Chapter 1

Selecting a Stylefor Your Audience

In This Chapter

  • Knowing your target audience
  • Looking at your current customers to understand their demographics
  • Interviewing and researching to analyze your target audience
  • Choosing the right tone to engage your audience
  • Using a blog to build a relationship with your audience
  • Using personas to define your audience
  • Understanding the benefits and drawbacks of using personas

The slogan “Content is king!” has been stated and restated in every blog, forum, conference, and seminar that has anything to do with search engine optimization (SEO) or Internet marketing. Content includes all the stuff inside your website: everything from the words you read, to the pictures and videos you view, to the audio you listen to. In this chapter, we teach you all about the most important content element for SEO — the words on the page. The text content draws people to your site, starting with the brief title that shows up on a search results page. Content holds a visitor’s interest long enough to read your page and, hopefully, move on to do more. Content is what gives your website credibility with both your visitors and other sites so that they want to endorse you with a link or purchase. Content tells the search engines what you’re all about. Content proves (or disproves) that you know what you’re talking about.

And content takes hours and hours and even laborious days to create. If you feel overwhelmed by the need to write tons of new content, we understand. The prospect of writing page after page of content may make you want to crawl under the nearest desk, but the truth is, your website really cannot do without it. Good content and plenty of it is needed if you want to rank well with the search engines and attract users who convert into customers (however you define that conversion). For this reason, Book V, which deals with content creation, may contain the most valuable pages in this book.

Good, relevant content is your single most potent SEO tool. It allows you to do the following:

  • Differentiate your site from the masses
  • Attract expert links to your site
  • Develop a loyal site following and brand
  • Launch your site higher in the search engine rankings

In this chapter, you think through how to create the best content for your site’s purposes and target audience. You first need to understand whom your site needs to appeal to, so we begin by discussing what demographic information you need to know about your target audience and how you can find it out. Next, you discover how to choose a dynamic tone and style that can effectively communicate with your audience and yield conversions. Last, you find out how to create a persona (a profile that represents your target audience based on calculated averages of their buying processes and demographics) so that you can design appropriate content that satisfies a specific, highly targeted group.

Knowing Your Demographic

Before you communicate anything, asking “Who is my audience?” is a great first step. You might be an expert in your field, but unless you can explain what you know in a way that your target audience understands, you can’t communicate your expertise. With your website, your job is not only to communicate but also to persuade, because you want conversions (visitors who make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or take whatever action your website requires). Understanding who your audience is becomes even more essential in order to better target your conversions.

Many new web marketers make the mistake of thinking they don’t have a target audience: They see the Internet as a vast crowd of people and just want them to come to their sites. But attracting visitors to your site who then convert requires specific targeted marketing. The Internet population includes many types of people, and the more precisely you can figure out who your target visitors are, the more effective you can be at attracting and holding their interest and making conversions.

Finding out customer goals

Beyond knowing who your target audience is, you also want to find out what they need. You know what your website offers. Now turn your chair around and look at your site from the other direction. Why would people come to your site? What goal would they be trying to meet?

You want to be sure to meet your visitors’ needs first before trying to motivate them to do anything else. Imagine you’ve spent two hours working and sweating in the hot sun to fix a broken sprinkler in your yard. You finally get it under control and walk toward the house for a cold drink. You have only one thing on your mind: your thirst. If another family member meets you at the door to show you something, how attentive will you be? You’re probably not going to give her much attention until your need for a cold refreshment is satisfied.

Similarly, your website visitors come to your site with a need in mind, and your first priority should be to meet that need. It may be to get information. It may be to research a product to buy. It may be to find a better price, free shipping, or some other special deal on a product they’ve already decided to buy. When you figure out what your site visitors’ goals are, you can make sure your web pages deliver.

