Tag Archives: marketing

Buyer Persona: Cater Your Content to the Right Audience

Buyer Persona, content marketing, ,

Around 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content a day. We all know content marketing brings success to businesses. However, new challenges have arisen with content marketing. With around 5 billion internet users today,  how to produce personalized content that reaches exactly the right audience? 

Not only does your business need to find a unique brand voice, but you also need to make sure your content is attracting the right audience. What’s more, if you’re a small business owner, you may need a LinkedIn engagement marketing tool to help boost your content reach effectively on LinkedIn. 

For right now, the very first thing to discover is: Who is your audience? There is one classic method to profile your ideal customer, which never ceases to go old, that is building a buyer persona.

Here, we will guide you through creating a perfect buyer persona in 4 simple steps. Take a piece of pen and paper, your laptop, or anything to get ready for brainstorming.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a holistic profile combining the most common traits of your ideal customer group including their background, demographics, goals, motivations, and more.

How can a buyer persona help you?

  • Understand your ideal customers’ challenges and goals
  • Understand what should be the topics, writing style, and focus of your content
  • Capture your ideal customers’ attention 
  • Produce quality leads for your business

Preparation

You need to have a solid knowledge of who your existing customers are. Open your Google Analytics, website statistics, customer database, or even Facebook audience insights. Remember to keep referring back to these places and collect information to answer the following four sections.

1. Demographic information

  • What is your persona’s name? Use the formula [adjective] + [first name] like “Work-driven Anna” so it’s simple and memorable.
  • What is their gender?
  • Which age group do they belong to?
  • Which country do they live in? Do they live in the suburbs or the urban areas? 
  • What industry do they work in and what is their job title?
  • What is their annual salary?
  • Are they married? Do they have children?

2. Psychographic information

Psychographic information via Adioma
Via Adioma
  • Think of 4 adjectives that best describe their personality. Use the image on the left as a reference. 
  • What motivates them to do their everyday work? 
  • What are their current short-term business objectives for this year or quarter?
  • What are the long-term business goals they wish to achieve?
  • What serves as a roadblock for their success? 
  • What are their biggest fears? 

3. Behavioral information

  • What are their hobbies and interests? 
  • What do they enjoy doing in their spare time?
  • Where do they search for information and seek help?
  • How do they prefer to interact with business? 
  • Which social media platforms do they use the most? 
  • Do they have a device preference?

4. Switch back to your perspective

Now that you’ve gotten every information you need, it’s time to uncover the content you should produce and the channels your business can utilise to reach out and help your buyers.

The demographic information allows you to niche down your content. The more niche your content is, the better it is going to resonate with your prospects. If you are targeting small business owners based in London, talk about the local business trends that small business owners in London should be aware of. If you are targeting married small business owners, talk about ways to balance family and business. 

The psychographic information determines your writing style and the various problems your content should solve. Some prefer to read about how-to articles with actionable examples, while others enjoy in-depth articles that provide food-for-thought for them to ponder on. Don’t forget to address how your business can lead them to success by overcoming their roadblocks and biggest fears. 

Create a simple marketing message using the information you have and include them in your articles and posts following a simple formula of [Call to action] + [Their challenges or goals] + [Time range to achieve the ideal results]”. If your ideal customer faces the challenges of generating engagement, an example would be “Download our free resource now to multiply engagement by 5x in 1 week”.

The behavioral information determines the platforms and channels you should be distributing your content as well as the touchpoints you should target. For mapping out your touchpoints, you can follow the buyer’s journey.

Conclusion

There we have it, all the steps for creating a simple yet comprehensive buyer persona. Some businesses need multiple personas to understand the various types of customers they deal with, but for now, it’s okay to start small and choose one group of customers based on what you already know. 

8 Tips to Increase Website Traffic

Small Business Marketing, Web Traffic, , ,

1. Update the pages on your website frequently (we’re starting to employ this ourselves!). Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product. Having backlinks will increase web traffic and overall SEO!

