Who are you writing for?

This might be the most important question any automotive digital marketer can ask themselves before diving into content creation.

You can’t please everyone, because each individual consumer has different needs. This is where persona marketing comes into play. When you know who you’re marketing to, making the final sale or conversion is much easier.

Let’s get into why creating audience-centric content is your key to auto marketing success.

What Is Persona Marketing?

Write for someone, and not just about something.

It can be easy to forget that marketing should speak to your audience, rather than simply spread word about your dealership’s inventory or service offerings. Everything you create online should have your intended audience in mind.

Give your audience buyer personas by creating semi-fictional representations of your best customers. This is what we refer to in the digital marketing biz as persona marketing.

Take it a step further by basing your buyer personas on market research and real data about existing leads and customers.

For example, if you want to promote your truck inventory on your dealership’s blog, think of who your truck customers typically are. This truck-buying audience is likely very different from a car-buying audience.

To shape your content topics for this audience, consider what information these truck shoppers might like to know about most. Perhaps their biggest concern is cab size? Or maybe payload capacity?

Touch on these key points to answer the questions most important to your audience, while providing helpful resources and building trust. 

By honing in on a segmented audience with the right information, you’re more likely to engage with leads, thus increasing the likelihood of a sale or conversion.

Why Your Buyer’s Journey Matters

Inbound digital marketing aims to educate buyers through curated content sent at the perfect time in an individual customer’s buyer’s journey. This gives your intended audience the content they need and want along their path to purchase.

At 9 Clouds, we consider the user’s place in the sales funnel when creating blog posts, email marketing, Facebook ads . . . pretty much everything we do. 

Automotive buyers have a long lifecycle. They won’t buy a vehicle for years — then, suddenly, they’re going through at least 24 touchpoints to decide which vehicle to buy.

Does your dealership marketing strategy meet the needs of today’s consumers? We recently compiled three automotive digital marketing trends to watch in 2018. Check them out to see if you’re on the ball.

How to Create Audience-Centric Content

Since purchase behavior and preferences can vary, you’ll need to gather data on your current customer base in order to understand who you’re marketing to.

Go to your sales and customer service staff to find out which key questions your dealership is getting asked the most. Note the trends you find, so it’ll be easier to predict what potential customers might be wondering about along their path to purchase.

What information is going to help your leads make an informed decision? What are they typically concerned about? What is motivating them to buy?

Once you learn more about your audience, it’ll be easier to build a strategy around what your potential buyers want — not what your dealership inventory lineup dictates.

This all might sound daunting, but the extra effort toward creating audience-centric content will pay off by bringing you higher-quality leads and better-informed shoppers.

Allow Us to Take Care of Your Content Marketing!

Feeling overwhelmed about applying persona marketing to your content efforts?

Get in contact with us to schedule your digital audit. We’ll show you how to better create content that connects with your audience in mind, generating more traffic, leads, and revenue.

For now, check out our online content marketing resources to learn about best practices for creating content that speaks to your audience.