How to Use Content Mapping and Psychographic Targeting to Drive Up Sales

We know content mapping and psychographic targeting may sound like complicated topics, but they aren’t really. To demonstrate this, let’s focus on content mapping first. Basically, a content mapping is the idea of “delivering the right results, to the right people, at the right time.”

In other words, it’s a map of your campaign. It should represent your customers journey – the different buyer journey stages users are at, appropriate mediums to reach clients, interconnections between various channels, predicted consumer behavior and ways of retargeting people who’ve opted-out.

But why is it so helpful?

Content mapping takes into consideration everyone from your audience and delivers specific content to much smaller highly-detailed (granular) groups. Predicting the actions of those people, and steering them in the direction which will eventually drive up results for your brand. This could help you convert more easily as well as generate leads.

Furthermore, this inbound marketing strategy also considers how to retarget people and what possible problems may appear along the way. The valuable thing about content mapping is the clarity and flexibility of this approach for everyone within a company. If a problem appears, you can see what stages of your campaign it interferes with exactly. Then you can determine how to react in a better and more efficient way.

In addition to this, no matter which team or person, you provide the content map to, they’ll be able to grasp the meaning of it and have a more thorough understanding of what their actual goal is.

So how do you implement content mapping?

Well, first off, you need to consider the following pieces of information:

• The Characteristics (Traits) of Your Leads. You must understand who these people are, what their goals and challenges are, what they dream of and what feeds their curiosity. After all, you’re aiming at becoming part of their inner circle.
• How Close They Are to Being Converted. Create content so that it resonates with each of your consumers. You must determine exactly how much they trust you and at what stage of the buyer’s journey they are.

1. Make Your Buyer Personas Valuable

You’ve probably heard a million times that you need to make a profile of your ideal customer that shows data-driven information on the person’s demographics, behavioral patterns, interests, motivation, challenges, goals, etc — also known as a buyer persona.

By definition, buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of the types of customers a business wants to attract. They help marketers to get to know their target audience to create high-quality content with a problem-solving focus. But when we get Marketing Bill, a CMO, 27 to 35 years of age that studied in a UK/US college and is interested in tennis, we know it’s not the complete picture.

In fact, there are three main challenges when creating buyer personas, according to HubleDigital:

1. Rooted in Stereotypes. Often represented as job titles and assumptions, instead of with a focus on behaviour and needs. For instance, Marketing Bill, Executive Mary, Tech guy Ted, CEO Jeff, and more.
2. Tend to Get Neglected. Buyer personas aren’t just nice templates. They require hard work to be created, so when done right and used accordingly, they can be very beneficial for driving up sales.
3. They Are Often All Made Up. Don’t underestimate the power of customer interviews and real data. Many fall into the trap that since salespeople are in content with customers all the time they must know them best. However, if you rely solely on this, you’ll have an incomplete view of your target market.

Each of us is much more complex than simple answers to simple questions.We’re all in different life stages, dealing with various problems, facing different challenges. Today we might be interested in finance, but tomorrow we may be interested in fashion, and thus, embrace a whole different side of us. Our characters have so many layers which is why creating good buyer personas is so tricky. And this is where psychographic targeting comes into play.

2. Intent-Based Targeting

Psychographic targeting is a methodology, part of the STP marketing model, that is used to group people based on their psychological attributes. These attributes are also called traits or variables and refer to personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles.

To be able to determine those psychographic traits and use them on multiple channels, to deliver the right content and increase sales, you would need to exemplify good understanding, intelligence and a hefty dose of intuition.

Psychographic targeting makes it possible for marketers to target different groups of people in greater detail, based on who they are in real life. This then supports the delivery of quality and relevant content to prospects that’s either going to turn them into a lead or convert them into a client.

But understanding how to group human complexity to create a useful matrix (system) of psychographic targeting variables, is possible only once you’re able to obtain useful insights on user behavior through various mediums. The channels that offer the most evolved targeting are also the places where you can find the information to implement such strategies. These channels are Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For example, a Master Persona could be all the people interested in the “technology sector”. Sub-personalities might be programmers, CTOs, gamers, journalists, reviewers, web developers, even marketing personnel. A Literal Persona might be CEO Frank, who is searching exactly for “technical copywriting” for his brand’s website.

What intent-based (psychographics) targeting focuses on is providing insights for both master and literal personas’ personalities. This helps marketers to turn audiences into leads or convert them into customers. Furthermore, it allows them to optimize their marketing spend and gain a competitive advantage.