Meet each visitor’s goal in the easiest, quickest way possible. If your site sells choir robes, help your visitor pick out the right styles, fabrics, sizes, and quantities as smoothly as possible. You can present lots of textual information to help him make the best choices, but be careful not to distract him with cute videos of choir performances, or clutter up your shopping cart page with Flash animations. His goal is to purchase choir robes. Your goal is to help him do it as directly and pleasantly as possible. Do this by leaving clues in your web content for your visitors. Tell them how to accomplish their goal. Remember that the trigger words for shopping and research differ: buy, free, and sale appeal to different visitors than how-to, step-by-step instructions, and more information.

tip A visitor who’s using a smartphone, tablet, or other device to come to your site may have different goals than someone using a desktop computer. Consider tailoring the options you provide to the user’s device type. Check out Book IV, Chapter 3 for help with designing for mobile versus desktop users.

remember The more you know about your target audience — who they are and what their goals are — the more effective your website can be.

Looking at current customer data

The best way to begin researching your target audience is to look at your existing customers. (We call them “customers” for ease of writing, but depending on your business model, you might call them subscribers, members, clients, or another term.) What do you know about the people already on your customer list? You probably won’t succeed in gathering all this information in the following list, but here are a few types of demographics to look for. These facts are helpful in profiling your target audience:

  • Gender: Are most of your customers male or female, or are they evenly split?
  • Age: Maybe your customers fall into a single age group; for example, tweens, teenagers, college students, young adults, 30-somethings, and so on.
  • Location: Do you know where your customers live? They may be concentrated within a given geographic area, in which case being included in local search engines and utilizing local ads might be part of your strategy. Geo-targeting is becoming an important factor to ranking. A study by Chitika found that as much as 43 percent of all Google search queries are meant for local businesses, products, or services (http://www.reviewtrackers.com/43-percent-google-searches-local-business-listed-sites-find-you/).
  • Marital status: Do you know whether your customers tend to be single, married, or divorced? You can cater differently to married couples than you would to singles by using certain elements in site design and style.
  • Education: What level of education do your customers have? This ties into the age category, too, but if your audience is made up of adults, knowing whether they never attended college or hold master’s degrees definitely impacts how you can communicate with them.
  • Occupation: Do you know what field your customers are in specifically? If your website offers an industry-specific product, it’s obviously an important factor for your target audience. But even if you offer products to the general public, knowing customer occupations can help you with more targeted web marketing. If you know, for instance, that a lot of nurses like your product, one place you might want to develop links to your site (or run ads, and so on) could be on sites that are popular with nurses.
  • Beliefs: What do you know about their religious, political, or philosophical beliefs? For instance, if your site collects signatures for various petitions, knowing how your typical petition signer leans politically helps you target the right audience for your site.
  • Lifestyle/situational: What do you know about their lifestyles? You may find a trend among your customers to be single parents or married couples with children; apartment renters or homeowners; city dwellers, suburbanites, or farmers; boat owners or horse owners; or other. Whatever extra information like this you can gather gives you useful clues about your target audience.
  • Much more: Customize this list with other types of pertinent information for your website marketing. You probably won’t be able to get all the information you want, but having a wish list is a good start. Income level, ethnicity, and hobbies are all excellent things to know about your customers. Much of this information is easily obtained just by asking for it. The registration process on many sites often asks for these facts. If your registration process includes the capability to do so, turn it on and see what you learn.

Researching to find out more

In addition to examining the customer data you have, you can look at industry statistics. Find out what data is available out there. Do some homework online and track down information sources. If there’s a trade association for your industry, see if it can provide statistics, member rosters, and other types of information. You might find news articles, court cases, studies, or who knows what else, but see what’s out there that gives you more information about your typical customer.

Interviewing customers

Consider interviewing past and current members of your target audience to find out more about them. A typical method is to ask users to complete a form on your website. It might be a sign-up form at the beginning of your conversion process or a feedback form you pop up on the screen at the end of a process. Or you might prefer to interview the old-fashioned way and directly contact people by mail, phone, or email. A survey can work great, although you may need to offer some incentive to the user for filling it out (a discount, a coupon, or some other prize).

tip You can ask people to complete a survey online. Sites like QuestionPro (www.questionpro.com) make setting up an online survey very easy to do; you just need to plan the questions you want to ask (see Figure 1-1). The costs can be nominal, depending on what services you use.