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons. Be sure it’s not the same content they can find elsewhere!

4. Add a speak to me script (like we have from Vcita) that will allow for immediate contact or to leave a message.

5. Be sure to brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

6. Create a FAQ page/section which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

7. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark. It’s also a good practice for SEO purposes!

8. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

Social Media Marketing Figures 2013

Infographics, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technology, , ,

So who are the main players in social media right now? We have a list running through some of the most prominent social media sites and why you should consider using them for your business. Check out the infographic below to learn more about these sites and how they are growing.

  • Facebook is still on top, not surprising really. It now has over 1.15 billion users, 50% of which log in every day. Just think of all those potential customers. Due to Facebook being so regularly experienced on mobile, users are exposed to marketing and brands even more frequently outside of the home.
  • Google+ has shot past the competition into second place and is now the fastest growing network ever! If that’s not reason enough to jump on the wagon, how about the fact that using it can make your business much more discoverable.
  • Twitter remains an important player. With 36% of marketers finding a customer via Twitter in 2013, you should consider making this top microblogging location a part of your marketing mix.
  • LinkedIn should be an obvious choice for any business looking to make connections, check out competitors, share content and keep up with the business world. Even more so now that it has over 200 million users.
  • Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest and other image based networks might not be the right fit for every business, but if they are for yours, you should rush to them and get interacting with their user bases. Instagram alone is 137 million strong!

See the original infographic here and check out some more affiliate marketing infographics on pinterest.

Social Media Marketing Figures 2013

Boost Engagement With Technology-Infused Email Marketing

Small Business Marketing, Web Design, ,

Don't let email go to spam

Recently seen as exciting and fresh, email marketing aged quickly behind social media, marketers’ newest go-to strategy. “Likes” now take precedence over subscribers, and following trends is more noble than providing engaging content. Social networking platforms have opened up a world of possibilities for businesses, no doubt, but with advanced metrics and dwindling competition, could it be that now is the perfect time to launch an email marketing campaign? In reality, email marketing’s decline has been greatly exaggerated. Hubspot reports that 54 percent of marketers who used email marketing during the 2011 holiday season said their campaigns were extremely or very successful.

If you’re looking to establish greater customer relationships or promote your product or service through content, ignore the premature obituaries and consider email marketing to spread the word.

Study Metrics

Email marketing lost value when users became immune to the slew of messages. On-the-go recipients quickly developed an eye to spot useless advertisements, and email providers even began filtering these messages into marketing wastelands known as “spam” folders. While many businesses believe that email marketing is a dead tactic, new metrics can help marketers determine their campaign’s effectiveness. Open rates tell marketers how many recipients opened the mail, which provides insight into effective email titles. Click-through rate monitors how many recipients follow a business link to the desired destination. Like with any other advertising, engaging relevant content entices consumers to learn more. Other metrics, including response rate, conversion rate and unsubscribe rate provide further procession, turning a guessing game into a sharpened tool.

Many mass email service providers include these metrics in their services. Otherwise, businesses can purchases individual tools online at sites like getopenrate.com.

Focus on Content

In the age of social media, email has become a more efficient way to consume information. Without real-time comments, photos, videos and links, email is pound-for-pound a more effective way to communicate. To maintain this edge, email marketers must focus their efforts on providing value to recipients. Use email content to put your business’ product or service in context, outlining where you fit in a trending or relevant topic. If you’re losing subscribers, consider adding exclusive deals or discounts in your email content.

By providing value to email recipients, not only will you build brand awareness for your business, you’ll also strengthen relationships with your subscribing or potential customers, a skill social media claims to dominate.

Know Your Audience

Effective content engages readers, so in order to build a content strategy, you’ll need to know your audience. A software company that offers to a wide audience might be tempted to lob various content topics as they email market. Survey data might reveal that many of its subscribers are business owners. In this case, an email marketer would be wise to mold their email marketing content around B2B companies.

Audience analysis makes crafting an email marketing campaign easier and more focused.

 By Peter Marino

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