As a B2B SaaS startup, you probably have a low marketing budget, and that’s okay. You don’t need a huge marketing budget to drive leads. At Accelity, we advise B2B SaaS startups to focus on generating inbound leads with content marketing. This strategy is an extremely successful one, and can be low-cost (as opposed to more traditional advertising techniques). Content marketing success starts with buyer personas, an essential aspect of effective and tailored marketing, and the topic of today’s blog.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is creating content that educates or benefits your target audience, begins to establish your company as an expert in your field, builds trust with prospects and generates qualified leads for your sales team. This content can take the form of blogs, ebooks, guides, checklists, infographics, cheat sheets and much more—anything that can benefit your target customer.

Rather than cold calling or buying ad space, you instead share your content through mediums such as email and social media, and let interested prospects come to you. This approach produces more qualified leads, as they’ve proactively shown interest in your content.

How do buyer personas fit in?

One of the most important tenets of effective content marketing is that the content should speak directly to your target customer. You don’t want to share broad, generic information; rather, you want your prospect to feel like you are solving one of their problems, or speaking directly to them about an important topic.

Since you can’t write different content for each individual person who reads it, buyer personas allow you to best tailor your content to specific segments of people. HubSpot defines a buyer persona as “a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations and goals.”

For example, let’s say your B2B SaaS company typically sells to one of three different individuals: the IT Manager, the CIO and the Marketing Manager. Each of these individuals has different motivations, goals, challenges, etc. By creating a buyer persona for each of them, not only does your company better understand each persona better, but you can then create content (and corresponding marketing campaigns) that speak directly to each individual.

Without personas, you’d be sending one message to all three, but you know that what resonates with the CIO isn’t what will make the Marketing Manager want to buy.

Ready to get started?

There are countless buyer profile templates online if you’d like to dive right into the topic (you can check out our Inbound Marketing Buyer Persona Template, too). However, many find this exercise is best performed by a third-party who can lead your stakeholders through the conversation. If you’re interested in learning more about the buyer persona process, contact Milwaukee Marketing Agency, Accelity Marketing.