Who are your customers…really?
I’ve been reading a truly eye-opening book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott, which I highly recommend.
In the book, he introduces the concept of buyer personas. This is the second time I’ve heard about this idea and realized, I need to pay close attention.
David says that a buyer persona, “is essentially a representative of a type of buyer that you have identified as having a specific interest in your organization or product or having a market problem that your product or service solves.”
He strongly advises making developing this profile the first step in your marketing and PR plan. In fact, he says that it is the most important thing that you will ever do as you plan.
Think about it…your product or service probably serves more than one population. For example, if you own a financial services business, you probably have clients who are just starting out in their careers, clients who are middle age and clients who are ready to retire or who are already retired. Each of these groups of people have different needs and what’s just as important…each of these groups speaks a different language. They describe their problems and their understanding of your service differently.
One size fits all doesn’t work when developing messages and website content. David recommends creating a specific page for each of your buyer personas. Using the same example, that means having links that may look like this…
- Just starting Your career? It’s never too early to start planning for your future.
- Need to make sure you’re financially on course? Leave the planning to us.
- Uneasy about retirement? Let us help you create a plan that will help you relax and enjoy the work-free years to come.
The actual links on the navigation may even say…
- Right Out of College
- Looking forward to retirement
These are just examples to get you thinking differently. The idea is to provide content on your website that immediately speaks to your target audiences by helping them to quickly see that your company can meet their needs and answer their questions.
David gives an example of colleges, who do this exceptionally well. Inevitably, when you visit a college website, you see links for:
- Prospective Students
- Current Students
- Alumni
- Faculty and Staff
- Parents and Family
Colleges and universities know that each of those groups has different questions and is at a different decision-making phase.
Check out the book! It’s a great read. And while you’re waiting for your book to arrive, start developing your customer personas by considering these questions:
- What are their goals and aspirations?
- What are their problems?
- What media do they rely on for answers to problems?
- How can you reach them?
- What words and phrases do they use?
- What sort of images and multimedia appeal to each?
I’ll be writing along with you, so let me know how it goes in the comments.
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]]>Need to reach your website’s target audience? Or perhaps you want to improve your product sales and increase the number of clients your business handles.
While driving targeted visitors to your website via advertising and marketing campaigns can do wonders, it is also important to grasp and convert these visitors into buyers, clients and regular readers.
One way to do this is to harness the power of social proof, which is simply the theory that people’s behavioral patterns are highly influenced by the actions of the people or community around them.
Check out this article to learn how you can use the concept of social proof to optimize your website and make it more attractive to your target audience.
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While researching e-learning strategies and development, I found this article that emphasizes the importance of writing at a reading level that is comfortable for your audience. Using Microsoft Office you can adjust the options so that the reading level of your text is checked when you run spell check.
- Tools > Options
- Click the tab: Spelling and Grammar.
- In the Grammar section, check the box next to Show readability statistics.
- Check your spelling. You should see the readability results.
- Look at the number beside Flesch Reading Ease.
Many plain-English advocates suggest aiming for a score in the 60s.
This post gets a 61.3 – not bad.
This is great advice for website content, blog posts or any other piece that is written for the general public.
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Michael Fortin did an excellent job of explaining Features and Benefits in his blog post, The Oft-Confused Features And Benefits. This is a must read for anyone with a small business website. This practice is probably contrary to what you see all around you and what you’ve always done, but it works.
Remember, your website should not be all about you…it should be all about your prospect or client. Use language that speaks directly to them, not to a general group of people.
Another important point that Michael makes is to make sure that your language is suitable for your target audience, not your colleagues. Avoid techno jargon, acronyms and expressions that only the people in your industry are familar with. It may be helpful to ask a friend in a different industry what he would enter in Google’s search bar if he was searching for information about your company’s products or services. Ask another friend to describe your products or services and listen to the words that he uses.
Unfortuately, many of us are afflicted with the curse of knowledge that the Heath brothers discuss in Made to Stick. In a nutshell, it means that once you know something, it’s difficult to imagine what it is like to not know it. The consequence is you cannot effectively communicate your ideas to people who don’t have that knowledge.
However, you must get help and overcome that curse so that it doesn’t have a negative effect on your business success.
Here’s an excerpt from Michael’s article, but you should read the entire article to truly understand the concept:
… A Benefit is What That Feature Means.
A benefit is what a person intimately gains from a specific feature. When you describe a feature, say this: “What this means to you, Mr. Prospect, is this (…),” followed by a more personal gain your reader gets from the feature.Therefore, turn it around. don’t focus on a certain feature’s benefit. Rather, focus on how those features specifically benefit the individual.
Here’s an example using my private membership website, where members get access to videos of me tearing sales copy apart, and revealing copywriting tips, tricks and actual, tested conversion strategies in the process.
Feature: Watch a top copywriter in action as he writes killer copy, all recorded on video, using real salesletters and websites from real clients.
- Advantage: You get to learn how to write copy faster by understanding the logic behind successful copy (not just how to write it), and also learn copywriting tips, mistakes, shortcuts and proven results in the process.
- Motive: Reduces the learning curve, the risks, the effort and the costs involved in trying to do it all yourself.
- Benefit #1: This means you get real-world examples and actually see the process done before you, instead of plain textbook theory or swipe files that leave you scratching your head.
- Benefit #2: Using real-world examples means you can appreciate and understand what goes into world-class copy, so you can easily repeat the process on your own, in the future.
- Benefit #3: Repeating the process on your own also means you don’t have to pay an expensive copywriter to do a rewrite.
- Benefit #4: Not having to pay for a copywriter means you save money and get it done faster by learning proven, tested strategies you can apply immediately — without having to wait for someone to do it for you or explain it to you in some “how-to” course.
- Benefit #5: And learning proven, tested strategies means you eliminate the need to search for, find, test and learn everything yourself, and avoid making costly mistakes — without having to figure out what works (and what doesn’t) on your own.
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It’s not all about you. Yes, that’s right. Your content should not focus on you; it should focus on your customer. If your home page reads like an “About Us” page, you have some work to do.
Your content should include more “you” and less “I” and “we.”
In his article, “It’s the Customer, Stupid,” Bryan Eisenberg explains,
Are you talking about all the wonderful ways your visitors can benefit from your products or services, or are you talking about all the great features of your products, services, or company? In other words, are you speaking the language of “you,” or are you caught up in the language of “we”? As our friend Roy Williams asks, “Are you wewe-ing all over yourself?”
Realize that the words you use and how you use them are telling your visitors where your focus is. Want them to stick around and eventually take the action you want? Talk about them, their needs, their wants, and how they can get those needs and wants satisfied. Use customer-focused language. Otherwise, they’re going to feel like you’re the self-centered guest at the party. You may not be, but they only have your words to judge you by.
After noticing this common problem on websites, his company developed a calculator to measure a website’s customer focus, called the WeWe Monitor. Try it out and find out your score.
To interpret your score, Bryan suggests,
If you do want a rough guideline, there seems to be a clear difference between sites with CFRs of 60 percent and higher, and sites with CFRs below 60 percent. If your site scores 35 percent, you can be sure that you have room to improve. But remember the example above: You could score 67 percent (or more) yet still have room to improve. Again, it’s a guideline.
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