As marketers, we analyze consumption statistics, engagement data, social impact, traffic, downloads, form fills and more. Buyer Personas and Journey Maps guide our strategic content planning, and we measure how those strategic choices help us be more buyer-centric with more effective content. But how do you measure if content effectively meets your buyers needs? Being truly buyer-centric includes validating statistical analysis with actual buyer feedback.
We recently implemented this philosophy for a Guide we created at Akoonu:
- Journey Mapping research revealed many organizations face a challenge in building and presenting an effective business case for investing in resources that fuel buyer-centric marketing and sales.
- We reviewed our existing content inventory for any similar content and determined this was a unique need that warranted content creation.
- We then brainstormed our outline as a team including Marketing, Sales and Client Services. We sketched out ideas based on our knowledge of each intended Buyer Persona and their needs, activities and preferences.
- After the working draft with visuals was reviewed and copy-edited, we reached out to the most important critics: those who had previously attempted to create a business case for implementing Akoonu without this resource. We wanted to get feedback from those who had succeeded, but most importantly, those who hadn’t. The Guide was sent with a request to review the potential effectiveness based on:
- Would it have helped you when we were in process with you? and
- When would it have helped you most? Early in the process or later?
- The responses were thorough, speaking to tone, length, value propositions and the follow-up resources. We averaged twice as many specifics on what people found helpful as what they would recommend changing — this gave us the validation we needed to make revisions and share a truly buyer-centric resource with our potential buyers.
Do you have feedback on our content or want to share an experience of your own? We’d love to hear from you.