TABLE OF CONTENTS
What Are Buyer Personas? | Identifying Personas on LinkedIn | Conducting Market Research |
Content for Each Buyer Journey Stage | Persona Example | Next Steps
With over 1.1 billion users worldwide, LinkedIn is the largest professional social media network.
Creating a LinkedIn profile allows you to tap into this vast community and showcase your experience, skills, and education. Whether you're searching for a job, networking with professionals, taking courses, organizing events, joining groups, or sharing content, LinkedIn offers countless opportunities for engagement.
For data-driven marketers, it’s also a powerful platform for gaining insights into people, audiences, and industries — enhancing content marketing efforts with real-world data.
At its core, successful content marketing starts with a deep understanding of your buyer personas. You need to reach the right audience at the right time with valuable, relevant content. This means going beyond basic demographics to understand their goals, challenges, pain points, habits, and preferences.
While this process takes time, it’s essential for a long-term, effective strategy. Fortunately, LinkedIn provides a wealth of real data to help build accurate buyer personas. But before diving into how LinkedIn can offer direct insight into your personas, let’s take a step back to define exactly what they are.
The terms buyer persona, marketing persona, and target persona are often used interchangeably, as they all refer to the same concept. A persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, created using research and data from both existing and potential customers.
Most businesses should have multiple personas to reflect different customer segments or service offerings. Since buyer personas can evolve over time, it’s important to review and update them regularly to ensure accuracy.
Ultimately, well-defined personas help keep your messaging focused on addressing customer needs and pain points — rather than simply promoting your own agenda.
Before using LinkedIn to find your buyer personas, you first need to define who they are. If you haven’t yet developed personas to guide your content marketing strategy, now is the time to make it a priority.
Start by analyzing your current customers. Look for patterns among the people you already work with to establish the foundation for your target personas. Ask yourself the following key questions:
Use these insights to create a detailed persona profile — but don’t stop there. Consider prospects you’d love to work with but haven’t yet converted into customers. Do they share common traits? If so, you may have uncovered another persona worth developing.
To make personas more tangible, assign them a name, such as “Manager Mary,” “CEO Chris,” or “Business Owner Owen.” Adding a stock image to their profile can also help visualize them.
Aim to create at least three well-defined personas by the end of this exercise. While the process is straightforward, dedicating time and effort to it will pay off in driving more targeted, effective marketing efforts.
With your personas defined, you can now use LinkedIn to find, research, and engage with them more effectively. The platform’s search function and filters will be your most valuable tools, allowing you to quickly uncover insights about your target audience: their habits, needs, and key attributes.
There’s no single right way to approach this research. You might start by exploring a specific company or diving into individual profiles. Either way, LinkedIn provides a wealth of real-world data to guide your content strategy and ensure your messaging resonates with the right people.
When exploring LinkedIn profiles, you gain access to valuable data about individuals — who they are, where they’re from, what they do, and what they engage with. If you choose to start your research at the individual level, focus on key details that can help refine your buyer personas. Pay close attention to:
Review 10 to 15 profiles and take note of any recurring trends. Are you beginning to see patterns emerge? This information can provide deeper insights into your target audience, helping you create content that truly resonates.
Analyzing company profiles on LinkedIn can also provide valuable insights, especially with over 69 million businesses on the platform. While this data tends to be more high-level, it can help build a more complete picture of your target personas. Key details to focus on include:
If your business primarily serves one industry, do you notice common trends among these companies? If you cater to multiple industries, are there shared patterns that could shape your marketing strategy? Identifying these insights will help refine your approach and create more targeted, effective content.
This is where everything starts to come together. After outlining at least three detailed buyer personas and using LinkedIn to refine their characteristics, the next step is placing these personas within the context of the buyer’s journey.
To create the right marketing content, you must understand how your buyers move through each phase of their decision-making process. The buyer’s journey consists of three key stages:
At this stage, the buyer recognizes a problem and begins searching for ways to address it. Your content should focus on education and value, not sales. Blog posts, videos, infographics, and eBooks work well to answer initial questions and provide helpful insights.
Now, the buyer has defined their problem and is evaluating different solutions. Content in this phase should be more in-depth, offering clear explanations and comparisons. Checklists, calculators, white papers, case studies, and webinars can help position your brand as a trusted resource.
In the final stage, the buyer is ready to choose a solution. Your content should be direct and persuasive, showcasing why your offering is the best fit. Product spec sheets, competitor comparisons, fact sheets, guides, and demos can provide the final push to convert them into a customer.
By aligning your content strategy with the buyer’s journey, you ensure your messaging resonates with potential customers at every stage, guiding them seamlessly from awareness to decision.
To bring this all together, let’s introduce Marketing Molly, one of our primary buyer personas at LAIRE.
Molly is a Marketing Manager with a strong background and passion for marketing. She is the trusted point of contact for the business owner or CEO and is responsible for implementing successful marketing efforts.
She juggles multiple tasks, including marketing automation, CRM management, social media, paid ads, and copywriting — all while occasionally being pulled into areas outside of marketing.
Understanding Marketing Molly’s pain points and behaviors allows us to create content that speaks directly to her needs, builds trust, nurtures her as a qualified lead, and ultimately converts her into a satisfied customer.
Marketers must do the groundwork to define the intricate details of their buyer personas — but the process doesn’t stop there.
The ultimate goal is to identify the challenges these personas face and, through strategic content marketing, position your business as the trusted solution. LinkedIn is just one tool to help refine and enhance your target personas, giving you deeper insights into their needs, behaviors, and preferences.
At LAIRE, we specialize in B2B content marketing, helping businesses develop effective marketing strategies that drive results. We know that crafting buyer personas and mapping out their journey can be complex, which is why we created a simple content marketing workbook for beginners.
Download your free workbook today and start building a stronger, more targeted content strategy.