What We Can Learn from Warren Buffet About Content Marketing
By Perry Rearick, Chief Editor, Follow Your Buyer
Each year at this time, I look forward to reading Warren Buffett’s letter to shareholders. I never know what I’ll learn, but I’m always confident I will.
Not being a Berkshire Hathaway shareholder, although I probably should be, I pay less attention to the profits and loss data and focus more on what and how Buffett communicates. He begins this year by honoring his long-time business partner, Charlie Munger, who passed away last year, and he does so with great character. Buffett credits Munger as the “architect” of BH’s success and he, Buffett, as the “general contractor”.
What especially stood out for me in this year’s letter is how he describes who he writes the letter for. It is a lesson in the importance of understanding one’s target audience and a clinic in developing a target audience persona.
His target audience is of course BH’s shareholders, but he goes much deeper.
“Writers find it useful to picture the reader they seek, and often they are hoping to attract a mass audience. At Berkshire, we have a more limited target: investors who trust Berkshire with their savings without any expectations of resale (resembling in attitude people who save in order to buy a farm or rental property rather than people who prefer using their excess funds to purchase lottery tickets or “hot” stocks).”
He further describes them as “lifetime shareholders and their heirs.” He cherishes them and believes “they are entitled to hear every year both good and bad news, delivered directly from their CEO” and not from an investor-relations officer or PR consultant.
He visualizes his owners through his sister, Bertie. She is the model used for his target audience’s persona. He describes her in the following way.
Bertie is smart, wise and likes to challenge his thinking. Her ownership spans decades. Bertie understands many accounting terms, but she is not a CPA. She follows business news but doesn’t consider herself an economic expert. Bertie understands human behavior and she knows when someone is just trying to sell her and she also knows who she can trust. She is nobody’s fool and Buffett has her interests top of mind when he writes his famous letter each year.
As a B2B solution provider, can you describe your target audience with the same level of understanding? Can you speak about your prospects and customers the way Buffett does? Do you know their dreams and motivations?
Have you developed your customer personas with as much fidelity as he has? And do you keep them top of mind when you develop your marketing messages, prepare for a sales call, or develop a new product or service?
Follow Your Buyer!