Basing Content on What You Want Buyers to Believe

“What do you want your buyers to believe?”  That is the question online marketers need to ask themselves when creating content, David Meerman Scott stresses in the 9^th edition of his book The New Rules of Marketing & PR.  What are your customers really going to be buying from you — is it great customer service? The safe choice? Luxury? Different buyer personas buy different things from your organization.

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer that you create from audience and market research, Flori Needle writes in Hubspot.  (A negative buyer persona, in contrast might include customers too advanced for your product or service or who are engaging with you only to gain knowledge, not to buy.)

Content marketing, however, is not about “forcing” prospects to believe. As Meerman Scott explains, customers tell themselves stories that define them and the way they relate to the products and services they use. Only if the story you tell your prospects and customers matches the story they’re telling themselves will your content be effective in appealing to them.

At Say It For You, we’ve learned over the years, content marketing will succeed only if two things are apparent to readers: a) You (the business owner or professional practitioner) understand online searchers’ concerns and needs and b) you and your staff have the experience, the information, the products, and the services to solve exactly those problems and meet precisely those needs.

What we’ve discovered, for example, in business blogging is that, whether it’s the owners or practitioners themselves doing the writing or whether they’ve hired us to do the job on their behalf, the language used must give readers the right impression in order to create that “belief connection”

At the same time, it’s important to remember that “the system” (search algorithms) appears to value cumulative content, offering the opportunities for us content marketers to build buyer belief over time.

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