In this episode of Actionable Marketing In Minutes we discuss developing a persona purchasing point of view for better website development.
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Problem:
If you’ve spent time with us reading our blogs or listening to our podcasts, you might have noticed we discuss personas as a useful marketing tool quite a bit. If you’ve not heard this term, let me briefly tell you what it is as defined by Ardath Albee: it is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. It helps you deliver content that is most relevant and useful to your audience.
A persona can be referred to as a business buyers’ persona, customer persona or marketing persona. It is a result of slicing your target audience into specific, individual groups.
Creating personas can help improve the way you solve challenges for your customers. And that’s what you want to do – give them an answer for a need or pain they are experiencing.
Today, after I briefly run through how to develop your personas, I want to take it one step further to show you how to either design or redesign your website to cater to their specific personas in order to entice them into your sales funnel.
Solution:
The number of personas you want to develop depends on the size of your company and your end goals; though, the average number is about three to five. Basically, you want to specify who the person is, what he or she values and how to speak him or her. And, don’t forget to give each persona a name. That makes the entire exercise more personal. Let me give you a few more details of what to include:
* Job title: what their role is and what size and type of company.
* Basic demographics: age, gender, salary and household income, home locality, education and family makeup.
* Personal goals and challenges: both primary and secondary goals and challenges and how you can help them achieve those goals and solve the problems.
* Needs: what do they need most or what is the biggest problem they’re trying to solve? What information are they searching for?
* Behavior: are they active online? If so, what do they do online?
Of course, personas vary from business to business and industry to industry. Chances are, you’ll need to add a little variation to the basic items I just mentioned.
Now, how to design your website using personas:
1. One thing is to include links on your homepage or navigation that gives your visitors the option to select for themselves who they are in order to navigate through your site in a more personal and relevant path. This gives you the opportunity to channel them into the funnel that will work best for conversion.
2. Then, create a custom page for each persona depending on the link clicked that will include content and offers that appeal just to that particular segment.
3. You could always take it even further by creating targeting landing pages, including personalized content, for each persona. Devise ways to cater to the persona’s unique needs, pains and interests. Modify language and tone so you are speaking to them at their level.
Benefits:
There are so many more details I’d like to cover with you today. But I promised I wouldn’t take much of your time. So, we’ll have to stop here. But, please stay tuned. We will return to this topic in the very near future. In the meantime, please let us know about how you design your site to better accommodate your various personas. We’d love to hear your ideas and integrate them into our next podcast pertaining to this subject.
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