Buyer Personas—What Are They And Why Should You Care?

Buyer Personas
As we all know, people are different in many ways. What’s important to know, is so are their buying habits. Like it or not, consumers buy things for different reasons. Not a big deal though, right? You can imagine that. But could these different behaviors cause you to be losing money if not addressed properly—OH YEA!

First, let me explain what buyer personas are. From an Internet marketing point of view, a buyer persona is a fictional character drawn up from market and customer research that serves as examples of real life buyer preferences. In short, your job is to construct fictional characters, based on the buying behaviors identified in your research. The purpose for this is to create empathy for your real life customers. If done correctly, you should be able to understand your customer’s inner dialog and be able to create an experience relevant to the context of that dialog.

So what are you looking for?
Ok, the creating a fictional character doesn’t seem to hard, right? But, what should you be looking for? Fortunately there’s a simple answer, there just so happens to be four main personas or types of people, at least that’s what Hippocrates said. Technically though, there have been several types of personas identified, but we’ll just focus on the main four:

•    Competitive – base purchases on quick and logic thinking—they buy things associated with actors, titles, etc.

•    Spontaneous – base purchases on quick and emotional thinking—they buy things associated with top sellers and new releases

•    Methodical – base purchases on deliberate and logical thinking—they buy things by genre and categorization

•    Humanistic – base purchases on deliberate and emotional thinking—they buy based on reviews

Ok, why should you care?
Identifying personas for the purpose of consumer empathy is to help you create more target specific content that essentially appeals to more of your already targeted audience. Keep in mind, just because you’ve identified your niche or target audience doesn’t mean you’ve created content specific to all of your consumers. After you find your main audience, you then have to consider their personas and ‘talk their walk.’

So, supposing you’re creating a marketing campaign. Taking into consideration your newly learned awareness of personas, you should start to see that one Web page doesn’t fit all. A good marketer may create more than one version of the same campaign Web page, ad, etc.

Remember back to my post about ‘call to actions?’ Take a look again at the mock up I created. You’ll notice I’m offering four different brochures. Any idea why? Because each brochure is catering to the specifics of each of the four main buyer personas.

Now does that mean that offering four different versions of something means you’ve catered to the main personas?—no, not necessarily, it depends on your marketing needs. For instance, I could have created four separate Web pages displaying only the dialog of one persona at a time. But even then, the ways in which personas get catered to isn’t limited to my examples. You need to find out how to incorporate buyer personas into your strategy.

Lack of awareness or abandonment of the buyer personas notion could possibly be the reason why online conversion rates are so low. Even though you may have truly identified your niche audience that doesn’t mean you’re actually talking to all of the different personalities your consumers have.

Talk the talk, so you can walk the walk... all the way to the bank!

What Is Your Call To Action?

Why a call to action?
In the Internet marketing world, there are certain elements that a marketing campaign just can’t go without… an actual purpose for running the campaign—there’s no such thing as a random campaign, exposure, targeted traffic, proper testing, analytics, quality content, an understanding of different buyer personas (competitive, spontaneous, methodical, humanistic, etc.), and, (but not limited to) a primary and secondary call to action.

Primary Call to Action
The primary call to action is the main reason that you’ve lured traffic to your site, Web page, blog, etc. in the first place. Good marketers don’t just jam the purchase of their product of service down the visitor’s throat—they offer quality content that supports their offer, often times for free!

For instance, check out the image displayed with this post; it’s a mock up of a fictitious Jewelry site’s home page. You’ll notice the subheading, which is the primary call to action… “Get a free guide on our hottest topics”—each guide is a different aspect or approach to ultimately the same thing, but entices different buyer personas in different ways. *We’ll talk about different buyer personas in a later post.

The purpose for doing this is to get quality content in the visitor’s hand. It’s offered to them for free to entice them with the store’s jewelry, without any commitment on the consumer’s part. This not only exposes the great products of the store, but also helps build trust! Consumers will remember who helped them the most.

*Please note: calls to action can be many different things, perhaps downloadable brochures (like the ones in the image), free educational content, podcasts, videos, articles, etc.

Secondary Call to Action
The secondary call to action is used to help compliment the efforts of building trust, and also acts as a fail safe should the primary call to action not entice the consumer. Essentially, the secondary call to action is a second shot at enticing and/or convincing consumers to ‘take action’ on your site!—although, of course consumers may utilize both calls to action.

What about…?
Now you may be thinking, you’ve seen successful sites simply cutting to the chase and offering the option of buying their product or service, or perhaps you’ve even seen sites merely explaining the specifics of their business, without any offer or primary/secondary call to action. What’s important to remember is that not all sites are running campaigns, or even selling something.

Sites that may just offer their product or service are often major businesses that need no introduction—consumers simply come to the site to buy—without needing to be enticed. But, also keep in mind that the Web page you’ve seen just may not be the actual campaign page. Campaign Web pages are often separate from the main home page.

Additionally, sites that don’t sell anything, such as a local dentist’s site, and the like, are created for the purpose of exposure, as well as displaying details of their practice and contact info. However, the details on contacting them should be in the form of a call to action. If you’re not seeing it in this way, it may simply be due to inexperience on the part of the site owner.

All in all, a call to action is the entire reason for creating a campaign (but isn't limited to campaigns), Web page, blog, and so on. They can be used to get the consumer’s e-mail address or other contact info., to get consumers on the phone with the company for further enticement, simple brand or new product exposure, etc. The reasons for your call to action may be debatable, but having one is not—you have to have a call to action.

How To Choose The Right Keywords To Make Money—Pick the Long Tail

*Citation at the bottom of post

Keyword misconceptions
There seems to be a common misconception among inexperienced online marketers when it comes to identifying which keywords they feel will make them money the fastest when creating content for organic SEO purposes.

