CHAPTER 6

Know Thy Customer: Personas

The first phase of our journey toward an optimized state of mind focused on planning and we covered a lot of important ground from the applications of social media optimization and content marketing for small, large, B2B, and B2C companies to the principles of content discovery, consumption, and engagement. With a holistic approach in mind, we discussed business objectives and strategies for integrated search engine optimization, social media, and content marketing. It’s a lot of groundwork, but there’s merit to the saying “He who fails to plan, plans to fail” (anonymous) that makes it worthwhile. In phase two, “implementation,” we’ll put that planning into action, starting with personas.

THE WHAT AND WHY OF CUSTOMER PERSONAS

Demystifying better search, social media, and content marketing often starts with doing a better job of connecting with customers in more relevant ways. But how can you connect with customers if you don’t know who they are or what they care about? Most SEO efforts are focused on creating and optimizing content against a list of keywords. But keywords don’t buy products and services—customers do. To really make a difference with more effective online marketing, businesses should become more sophisticated in their understanding of customer needs, behaviors, and preferences. That means optimizing for customers and outcomes by researching and segmenting customer data to develop customer personas.

So, what is a persona? According to The Buyer Persona Manifesto, a persona is “an archetype, composite picture of the real people who buy, or might buy, products like the ones you sell.”1 Developed in the mid-1990s by Angus Jenkinson, the notion of personas is based on a representation of collective prospect and buyer characteristics that can draw from a wide range of data sources and types, including demographic and behavioral, as well as preferences for content discovery, consumption, and engagement. Working with personas is an act of empathizing with customer needs and organizing common sets of characteristics into a corresponding profile. Insight into customer needs will help you develop a more relevant and effective content marketing approach.

For example, “Bill Engineer” might represent a 35-year-old man who is married with children and owns his own home. He has worked in mechanical engineering for 10 years and travels about six times per year. He owns an iPad, a smart phone, and several computers at home. He connects to news, entertainment, and friends digitally, but rarely uses social media channels for professional sharing. Bill’s preferred search engine is Google. He rarely clicks on ads (but does so occasionally when one is relevant), and he uses Google Reader to subscribe to online news. He’s busy and doesn’t spend much time on any social network other than Facebook and LinkedIn, and when he does, it’s usually via his iPad. He consumes social and online news content daily, but briefly, early in the morning and in the evenings. His content preferences include sports, technology, games, electronics/gadgets, cars, and Maker Faire projects. Bill is always interested in finding ways, even it costs him a little more, to simplify, automate, and carve out more time to spend with his family.

Based on what we know about Bill Engineer, we can make some preliminary decisions about content and topics relevant to a brand’s products and services. We want to understand where Bill is coming from and what he cares about. The context for how he discovers information, the topics and format of that content, and what motivates him to engage or buy are essential for connecting with the persona of Bill Engineer in a meaningful way.

By knowing what a customer group cares about, marketers can do a better job of creating relevant content that is easy to find on search engines and social media websites that inspires them to buy and share. Information gleaned from developing personas can inspire all aspects of content marketing and optimization, including keyword research, editorial plans, social networking, and promotion.

WHY CUSTOMER SEGMENTS AND PERSONAS ARE IMPORTANT

With the study of customer data collected online, customer segments can be created and named. The testing of various products, services, and price points allows different offers to be made to different segments, often with great accuracy. However, when the data is taken a step further, it can do more than answer the question, “What can we sell them next?” It can be used to assemble personas. As we build these personas, they can take on shape in our minds, just as brick-and-mortar retail merchants learn to distinguish between the sampler and the buyer, the economy-minded customers and the spendthrifts.

Persona development goes beyond simply selling more right now or favoring spendthrifts over economical customers. When customers become “real” in our minds (e.g., Bill Engineer), we can listen to them and learn what they really care about. Understanding your customer groups in this way helps us gain a sense of how they like to find and engage with online content. The better the alignment of content availability and relevance with customer interests, the more effective our content marketing efforts become at increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

A marketing focus on personas can also help assemble a more targeted and effective content plan. The ease of publishing and distributing content on the Internet has motivated many marketers to take a shotgun approach to copywriting and SEO. Such tactics focus on lists of the most popular keywords to be used as inspiration to create new content in the hope it will lead to conversions. While a gross increase in optimized content may lead to some sales, it can also create websites that are large and hard to manage, as well as a body of content that is more mechanical than meaningful to customers. Google, in particular, frowns on lower-quality content through the application of processes and updates like Panda, which can affect a website’s ranking if a substantial number of pages are deemed low quality. Persona-guided content is more relevant and useful, thereby appealing both to search engines and customers. The answer isn’t just quality, it’s the quantity of quality content that is relevant and easy to find that inspires readers to act.

Understanding the persona takes online marketing segmentation to the next level by focusing less on corporate egocentrism of promoting products, hoping someone will buy, and more on understanding what motivates customers to want to buy.