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Figure 1-1: Online surveys are easy to set up and can be inexpensive, too.

When interviewing people, try to gather some personal demographic information (such as the items in the section “Looking at current customer data,” earlier in this chapter) as well as some feedback about their experience on your website. It’s a golden opportunity for valuable feedback from past customers. Here are some good things to learn during your interview:

  • How they found your website
  • What their impressions were of the site
  • Whether they had any difficulty getting around your site, or whether they found it easy to use
  • Whether they were pleased with the service or response they received (if applicable)
  • What type of product or service they were looking for

Include these two questions in your survey to get a technical picture of your customers' awareness:

  • How often do you go online, and how long do you spend there?
  • Which of this website’s competitors’ sites do you visit?

You can also use surveys in conjunction with the data your analytics tool gathers (for more on analytics tools, read on) to discover information about your customers' browsing habits. You can easily get the following data:

  • The type of computer they use
  • The ISP (Internet service provider) they use to access the Internet
  • The type of Internet connection and device they use
  • What Internet browser they prefer

tip The answers to these questions can give you an idea of how tech-savvy your customer base is. For instance, website if your users get to the Internet through an AOL interface and stay there throughout their web session, you know you’re probably dealing with a less-technical user base.

tip If you have any professional associations in your industry (the SEO community has the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, or SEMPO, for example), check with them to see if they've done any demographic research, which is likely more cost-effective than conducting your own research. This is a particularly good idea for a new site that might not yet have a large user base to interview.

Using server logs and analytics

Your website’s server logs contain valuable data about your visitor counts and their behavior. It’s also a good idea to have analytics embedded in your web pages, which are program routines a website can use to track user behavior on the website. Talk to your IT department or webmaster and see what they can tell you about your web traffic and the user behavior on each page.

technicalstuff If you would like more analytics operating on your website or want to know all the choices out there, we cover web analytics in detail in Book VIII. We also recommend you check out the following resources:

Analytics tools can look at your recent website traffic and tell you where visitors came from. Further, demographics reports inside Google Analytics can give you statistics about your web audience such as percentages by gender, age, and so on. And reports in your free Google Search Console account (www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) can even tell you what search terms people have used in Google searches to find your website.

Analytics tools are extremely valuable for SEO. Knowing where your users come from can give you clues to their goals. For instance, if your site sells shoes and you find a lot of visitors coming from youth soccer sites, they’re likely looking for children’s soccer shoes and cleats. This information can help you style your site to help those visitors find exactly what they need.

Creating a Dynamic Tone

The way your content comes across to your potential customers is as important as the services and actions you have to offer visitors. When you write content for your website, your text should

  • Engage your target audience with an appropriate style and tone. For example, this book uses a conversational tone that wouldn't be appropriate in a scholarly journal. A site targeting teens might rely more heavily on modern slang than a site targeting baby boomers. As a general rule, effective website copy should be dynamic, meaning always changing, purposeful, and energetic.
  • Lead visitors to the goal you have for each web page. As we discuss in the section “Finding out customer goals,” earlier in this chapter, each of your web pages should have a goal that matches the visitor’s perceived goal, which may be to gather information, clarify a question, sign up for something, make a purchase, or do something else.
  • Meet the visitors' needs with relevant content as directly and quickly as possible. The text on each page should immediately engage the readers' attention and interest and lead them to fulfill the goal. Proper design can help the content create conversions, but the content must be engaging on its own.

The tone of a written piece can make or break it. Tone refers to the writer’s attitude toward the subject matter and toward the reader. Tone creates an emotional response in readers. The wrong tone can turn off an audience within the first sentence or two.

When people talk about the way a piece “comes across,” they’re talking about its tone. In speaking, people call it the “tone of voice,” and it affects communication powerfully. Dogs, for example, can tell a lot by the sound of their master’s voice: They might come running or hide their tails based solely on their master’s tone. In written communication, an author’s tone comes through in more subtle ways. Word choice, sentence length, punctuation, grammar, sentence structure — all these and more convey the tone.