The reoccurring theme, among those who are not so online savvy, is that when targeting a market, the most obvious word or two (also known as a short tail keyword) will bring in the most traffic, and therefore, the most money. Although it is true that the more broader the term, the more traffic it will most likely receive, unfortunately, it simply isn’t reasonable to suspect an index anywhere even close to what’s considered a ‘good’ ranking, in a short amount of time.

For example, supposing you were to target the music industry for the purpose of selling advice on how to successfully enter the music biz, then you created a blog to write up some articles on the secrets to music career success. In doing so, the keywords music, music industry, and music career were targeted and articles were written up mentioning these keywords only.

The problem is, the keywords music, music industry, and music career are all too broad for the ‘how to successfully enter the music biz’ niche. In looking at the search engine index pages for these keywords, you could find results for perhaps a personal blog post about how much someone likes music, or where to buy music instruments, what the current music industry trends are, and even the music career of a famous artist, but nothing on how to break into the music biz.

If that’s not enough, another problem is the amount of time it would take to make it anywhere on the first three pages of the SERPs (search engine results pages). The music market is huge and so are the numbers of indexed pages for most of its short tail keywords. It could take years of targeting broad terms like music, music industry, or music career.

So what’s a marketer to do?
Fortunately, there’s hope for you when entering into a market or looking to revamp your current SEO efforts—the long tail keyword. The long tail is a more concise, descriptive keyword phrase that enables you to make a fair assumption as to what consumers using these phrases are looking for. For instance, in the event of selling advice on ‘how to successfully enter the music biz,’ the short tail keyword music career could actually also exist in a long tail form as perhaps inexpensive music career advice or maybe music career advice for beginners.

The beauty of the long tail is that due to its highly descriptive nature, consumers who use such phrases are indeed looking for a specific result and more likely to purchase, then consumers looking for short tails. The long tail inexpensive music career advice suggest that someone is looking to break out his/her wallet, soon, provided the offer is enticing enough.

It is important to know though, that most long tails often have a lot less traffic then short tails, therefore, you must keep in mind when dealing with long tails that there’s strength in numbers. Expect to target many long tails for the full benefit of these highly converting, quick indexing, and ultimately faster brand name building keyword phrases.

Where can I find long tails for my market?
Long tails exists for every market, as long as you know where to find them. There are many ways to find long tails, but perhaps the easiest way is to simply ask the experts. Google provides an excellent tool for finding the exact keywords phrases being searched for, by the very consumers using the search engine. Check out Google Adwords for some of the best long tails around. Another good place to go is Wordtracker.com, which is another platform for studying the actual keywords being sought after, from real life consumers.

Please note, this advice isn’t to steer you away from short tails, but rather, when waiting for your short tail targeting efforts to pay off, use the power of the long tail to get you noticed and start bringing in some money!

Google. (n.d.) Google Images. Retrieved on October 9, 2010 from http://www.jumpstartpro.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/real-estate-long-tail-keywords.jpg

5 Tips For Creating A Viral Marketing Campaign

What is Viral Marketing?
When it comes to marketing techniques, almost none are as explosively successful as viral marketing. Viral marketing is any piece of content that one person sends to another—then that person sends it to another, and so on, until it catches momentum and basically becomes its own marketing phenomenon without any further assistance from the content’s originator—the ability to gather “eyeballs” simply grows on its own like a virus.

What makes marketing virally so special is that, once it catches on, the audience itself basically does the marketing for you, instead of you having to research a specific audience for what makes them tick (for the purpose of being able to strategically place your content in front of them). Then, once they pass the content on to each other, the odds of getting them to take action become greater, largely because the content was recommended by someone they trust—family, friends, co-workers, etc.

Also, in case you're wondering, viral marketing comes in just about every form of marketing or advertising. Viral content includes videos, podcast, articles, e-mails, images, print advertising, billboards, commercials, etc

5 tips for creating a viral campaign
1)    Create something enticing—people/consumers are mostly interested in things they can connect with emotionally—make them laugh, cry, scared, etc. any you’ll have their undivided attention. Show them something extremely useful, but in a boring way, and your call to action will suffer!

2)    Make your content easily sharable—make sure your audience can easily pass along whatever you’re looking to go viral. Simple “send to a friend” or "e-mail a friend" and/or social networking widgets (and like) go along way.

3)    Get involved in an online community—if you want people to notice your content, you need to go where people who actively share are. You’ve never seen a billboard hidden away in some off the map neighborhood—they’re always displayed where many people will see them.

4)    Test your efforts—expect to create more than one version of content. For example, when creating an ad for PPC, you want to make sure you try a few different versions of the ad, then test which ad is receiving the most clicks. The same is true when creating landing pages for a viral campaign (another example). Create a few different versions of the same page and test which one being passed along from consumer to consumer the most—that’s the one with the most viral potential.

5)    Expect no guarantees—perhaps one of the most important things to remember about viral marketing is that there are no guarantees. Since it’s the audience itself that chooses to pass your content on to others, there’s really no way of knowing what exactly it was about your ad, video, article etc. that enticed them to share--therefore you can't rely on your efforts to definitely go viral! The best you can do is confirm that you’ve added all the lovely ingredients needed for a piece of content to go viral—and hope for the best.

So there you have it, viral marketing 101; of course there are more advanced methods to this beast of marketing success, but these tips will help you get your feet wet.

Take care,

Dave

Google. (n.d.). Google Images. Retrieved on September 2, 2010 from http://acreativellc.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/viral-marketing-tree.jpg