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How well do you know your customers? What motivates them and why? The more you understand your customer, their needs, wants, challenges, and values, the better you can communicate with them. Marketing personas are highly detailed profiles of your ideal customer that will help provide clarity in your marketing strategy.
A marketing persona, also known as a customer or buyer persona or customer avatar, is a generalized profile of your ideal customer and a key segment of your target audience. You form this picture of your customer and their characteristics by using customer research and analyzing the data. Look at demographic information such as age, gender, location, and job or role. Depending on the product you sell or service you offer, it also can include the psychographic profile that includes lifestyle, interests, preferences, and concerns. This description is not just who buys your product – i.e., the business owner. It’s a generalized representation of your target audience and the traits your customers have in common. It helps you to visualize this person because you understand details about why they buy your product or service. If you understand the unique characteristics and needs of your customer segments, you can design products and services that will appeal to them and structure your marketing activities to get their attention more effectively. Determine the base information for your buyer from your current customers. Do you see a pattern with your current customers? What is the key demographic information such as age, gender, location, and job? Do they have common lifestyles, interests and preferences? What is their story? Describe their needs, goals, and concerns. Include how they make decisions and if there are any common objections. Once you have identified your marketing personas, use them as the foundation of your marketing. You will be able to create strategies that align with the people that really want your products and services. Content Marketing Defining marketing personas helps you understand how your target market searches for solutions. Do keyword research using your personas to understand how your audience searches. What questions are they asking, and do you have well-optimized content that answers these questions? If not, use this information to develop your content strategy. This will ensure you are providing your audience with the information they want and need from you. SEO Persona-driven SEO can make your organic visibility more effective. When your SEO activities directly target your ideal client, the people who find you in the search results are those visitors who are more likely to convert into leads. Website Structure Ensure your website provides the content your ideal client is looking for. You’ve done the work to get a more targeted visitor to your website, now give them what they want. Directly speak to your visitors with messages that are meaningful to their needs, guiding them through your website. When your visitor sees that you understand their needs, they will follow the path you set for them. Social Media Part of your marketing persona profiles should include what social media they use. This will enable you to focus only on those platforms that make the most sense. You can curate better content to post on your social sites that will attract your audience as well. This makes you a valued resource of information your audience needs without having to search for it. The more you know about your ideal client, the better business and marketing decisions you can make. This information can help you create the right service offerings and eliminate those that are of no interest. Personas also give you a clear focus on who you are trying to attract and enable you to create content that solves the problems that impact their lives.
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Email campaigns and newsletters are still important and cost-effective. However, today, email campaigns must be targeted, relevant, and break through the noise and hurdles of our inboxes. Gone are the days of effectively reaching your audience with mass emails. To be effective, with everything that everyone is receiving, you need to really answer the following questions:
1. Did you find the right contacts? Before you even start the email process, you must find the right contacts for outreach. It’s crucial that you identify your desired audiences. 2. Are the email addresses accurate? An email will not be received unless you have the right data. Therefore, you must have strong data and find any that may be missing. This will ensure the right email gets to the right contact; simple human error can switch letters in an address. 3. Will your email be viewed or put into spam? If your email went to the correct address, did it hit their inbox or their spam? Check your emails against an email spam system before you hit send. New email spam systems pop up all the time, so go online and search for tools that can check to see if the email that you’re sending looks like spam. If it does look like spam, then it gets scored like spam and it’s never going to be seen. Email spam systems break your email down, telling you what’s wrong, and allowing you to fix it. 4. Will your emails be read? Spam emails can also be uncovered by simply reading them. It’s fairly obvious when an email looks like spam. During a webinar with Cirrus Insight, RingLead CEO Donato Diorio did a spam test, where he showed four emails and asked the audience for the one that wasn’t spam. He displayed each email on screen for 10 seconds. More than 50% found the non-spam email. As humans, we’re able to determine whether an email is spam by the visual structure … in seconds. 5. Is the email well written? Writing emails to potential customers can be one of the most difficult tasks for any marketer. Remember grammar is important and always be professional. 6. Did you grab their attention? Now we shift our focus to the content of the email. It’s reaching your audience, but is it interesting? Should they care? Are you targeting the right demographic? The message, audience, and content need to grab attention. 7. When do you plan to send the email? There really is a right and wrong time to send an email. Sometimes, the timing doesn’t matter. But do you know the difference? A detail as seemingly trivial as the timing of an email can determine whether a lead responds. Take a few minutes to do some research and it may make all the difference. 8. Do you have tracking in place and are you going to look at it? We’re in an age where sending emails blindly will no longer cut it. In order to thrive, you need to know which email strategies are most effective. The way to do that is through analytics. Create dashboards showing email opens and customer engagement and check it often. Only then will you be able to correctly follow-up.
I have always been a fan of email marketing, and newsletters are still at the top of my offerings to almost all my clients.