Your writing tone should support your site goal and be appropriate for your target audience. For example, if you're a heavy-metal band promoter, you wouldn’t want to greet your visitors with rainbows and ponies and a jaunty message like, “You’ve arrived! Mr. Ponypants wants you to have a super fun day!” The bouncy, enthusiastic tone is all wrong for the target audience and would probably have visitors heading straight for their Back button. There's nothing wrong with heavy metal or ponies, but typically fans of each aren't found in the same audience. Instead, you’d want the tone to come across as rebellious or rowdy, meeting your target audience in the same spirit they're showing. Only then would you be able to achieve your site’s conversion goal, which is to engage people and interest them in becoming clients.

tip Look at your current website and ask yourself how you feel when you read it, but don't just stop there. Read it out loud to yourself or someone else to see if it flows nicely to the ear. This is usually an enlightening experience. Ask someone you know to read it with fresh eyes to give you this feedback. Ask her to tell you what attitude comes through the writing. How does it make her feel: happy, lighthearted, positive, hopeful, enlightened, or wanting more? Or does it make her feel uncomfortable, belittled, creepy, angry, annoyed, or frustrated?

Think about what response you would want your target audience to have when they read your website. The emotional response your tone evokes in your readers can make them want to stay or run away, so choose it carefully.

Choosing a Content Style

After you know who your target audience is, you can adjust your website to be appropriate for them. We talk in Book IV, Chapter 1 about tailoring your website design to your target audience. In Book V, we focus on tailoring the content style to your target audience.

tip Listen to your customers. The words they use to talk about your industry and your products and services could be very different from how you describe the same things. Jargon that may be commonplace in your offices won't necessarily be familiar to your potential clients. You want to incorporate their words into your website. Not only does this ensure that people understand what they’re reading on your site, but it also adds keywords that people search for when they to try to find you.

tip You also must listen to the way in which your customers talk — not just the words they're using, but how they're using them. If your target audience is children, you don’t want your website to read like a dry academic text, or you’ll just bore them. If your target audience is medical researchers, your website can be written in a more academic style with longer words and sentences. You want to make visitors feel that they’ve come to the right place. You can do this when you support relevant content with a style and tone that feel natural and appropriate. So use a style that reaches your target audience and feels natural for the content.

Developing a Blog

A blog (originally short for “web log”) on your website can provide a platform to let your voice be heard and interact with your target audience. Content marketers often consider their site’s blog to be the axis of their community outreach. The blog connects people to your website and pulls them in with a regular supply of fresh, timely content that can be linked to and shared across various social media channels.

Blog posts can be published more quickly and easily than static web pages. Blog posts can cover anything related to your business or industry. If new legislation is passed, write a timely article explaining the new law’s impact on your customers. If you attend an industry event, you can use your blog to share ten takeaways you learned that might help others. The possibilities are endless; the point is, blog software makes creating a post fairly painless.

Your tone in a blog post can usually be quite conversational and more personal than on your main website. On the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog, for example, writers often inject their own thoughts (“Seriously?”) and reactions (“That’s awesome!”) into their posts. Have a conversation with your reader, as if he or she were sitting across from you asking questions about your subject. If you think about what your reader needs to know, you can break down any topic into useful information that’s friendly and interesting.

The blog environment is perfect for showing personality and helping people feel like they can relate to your company or organization. Far more than static web pages can, a blog lets you “put a face” on your brand. It’s not just the company owner or CEO who can create this kind of genuine human interaction for a brand. The best brands encourage trusted employees to use their own names and faces, representing the company but also becoming known as recognizable individuals in the industry. As an example, the writers’ names and faces appear alongside the articles on the Bruce Clay, Inc. blog, as shown in Figure 1-2. When a brand empowers its blog writers (and social media writers) to be themselves as they work, the audience sees the people behind the logo. Suddenly, your brand becomes more human and more trustworthy. And people feel like they know you.

