This document discusses how to create effective personas for a B2B content strategy. It emphasizes the importance of basing personas on real customer data and understanding customer purchasing concerns. An example shows potential persona profiles for bicycle buyers and a chart mapping content topics to purchasing themes. Creating comprehensive content that addresses buyer needs and concerns established in personas can help establish authority and improve organic search traffic.

1. www.buyerzone.com A Purch Brand
Tailoring Persona
Research for a
B2B Content
Strategy
Dylan Mazeika
dylan.mazeika@buyerzone.com
@dylan_Mazeika

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1.Persona Definition
• Persona goals
2.Importance of having personas in
the B2B space
3.The process
4.Benefits

3. Persona
Definition

4. Far too often the second part of that definition is not explored enough;
“…real data about your existing customers”. This type of research allows
businesses to turn keywords and search terms and create targeted pieces
of content that enables conversion specifically for your target audience and
ideal customers.
You’ll be tailoring the type of information your buyers need to make a
purchasing decision, in the form they want to consume it.
PERSONA DEFINITION
“A semi-fictional representation of your customer based on market
research and real data about your existing customers.”
Sam Kusinitz, HubSpot

5. Knowing the background about your target demo (age,
occupation, personal info, etc.) is great, but it’s more important
to understand the sales process for your product and where the
purchasing concerns lie.
Let’s say that you drive leads for bicycle companies. Most
persona approaches may come up with several personas of
different individuals that are interested in buying a bicycle:

6. WEEKEND WARRIOR DAVE
• Personal background
• Age: 25-35
• Newly married or in committed
relationship
• Education: undergraduate
• Shopping and research
preferences
• Preferred communication: Email,
Phone
• Uses industry websites and
publications/ catalogs to do buying
research.
• Goals and challenges
• Bike use: Weekend road races
• Participate and be competitive
• Price isn’t important when seeking a
quality product
CITY COMMUNTER TOM
• Personal background
• Age: 19-25
• Single
• Education: undergraduate
• Shopping and research
preferences
• Preferred communication: Email
• Consumes online reviews
• Audio forms of content: Podcast, video
• Primarily does research/ shopping
online
• Goals and challenges
• Bike use: Transportation. Around the
city and for work
• Dependable and reliable means of
getting around
• Long lasting and worth the money

7. This information definitely provides insight into your
customers and lays the groundwork for topics you
should be covering, but it doesn’t necessarily inform
you on what type of buying concerns exist for a
bicycle purchase.
Identifying pain points and challenges in the
purchasing process will define the goal of your
content strategy. When you are clear on the concerns
that your customers have, you are able to create
content and focus on topics that take a user through
the purchasing funnel start to finish or pick up a
generally informed buyer and convert them on your
site.

8. (Source: Distilled)
By combining these personas
with in-depth product
research it becomes easy to
create conversion oriented
content that falls within this
B2B content matrix provided
by Hannah Smith at Distilled.
That 1st quadrant focuses on
buyers and concerns that are
at the top of a purchasing
funnel, while the 4th quadrant
is where purchasing concerns
are made, and rubber hits the
road for a user making a
decision.

9. Dan Shure at Evolving SEO has recently spoken on the topic of prioritizing these
types of content (especially if budget is an issue).
• He recommends focusing on converting content first. If successful, it enables
buy in for projects that may not necessarily fall into a purchasing funnel.

10. The
Process

11. Analyzing a product and buying
process, combined with your
persona research will provide
you to topics you need to cover
in the purchasing funnel
Start by identifying themes that
are important to the research
process in your industry and
expand from there. Creating a
chart in PowerPoint is helpful to
visualize the industry and where
the knowledge gaps are on your
site.

12. In the next slide, we give an example of 5 themes that
appear to be overarching concerns that bicycle buyers
had while making a purchasing decision.
• Top brands in the industry
• New technologies in the product
• Types/models of the product
• Uses
• New trends

13. Bicycles
Brands
Types
Trends
Technology
Uses
Bike Shares New Bike
Designs
Cannondale
Custom
Bikes
Huffy Trek Specialized Schwinn Santa Cruz
Road
Touring
BMX
Mountain
Cruiser
Recreation
and Urban
Road Mountain/
Off-road
Cyclocross
Folding
Bikes
Fit Bit/
Exercise
tracking
Cycling
gear
Carbon
Frames
New
Topic to
Cover
Existing
Topic

14. This bubble chart identifies topics that will create a
solid foundation of information that supports that given
theme.
In an online landscape that is dictated by semantic
search, covering the concerns and becoming an
authority on “types of bicycles” will help your visibility
for people searching these types of terms.
I use basic coloring here for topics that we already cover
(Gray) and topics that present new opportunities (Green)

15. Authorship
Establishing yourself and site as
an authority on a topic has
multiple benefits in regards to
users finding your site.
While Google has said there is no
correlation to authorship and
rankings, having your name and
image displayed with the SERP
listing can increase click through
rate and establish trust for your
listing on a results page.
15

16. As authorship becomes an important part of standing
out in SERP results, covering themes and topics
thoroughly will only improve your chances of engines
recognizing your site and information as authoritative.

17. It’s important that the terms/topics you’re planning to cover match the intent of a
buyer. This planning is buyer focused, but let’s not forget traditional SEO
Take recreational and urban bikes.
Serving both terms makes sense for a user for sure, but also makes sense from a
semantic search standpoint.

18. TAKING ACTION
The visualization chart you created (depicting your site’s content)
shows you that you don’t cover urban or recreational bikes. Your
persona information tells you there is a customer who is a commuter
located in the city.
18
CITY COMMUTER TOM
• Personal background
• Age: 19-25
• Single
• Education: undergraduate
• Shopping and research
preferences
• Preferred communication: Email
• Consumes online reviews
• Audio forms of content: Podcast,
video
• Primarily does research/ shopping
online
• Goals and challenges
• Bike use: Transportation. Around
the city and for work
• Dependable and reliable means of
getting around
• Long lasting and worth the money
Instead of just covering the specs
and dimensions of urban and
recreational bikes, you can put this
information in a medium that your
persona is interested in (audio
content: podcasts, videos).
Video reviews or testimonials of the
product would do a better job of
converting this user because this is
the way they make decisions and
do their research.

19. Benefits

20. Based on this chart and the color coding, you can see that you don’t
have any coverage on recreational and urban bikes. Based on your
persona research you know exactly how you should be marketing this
content to City Commuter Tom (Video reviews, visual forms of media).
By focusing on these overarching research points that your users need
to consider before making a purchase, your site will be in a good
position to benefit from the following.
• Becoming an authority on
the topic
• Robust coverage in your
area of expertise
• Increased authorship in
SERPs
• A thematically complete site
will improve organic traffic
from a semantic search
perspective.

21. For more tips on perfecting your content
strategy, visit our blog, About Leads:
www.buyerzone.com/blog
> Questions or comments?
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