E-mail is an action-oriented medium in general. There is the idea that our e-mails are supposed to be, something you have been expecting from someone, something amusing and entertaining, or coupons and specials encouraging you to buy something. But we also expect to do something following consumption of the content, a call to action. What we are forgetting is the newsworthiness of email. I have been teaching my clients for years to educate their consumers and prospects. Give them the information they want to read. Do not bore people with more information on your company or just a plain old ad or coupon. Of course, there’s a limit to how much media people will allow being pushed in their face via email. The wrong content can make an email newsletter into a product that is incredibly annoying. But the right content can make the newsletter into a habit. And nothing excites a business like the chance to create a profitable compulsion. One reason email marketing has value for business owners is that it's an easy way to start reaching consumers without investing a lot in technology or software. Email marketing isn't something marketers do just because they can and it's easy. The tactic is highly effective at helping business owners and consumers stay connected and informed. In fact, consumers often seek out email marketing campaigns from their favorite businesses and local stores. This goes beyond coupons. There is a real value to staying connected to customers and email marketing makes that easy to do. It's also easy to customize and integrate into other marketing tactics. The versatility of email marketing is another reason that marketers keep this tactic in their marketing toolbox. Depending on the depth of the email database and the skill of the crafter, email marketing messages can range from simple to complex. Email marketing can also be utilized with just about any other marketing tactic, which makes email an important part of any integrated marketing campaign. And email marketing is still effective and inexpensive. To sum up, the best reason to use email marketing: It's easy, effective, and inexpensive. Email marketing allows business owners to reach a large number of consumers at a rate of pennies per message. For small-business owners on a budget, this makes it a great choice. You don't have to take my word for it. A joint study from Shop.org and Forrester Research found that 85 percent of U.S. retailers consider email marketing one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics. The point of all this is that email may be an old tactic, but it remains a vital one. It's relatively easy to do a newsletter, so there's no excuse for business owners to not be taking advantage of it. Understandably, business owners may be too busy to handle the email marketing on their own, but this is something with which any marketing professional (wink, wink) can help.  Not everyone can write good copy. That’s why there are professionals just writing copy for small businesses and for graphic/website designers who are creative but just not gifted writers.
IF you decide to write your own copy, here are five mistakes to avoid ensuring people will read more than your home page. (PS – writing for printed materials and other marketing including social media are quite different than websites, so for purposes of this article, we are sticking with website copy.) 1- Don't be boring There's nothing so deadly as a marketing message that fails to arouse the senses in any way whatsoever. You need to write copy in a way that stimulates, annoys, amazes, depresses, scares or whatever is necessary to shock the senses into awareness that a compelling offer is on its way. So never be boring! 2- No call to action Here's the rule of thumb to remember: a confused prospect doesn't buy. If you don't give your reader a very clear and specific command to do something, they will take the easy path to doing nothing. So, figure out exactly what you want your copy to accomplish and then very clearly tell your prospect to do exactly that. 3- Don’t be vague As a copywriter, it’s an easy mistake to make. You write about something you don’t know much about, so you end up with grammatically correct sentences that don’t convey any meaning. Unpersuasive blah-blah-blah As a small business owner, this is where you have a solid advantage: you know your offer inside and out. And you know your customer. So, review your copy, and ask yourself: Is this concrete or generic? Can I visualize this? Is it making sense to other people? Blah-blah-blah (Generic and unpersuasive): “We take your marketing to the next level,” vs. Specific and persuasive: “I help you optimize your marketing budget so you can generate more leads and win more clients.” Make people want to learn more. Don’t skimp on the detail. Design your copy so it’s both easy to scan and easy to read. Share all your persuasive arguments and make people eager to contact and hire you. 4- Don't be me focused This happens all the time ... the marketing team thinks that the sheer glory of the program/product/service being offered — combined with the stellar history and track record of the company providing same — will be more than enough to close the deal. Wrong. Dead wrong. The reality is you need to express over and over again specific details as to what everything in your sales copy means to the prospect. ME-focused marketing will get you zero. 5- Lack of credibility Why would readers believe you and hire you? Let’s be frank. It’s easy for web visitors to doubt your claims, to hesitate to believe you and to turn away to go somewhere else. You can’t assume people will simply believe you. Readers want to see proof. Too often they’ve been disappointed. To build trust, provide external proof for your claims. External elements of proof are provided by experts and other buyers. This can be reviews, review ratings, test results, press coverage, and more. For service providers, testimonials are probably the most commonly used external proof. Make sure your testimonials are persuasive and back up your claims.
It is certainly true that Google plays a role in SEO. However, your efforts on the social media site should be about more than gaining followers who don’t interact with your content. Instead, you should be striving to create an environment where fans communicate with each other and your company. You must stay active on the site by sharing content and relevant links, responding to feedback and making connections. Everything should be done with your target audience in mind, so make sure each piece of information is useful.
Myth #2: Social media is becoming the most important aspect of SEO Whether social media sites take over good old fashioned content marketing as the most important aspect of true SEO remains to be seen, but for the time being it should just be another cog in the machine. Search Engine Watch noted that you can’t rely too heavily on social, as it should only be used to back up interesting content. Although certain websites and businesses have found ways to go viral through social sharing, it is not sustainable and often doesn’t lead to long-term success – you need balance to achieve that. Myth #3: The linking conundrum No one denies that links are a valuable way to boost website ranking. However, the days of mindlessly loading up content with links are long gone, and in their place is a strategy that emphasizes quality over quantity. But you shouldn’t go too far with this initiative, which can leave you throwing in citations instead of good links. According to Search Engine Land, it is important to identify the best possible sources and connections, and then using those links and citations to build great content marketing. Myth #4: You need to invest in paid ads to get a better ranking Paid search is another aspect of content marketing that can improve your SEO efforts, as well as the bottom line, but it’s not enough to boost rankings. It was commonly thought that services such as Google AdWords went a long way toward jumping in the ranks, but Google executive Matt Cutts spoke about the truth behind this myth. He claimed that while the search engine would certainly like you to purchase ads, it doesn’t punish those who don’t. Myth #5: Your content can never be improved OK, this might not be a myth as much as it is a common mistake where you become content with everything you have done. Instead of thinking your content marketing strategy is consistently outstanding, take time to evaluate each piece and note areas of possible improvement. Analytics tools can be a huge help as you try to find small details you can improve. Dig through stats such as bounce rate or click-through rate to see what needs improvement and try to pinpoint exactly where you went wrong … or right. |
Boost Your BusinessMaria NovakI have over 35 years' experience in Marketing Small Businesses. Categories
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