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Figure 1-2: Readers get to know blog writers if their names and faces are visible, such as in the Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog sidebar.

Most blog software is fairly simple to set up. We cover more of the benefits and how-tos of blogging in Chapter 7 of this minibook.

Using Personas to Define Your Audience

To help you evaluate your website from your target customer’s perspective, you can create a fictional web persona based on all the customer data you accumulated.

A persona is like a role, and it includes how a person acts, talks, thinks, believes, and so on. The customer web persona you create is a profile that represents your target audience based on calculated averages of your customers’ buying processes, goals, and demographics.

Companies use personas as user “archetypes.” These archetypes are a compilation of general personality traits, behaviors, wants, and needs attributed to a type of target customer, which can be applied to a larger category of customer types. This helps guide their decisions concerning product launches, new features, customer interaction, and site design. It’s easier to evaluate your website from a particular Jane Doe's or John Doe’s perspective than just imagining a vague customer group. By understanding the goals and patterns of your audience, your company can create archetypes to help create services to satisfy a specific, highly targeted group.

Your goal is to create a persona that encompasses the most complete picture of your target audience. In fact, you may want to create several personas, depending on your website’s various goals and how varied your customers are. Linda, the mother of two, has different motivations for being on your site than Debbie, the high-powered sales exec, or Fred, the college student. Creating more than one persona allows you to produce the maximum amount of appeal to your real-life customers. Creating effective personas helps you

  • Understand (and keep in mind) your target audience’s goals and beliefs.
  • Develop the most effective voice (your brand’s representation in its web content) for your company’s website.
  • Determine what products/features are and are not accepted by your audience.
  • Get to know your audience on a more personal level.
  • Build a shared vocabulary between you and your audience to avoid confusion.
  • Enable your company to make informed decisions.

Creating personas

Creating personas helps you identify your customers’ buying decision processes to allow you to maximize your conversion rate. Acquiring and analyzing the type of data listed in the sections, “Looking at current customer data” and “Interviewing customers,” earlier in this chapter, can help you develop a more complete picture of who your audience really is, how they spend their time, and what they value as being important. After looking at this information, you can start to see patterns emerge. These patterns are the basis for the personas you create.

In looking for patterns, notice the similarities and differences between your customers through your research. Keep in mind that personas represent your audience’s behavior patterns, not job descriptions, locations, or occupations. Although it’s important to be aware of this information, these details should not be the basis of your archetypes. A properly defined persona gives you a well-rounded picture of your customers’ attitudes, skills, and goals; it's not just a résumé that only offers a surface view.

After you have your data, group the information in a way that makes the most complete picture of a person. This includes assembling key traits (such as behavior patterns and similar buying processes) to try to form a cohesive “person.” You should be able to use the collected information to form a small group of “people” that you feel represent your audience. Each persona (like your real audience) should be different, wanting and looking for different things.

remember When you are creating your personas, do not model them after someone you know. Creating personas based on familiar people in your life alters how you work with those personas. A persona should be a purely fictional character that you feel best represents some segment of your audience.

After you have your persona, don’t keep her (or him) to yourself. Share it with the other members of your company to get their insights. They may have valuable opinions that help you narrow or fill out the personality of your customer. Use this time to fill in any blanks. Name your persona to differentiate her from the others: Don't just call her Jane Doe. Choose a name that you can believe in, not one that's just a stand-in.

Using personas

You now have your persona: You’ve named her, you know where she comes from, and you know what she’s looking for. But you’re not done. It is now time to put your persona into action. Use your persona to role-play the following:

  • Case studies: Imagine your persona coming to your website for various purposes. Walk through the types of steps any given persona would go through.
  • User testing: Using your persona, try out a feature of your website. You can also use your persona when running different keyword searches, starting at a search engine, and find out how quickly that persona can find relevant information on your site.
  • New feature evaluation: Try out any new pages or features of your website from your various personas' points of view and see how easy they are to use.
  • Product decisions: Coming from each of your personas’ perspectives, think through how useful a new product would be. You may be able to identify whether the product meets a typical user’s need as is, or needs some value-add to have better marketability.
  • Design decisions: See your website design through a persona’s eyes to determine whether the colors, placement, layout, bells and whistles, and other design elements make it easier or harder for visitors to achieve their goals.
  • Customer service: Use your personas to find out how easy it is to get help when using your website. Remember, your web persona doesn’t know that you have an exhaustive help system linked from the site map or that clicking a tiny link somewhere in the footer launches a live chat window. The persona only knows what it can easily see during the user-engagement process, so this is a valuable way to find weaknesses in your website.

