The More you Know, the Better your Digital Marketing

Customer knowledge is one key area that businesses are paying more attention to these days.  Mastering this one task could help you generate phenomenal benefits in traffic, content engagement, and sales. Fortunately, there are techniques and research available to generate a clear picture of your target customer.

Before you do any further digital marketing spending, learn what your target prospects want, how they think and buy, and what motivates them to purchase.

 

If you don’t know your customer, who is your website serving?

Marketers use a model picture of a target customer and this guides marketing strategy and content strategy. It’s called the buyer persona.

Buyer personas help you understand your customers (and prospective customers) better. It’s a guide to help you tailor your content, messaging, product development, and services to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups. Adapted from a quote from Hubspot.com

Certainly your prospects and current customers all have unique wants, however there are common traits, needs, preferences that your digital marketing can respond to. Those needs are generally a hierarchy but how customers choose among that ranking of needs could vary a great deal on any given day. The buyer’s emotions come into play too as they begin assessing their options.

The Power and Potential of Personas

 

THE POWER AND POTENTIAL OF PERSONAS survey from b2p Insights found that “over half (58%) of B2B marketers say they are currently using personas and 28% say they will start using personas in the next 1-2 years. Yet only a third (35%) report that personas are very or extremely effective.” That means there’s room for improvement.

From the report: “77% of the extremely or very effective personas are based on new external research while 72% of the ineffective personas were created from existing data.”  That means marketers need to do new research.

42% of respondents said that personas do create a competitive advantage.

Good customer personas inevitably give your content strategy, PPC advertising, and email campaigns a distinct advantage. It will guide the development and presentation of your unique value proposition, which specific features and benefits to highlight, and which incentives will work best when you need them.

Are you ready to learn more about your customer now?

10 Ways to Build your Customer Persona

  1. Conduct personal interviews with current customers
  2. Provide prospective customers with incentives to talk about their needs and preferences
  3. Use Google Consumer Surveys to conduct larger scale surveys of audiences
  4. Analyze what your prospects have inquired about
  5. Examine your web analytics to see what visitors viewed on your site (Google analytics, SumoMe)
  6. Use a pop up search box on your homepage and ask them what they’re looking for?
  7. Do A/B testing with your Google Adwords account where you vary ad text, keywords bid on, and landing page copy
  8. Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter for a chance to ask them poignant questions about their preferences
  9. Use a professional research firm to conduct a formal study of your target market (they do phone interviews with prospects)
  10. Ask prospects to visit your social pages and comment about they like and don’t like. Social media is a perfect format to test responses to different topics.

Any new customer research you do is going to help optimize everything from your digital marketing plan to content strategy to increasing conversion rates.

Contact us now to discuss your web marketing challenges and how we can help.