How to map content to buyer personas: part 3—the content audit

A popular (and incredibly effective) trend in marketing and sales recently is to map content to buyer personas. This 5-part blog series will teach you a simple way to create content that directly targets individual buyers, enabling your sales and marketing teams to engage buyers more effectively.

Thus far in our content mapping series, we have discussed how to create relevant, useful buyer personas. Now we’ll teach you how to start the content mapping process by:

Doing a content audit

What's being used?

Before you start checking off your list of content that maps to buyers, be honest with yourself: is the content you have actually being used with buyers? If not, now is the time to find out why.

Many sales reps don’t use existing content because they don’t realize it’s available. Another common issue is marketers creating content they think is impactful with buyers, but sales reps disagree.

Cover all three bases

There are three aspects to mapping content to buyer personas: the specific persona, the content type and the buyer’s journey stage. Having one of these three aspects is a step in the right direction, having two is good and having all three is fantastic.

The persona

Different personas are going to want different content. A financial persona such as an accountant is going to want content that shows ROI and realistic numbers, while an IT persona is going to be more interested in data sheets and integration guides. Make sure you have content that’s a good fit for each of your main personas.

We cover content types for common personas here.

The buyer’s journey

A buyer just starting his or her purchasing journey is going to want very different content when compared to a buyer who is ready to make a purchasing decision. You may not have or need content for every single stage, depending on the persona, but make sure you’re covering the most important journey stages with appropriate content; offer helpful and challenging insight toward the beginning of their journey, then transition toward product information and specific features.

During your content audit, you’ll notice gaps where you have no content for specific personas or stages of their journey. There’s your content creation list for the future. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

The content type

If your sales reps are sending out nothing but PowerPoint presentations, your buyer is going to get bored fast. Use this content audit as a way of ensuring you have a good variety of content types, such as videos, whitepapers, case studies, assessment tools, data sheets, etc.

Our downloadable content checklist resource is a good starting point for ensuring you have a range of content for each persona (it even has guidance on which buyer stage is the best option for that content type).

After doing your content audit, you’ll have a clear idea of where your persona content gaps are. In our next post, we covered how to best create persona-specific and generic content to avoid duplication of work.

See the rest of the series here:

• Part 1: Figure out your audience
• Part 2: Build out your personas
• Part 3: The content audit 
• Part 4: Content creation
• Part 5: Tracking content effectiveness