A PROCESS FOR DEVELOPING BUYER PERSONAS

Creating buyer personas as part of your content, search, and social media marketing strategy involves a range of activities intended to reveal groups of customers with common characteristics whom you can associate with a common identity. With a clear understanding of your overall business goals as discussed in Chapter 4, the information and analysis of customer personas will be instrumental in formulating your editorial plan, keywords, social content, and promotion tactics. The fundamental steps for persona development are shown in Figure 6.1.

FIGURE 6.1 Steps toward Persona Development and Implementation with Content Marketing

COLLECTING DATA FOR PERSONAS

Now that you have an idea of the process for constructing personas, we can dig a little deeper into how to collect the initial data. (See Figure 6.2.) A large portion of the data for your persona development effort will include demographics information and insights from web analytics. Some of the most valuable information will come from surveys and interviews. It’s important to strike a quantitative and qualitative balance. Here are some examples of data sources you might use:

FIGURE 6.2 Data Collection for Persona Development

• Surveys of existing customers, prospects, and frontline employees
• Web analytics and conversion data
• Social media listening and monitoring tools
• Demographic information from Alexa, Quantcast, or DoubleClick Ad Planner
• Keyword research using Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, SEMRush
• Blog engagement information from PostRank
• Aggregate user information from services like Fliptop

The data you collect can be compiled and analyzed to reveal common characteristics for persona development. Personas can then guide editorial direction for landing pages, blogs, social media content, and company web pages. Marketers and content creators who read a persona description must come away feeling like they’ve met someone real.

HOW PERSONAS GUIDE CONTENT CREATION AND OPTIMIZATION

As you accumulate information about your customers, you’ll want to identify common characteristics and patterns. Those behaviors that contribute to your business objectives, such as sales, advocacy, sharing, referrals, and repeat business, might fall into an “ideal” customer persona. That means there’s another end to the spectrum—patterns that reflect undesirable customer behaviors, which might be associated with an “avoid” persona. There are several types of personas in between, according to where they fall in line with your company’s business goals.

Understanding the pain points, goals, and topical preferences of customer personas provides invaluable insight into planning content to guide those customers through the buying cycle. The motivations and context that bring customers to search or tap into their social networks for recommendations can be translated into tactics. (See Figure 6.3.)

FIGURE 6.3 Example Persona

• Content plan. Based on the need, pain point, or goal for your ideal customer persona, identify whether content already exists to meet it. If sufficient content does not exist, incorporate it into the content plan for creation. Map your customer needs (e.g., “How can I back up my computer without having to worry about losing disks or remembering to schedule?”) to specific content such as an article, a how-to video, or even a product page that will help guide that persona along in the sales cycle.
• SEO and Keywords. Search phrases in demand that represent the product or service relevant to the persona’s need should be researched for popularity and competitiveness. Based on the preceding backup example, do research beyond the obvious “computer backup,” including phrases that describe situations or scenarios such as “computer backup without disks” or “automatic computer backups.” Keyword-optimize existing content and incorporate SEO copywriting into the task list for ongoing creation of content according to the content plan. We will cover more on keyword research in Chapter 7.
• Social media presence and participation. In which social channels do specific customer personas participate? Where are they influenced? Based on persona social media participation, determine whether a brand presence exists at all. If so, does it share and engage with content related to the ideal customer persona’s needs and goals? If not, factor that social content opportunity into the brand social media strategy for creating a social presence. What social topics is the persona motivated by? Do threads of discussion already exist in social channels relevant to the customer goals? How can your brand be an authoritative voice on those topics? Incorporate relevant social topics in your community management, social content, and engagement approach relevant to the ideal customer persona.

In the assessment of existing web page and social assets, determine how well those search and social media assets perform in terms of ranking and social visibility. Reconcile the difference between current performance and the ideal in order to better attract, engage, and inspire the target persona. Add new content, optimization, and social engagement tasks accordingly. Also consider which metrics will help you identify successful efforts to connect with your ideal persona.

A fragmented effort within search, social media, and content marketing helps no one—not customers, and certainly not companies. Competition for attention within search results and on the social web is only going to increase as more brands become publishers and more customers create and socially share content. The need to create a relevant experience for your target customers in an online world of information overload is more important now than ever. Smart marketers would do well for themselves and the customers they’re trying to reach by investing in the development of personas that reflect the desires, goals, and key traits of their best customers. Translating customer insight into quality keyword optimization of web pages, social content, and digital assets for specific phrases according to the searcher’s needs in the buying cycle is an important step, along with social engagement. As a result, you’ll deliver a more relevant experience for both search engines and customers that is worth sharing on the social web.

Armed with our new knowledge of how to research and develop customer personas and the corresponding effects on our content, search, and social media marketing approach, we can next drill down into the finer art of keyword research.

ACTION ITEMS

Notes

1. Adele Revella, “Buyer Persona Manifesto,” June 2011, http://www.buyerpersona.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/The_Buyer_Persona_Manifesto.pdf.