Planning your content calendar doesn’t have to be difficult. Before you start deciding on topics, you’ve determined:

• the main purpose of your blog
• how you’ll track the effectiveness of your blog
• the next step people should take after reading

Now, you know the goal of your blog, it’s time to think about your readers.

Get to Know Your Reader Personas

As a B2B hospitality marketer, you’ve heard the term buyer persona. The information about your ideal buyer. You know the common problems a buyer’s company has, their size, and their budget and so on.

But, is the person doing the initial research the one with the ultimate buying decision? Who is searching for answers to a problem?

Let’s say you work for a software company creating PMS for hotels. Who will be reading your blog?

Most likely, it’s someone who regularly uses PMS, or at least understands the purpose of PMS. When creating blog topics, you need to knowwho is most likely to read the posts to pick valuable topics.

When you create your content calendar, go in-depth when researching your ideal reader.

Research Your Reader Persona

To get to know your reader, you need more than the general information about the companies you serve. The reader will hold a unique position in the company. The people who read your blog might also be in a different position than you think.

Ask yourself these questions to get a better idea of who your ideal reader is:

• Who is most likely to read your blog posts?
• Where do they fit into the overall structure of the buying process?
• Are the people reading your content the ones with the final buying decision?
• What type of information will they find most useful?
• Where in the sales cycle is your reader when they find your post?

Once you answer these questions you can narrow down the list of topics you might want to include in your content calendar. You’ll know more about who will read your posts and you can create valuable content to show your expertise and thought leadership.

Multiple Reader Personas

In researching who reads your blog, you’ll probably find more than one type of reader persona. That’s okay. How can you write for all of them? That’s where segmenting your blog comes in. Let’s go back to our hotel looking to buy a new PMS system.

Here are some of your possible readers.

The IT Person: She needs to research technical specifications to determine if a system can communicate with software they already use.

The Revenue Manager: He needs to search for information on how a new PMS will help reduce costs and increase revenue.

The Hotel Manager: She looks for information on how to better manage their inventory and improve the customer experience.

The software company that creates the PMS for hotels provides a solution to all of these problems.

Who reads the blog post from the software company? The IT person? The revenue manager? The hotel manager? All of them?

To reach out to all three with a single post would be difficult. That’s why you create different posts for different people. Determine who is most likely to read your blog and continue in the buying process. Then, create posts for that group. I’ll explain more about this in an upcoming post.

When you answer these questions, you can create targeted posts for the people most likely to read your content.

After you’ve discovered your ideal reader, you’ll want to start choosing topics.

Creating a reader persona helps you decide on your blog content. When you know who is most likely to read your content and where they are in the buying process, you can create highly targeted and relevant blog posts.

Are you ready to start planning out your content calendar? Contact us for a FREE 20-minute call to get started. Or discover more about our other services.