or bottom of the funnel, the buyer's journey is made up o
f three stages
[Buyer's journey stages.png]
Awareness: they're researching to understand, frame and give a name to their pro
blem or opportunity
Consideration: has clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportun
ity
Decision: has decided on their solution strategy, method or approach.
You need to have content prepared for every stage of the journey.
[Buyer's Journey Example.png]

When creating content, keep it educational.

Not educating your buyer personas on who you are and what you do, but educating
them on their problems and solutions to those problems.

--- Create Remarkable Content ---

Inbound Marketing = Content + Context
Context: Who you are creating content for?

--- Leverage Your Content ---

Make the content available for your buyer personas to find.
Distribution makes content relevant.
[Content Distribution Techniques.png]
The right distribution technique gets the right content in front of the right pe
rson at the right time.