How to Incorporate Technical Buyer Personas into your Content Strategy

It’s a great, big manufacturing world out there, and the truth is – from the organization level to the people level – you can’t market effectively to everyone. You need to be strategic, and make sure that you’re burning your marketing calories as efficiently and effectively as possible. 

A great game plan for accomplishing this is to align your shop’s strengths against the various pain points of technical buyers. If you haven’t already read our Understanding the Technical Buyer article, this is a great starting point. 

Helpful resource

Understanding Technical Buyer Personas

Here’s a condensed version of the Technical Personas Guide, specifically looking at each personas’ pain points: 

Choosing the Right Technical Audience(s) 

In most cases, a job shop will not be able to meet all the pain points of the three main technical buyers. They might be able to address all of the Engineer’s pain points, some of the SQE’s, and maybe a few of the Industrial Buyer’s. 

When this happens, it doesn’t serve your team well to develop technical content for the technical buyer persona that you align with the least. It’s a wasteful use of your marketing calories, and will create a disconnect between you and the potential customer. 

I’ll give you an example. 

Let’s say your shop excels at DFM and developing strong manufacturing processes for very complex, tight-tolerance components — that’s an indication that you should be developing technical content for engineers. Maybe it’s a blog post on how to apply GD&T to a part drawing in a way that lowers cost and makes the part more manufacturable. 

On the other hand, while this shop excels at DFM and working with engineers, they tend to have longer lead times and higher prices than some of their competitors in the area. If you take the time to develop content around aggressive lead times and reduced costs, a potential customer who contacted you after reading that content will be confused when your lead times and costs aren’t competitive, or at least comparable, to what they can find with other shops nearby. 

To have a successful content marketing strategy, this shop needs to have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and hold them up against the three main technical buyer personas’ pain points. How everything aligns, or doesn’t align, will highlight which audience they should market to and which one(s) they can de-prioritize. 

Key Takeaways / Action Items 

It’s great learning new things, but I want this information to be actionable for you. 

If your shop wants to improve its current content strategy, or develop its first one ever, I recommend completing the following steps. 

1. Review the technical buyer personas’ pain points 
2. Going through the list, mark whether a pain point is a strength or a weakness for your shop (this may take some market research to understand how you stack up to the competition) 
3. Choose the technical buyer persona whose pain points most closely align with your shop’s strengths (it may be more than one, but it’s likely not all 3 unless you’re a fairly large CMO) 
4. Create topic clusters based on your chosen audience’s pain points that you can speak to (HubSpot has a great article on how to do this and why it’s an advantageous content model) 
5. List out content that you and your team can develop based on your topic clusters (again, you derived these from your chosen audience’s pain points) and get to creating! 

That’s a simple, but highly effective, game plan for developing your job shop’s technical content marketing. I hope it’s helpful! If you have other questions or need some marketing nerds to brainstorm with, drop us a line!