Any growing business or organization that wants to have long-term success in today's digital world must learn to take advantage of digital content.  While there is still value in physical business collateral such as books, brochures, magazines, informational pamphlets and the like, what's becoming a standard for practically every professional industry is for businesses to produce online content for a digital audience.  If you're wondering how to best approach digital content for your business to ensure that it's helping rather than hindering your goals, here are 5 important rules when writing digital content:

Being able to target promising leads through the use of personas is a crucial part of any successful inbound marketing campaign.  Compiling strong data-backed profiles enable you to target prospective buyers in a more focused and relevant way.  With personas, marketing and sales teams are able to create targeted strategies which attract higher quality leads and allow for a faster transition through the conversion funnel.  Our partner BrightInfo, has an article written by Alex Embling, that explains how data-backed personas can shorten the sales cycle.

Personas are fictional, generalized representations of existing and potential customers.  By creating personas to represent various groups of people, you can tailor your content to targeted segments of your audience, thereby increasing your marketing effectiveness.  Our Toolkit of the Month: Personas, explains in more detail what personas are, how to create them, and why they are important for your organization.

I’ve been singing the praises of persona development since the day I started at HighRoad and I’m seeing that the market is starting to pick up that same message – I see a lot of conference sessions reference the value and importance of persona development, which is fantastic! Organizations (not just the marketing team), need to know who they’re targeting if they want to be able to market effectively. More importantly, and this is why personas matter, you really need to understand what motivates and drives your target audiences. What are they interested in? How do they spend their day? What are their pain points? How do they consume the information you send them? What information do they consume? Are they extroverts or introverts? Are they likely to respond to social media outreach or do they prefer traditional email? How much free time do they have? Are they Baby Boomers, Millennials or Gen X and does that matter when it comes to promoting your programs?