Understanding Buyer Intent: 5 Ways to Close More Sales

3. Where Are Your Personas in the Buying Cycle?

As we’ve mentioned before, after determining our buyer personas and giving them complex psychographic traits, we then need to figure out at what their buyer intent is and what stage of the buying cycle they are. 

For instance, are they at the stage of:

• Unawareness. The user is not aware of your brand or the products/services it offers. At this stage, it’s likely that the first interaction with consumers will be through your content. That’s why it’s important to present yourself as a trustworthy source of valuable information. At this stage, you are building brand awareness and creating a community to work with.
• Awareness. At this point, the user becomes aware of your brand.
• Consideration. The person is aware of your brand and is considering whether you meet their needs or not by comparing you to 2-3 competitors and doing a more in-depth Google (re)search.
• Decision. The person has decided whether or not to purchase based on their needs and the services or products you have on offer. Consumers at this stage are making a final decision and consider things like quick start costs, planning and implementation, and customer support.

Knowing what stage of this cycle a prospect is in, will help you make your buyer personas more relevant to the major touchpoint of the buyer journey, and more practical to the functions of the sales and marketing teams. Thus, providing structure and insights to organize your time and resources.

4. Work With the Information You Have

We’ve already covered how to determine and approach different psychographic personas. Now let’s put that into practice. Let’s imagine we have a copywriting company that offers written content for the tech industry.

Probably the most critical part of any campaign is answering the question of “How are we going to reach our buyer personas?”. This happens through targeting customer egments based on their psychographic traits. We’ll start by determining the right keywords for the channels and advertisements we’re going to use to approach consumers.

Literal Persona

The first part is identifying the literal keywords and social segments. These are useful for reaching consumers that search (Google) and are interested in the service we’re offering. Such keywords will revolve around “technical copywriting,” “content writing tech industry” and other similar wording.

Master Persona

For instance, let’s take Facebook. It is valuable for marketers because of its 900-million-plus users and the fact that it targets other channels far beyond its social network. What also makes Facebook great in the eyes of marketers is the ability to interlayer broad and precise interests in the same targeting matrix.

This is valuable because, for example, if the interest of our master persona is Technology, we could add other more precise interests within the broader one such as marketing – as it’s also what our potential customer might be searching for.

Personalities

Now is the time to get creative, and dive into patterns that are often in the marketing blind spot. For example, we can figure out which CMOs and CEOs, in medium to large US/UK tech brands, are regular LinkedIn users. From there you can search their social media and find out what magazines and blogs they might be reading, or what common interests they might have.

Let’s say they both read publications such as “The Verge” or “Financial Times”. These two publications could easily be keywords for the Google AdWords Display Network or concrete interests on Facebook.

With the new option to target precise individuals on Twitter, you could also find users who are following the magazines on the social network and approach them. We’ll also want to add the names of influencers in the industry and the groups/communities they belong to, target both them (using Twitter’s precise targeting) and their communities (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter).

And finally, here are a few great observations – you could also target the media as well as influential people in the sector, e.g. VCs (Venture Capitalists), through Facebook!

Content Map

The next thing we should do is map out the buyer journey of our clients. That’ll include determining the key events that’ll convert leads, possible consumer behavior, and how to retarget opted-out prospects, with the goal to move them down the funnel.

Let’s take the content map above and try to make a campaign similar to it.

• We’ll be targeting people through Facebook, Twitter, and the Social Display Network, all with ads leading to our website.
• Then we’ll need to make people interested enough in our content and lead them to a landing page to sign up for a newsletter.
• Once they opt-in, we’ll send out valuable content strategy guides through email to nurture our leads and wait for the right moment to send a sales letter.
• This letter then leads to a sales page that will hopefully close the deal.
• We’ll also retarget the people who left our website, without signing up for our newsletters, through Facebook Ads.
• These ads directly lead back to our sales page.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to analyze your content by going through metrics like CPA, CPC, and/or conversion rates and determining which content has the best results and converts the most leads. This way you should be able to resolve any potential problems, making your sales skyrocket, and becoming a brand people can trust.

And that’s how to make a complete content map, in our case, for a campaign, using the psychological traits and behavioral patterns of consumers.

Conclusion

Basing marketing efforts on psychographic data makes these efforts into real experiences that consumers see as the answer to their problems. Such maps can also be done for whole blogs, websites, brands, concrete pages, etc.