You’ve got a great product or service, and plenty of valuable content on your website, but if you want to make the most of your online presence, you’ve got to consider your audience. You want to attract visitors to your website, but you should be trying to draw in the right kind of visitors, those who will eventually become customers. One of the best ways to determine who you want to bring to your website and into your marketing funnel is to formulate buyer personas, examples of the ideal customer that you want to target. Let’s look at some of the benefits of formulating personas:
A Better Understanding of What Your Customers Are Looking For
If you know what your customers want to obtain when they visit your website (information they need to know, problems they need to solve, products or services they want to obtain, etc.), you can work at providing exactly what they want, rather than casting a wide net for anybody and everybody.
Better Quality Leads
You know your business, so you have some idea of the type of person who buys your products or services, and you can combine this knowledge with personas to generate better quality leads. By defining your target customer, you can not only target your content toward them, but your marketing and sales teams can make connections with them, knowing ahead of time what they want to accomplish and how you can help them do so.
Consistency
By defining personas and sharing this information across your company’s different departments, you can make sure everyone is on the same page when communicating with leads. If the marketing team identifies a lead as one type of persona, they can work with the sales team to determine the best strategy for converting this lead into a customer. Using personas to identify what is important to a lead and what their needs are is a great way to get everyone on the same page.
Defining Personas
Now that we’ve seen how much personas can help your team provide the best experience for your site’s visitors, let’s look at what we should consider when creating personas:
1. Demographic information: What is their age, sex, household income, marital status, etc.?
2. Job and level of seniority: What function do they serve in their company? Are they at a manager or director level, and how much decision making do they do?
3. A day in their life: Get an idea of how much time they spend at work or at home, what they do for fun, what kind of car they drive, and try to put an actual picture to the persona.
4. Pain points: What problems do they have that your company can help them solve? How do those problems affect them on a day to day basis?
5. Values and goals: What do they care about? (And what don’t they care about?) What do they want to achieve, and what will get them excited about your products or services?
6. Knowledge and research: Where do they get their information? Do they use Google or social networks? Do they prefer to do research offline? How can you leverage the sources they trust to your advantage?
7. Their ideal experience: What do they expect from your products or services? What kind of sales experience are they expecting? Do they prefer email, phone, or in-person communication?
8. Objections: What might they dislike about your products or services? What might make them less likely to purchase from you? What might make them switch to a different provider?
9. Identification: How can you identify which person fits into which persona?
By taking these questions into consideration, you can formulate exactly the types of people you wish to market yourself to, and when you do identify a lead, you can determine the perfect way to interact with them to convert them into a sale. Do you have any questions about how you can determine your personas? Do you have any tips of your own? Please leave a comment below, or contact us for more information on how we can help you make the best us of personas on your own website.