Persona type scenarios

Here is an example of a persona and how you can put it to use. Alice is a competitive personality. Social status is very important to her, and she appreciates it in others. She tends to be impulsive and doesn’t mind the impersonality of doing things online as long as she is able to get what she needs quickly and efficiently. She is looking for verifiable results and quantifiable bottom lines. Social interaction is not important to her. She is willing to pay more to get a little extra. She is unmarried and does not see marriage in her near future.

Alice is very Internet-savvy and uses the Internet for ten or more hours per day. She has multiple email accounts from various service providers and does all her shopping and banking online. Alice works for an Internet company and has just purchased a modest condo in the suburbs outside a large metropolitan city.

By analyzing the profile of Alice, you can better target her needs. Based on this, you can see that her primary concern is for quick, expert information. Alice is an impulsive buyer; the key to acquiring her conversion is to give her information in a quick, easy-to-read format while touching on her desire for prestige and quality. She considers convenience, as well as easy access, important. You can guess that when she first visits your site, her eye quickly scans the content for keywords. If you lose her interest for a moment, she’s gone.

The profile also gives you an idea of Alice’s experience level with your product. This information can help you decide how to target her. Here are two example scenarios:

  • Scenario A: Alice at a technology-related website: If you’re a technology company, you know that Alice has a certain experience level with your breed of product. You can assume that Alice likely understands the basic workings of your merchandise without you having to break things down step by step. Based on her Internet savvy, you know she likely has little or no problem navigating through your site, but if she doesn’t find what she’s looking for immediately, she will likely take off and visit one of your competitors’ sites. For Alice, brand loyalty comes second to quick service.
  • Scenario B: Alice at a non-technical website: If your product is home- or garden-related, you know that Alice needs a lot of detailed information to better understand how your product or service could benefit her. You need to make sure your information is presented upfront so that Alice doesn't wander away from your site. You know that Alice just purchased her first home. It’s likely she is looking for easy ways to spruce it up. How can you gear your marketing campaign to address this goal? Perhaps there’s a way to market your product as a “timesaver” so that she can focus on other things. Is Alice likely to have a pet? Maybe your product can do a better job of keeping her pet safe. By understanding Alice, it allows you to target her more efficiently.

Using Alice’s persona helps you identify the language that most likely appeals to her and satisfies her motivations and needs. When you’re testing out new features or campaign plans, make sure to keep Alice in mind. Ask yourself these types of questions for each of your personas:

  • Benefits: Does this feature offer a clear benefit to this persona?
  • Level of explanation: What, if anything, do I need to provide this persona with to help her understand this benefit?
  • Wording: What kind of language should I use? Does this persona understand industry jargon, or do I need to define terms in the page content for her?
  • Style: How can my writing style fit this persona and give her what she’s looking for most naturally and directly?
  • Tone: What tone would seem most natural to this persona? Would a tone that’s friendly, professional, enthusiastic, subdued, energetic, calm, or other best suit her goals and influence her to stay on the site and move toward my web page’s goal?
  • Clarity: Does this persona realize the problem this feature is supposed to address? How much do I need to spell out?

Benefits of using personas

Personas provide many benefits. First, by speaking with your customers directly while gathering the data to create your personas, you have taken the first important steps to creating brand loyalty. Taking time to ask them about their needs and their interests shows them that you are interested in who they are, not just that you are out to make a sale. You want to learn about them, their goals, and what is important to them so that you can make your product better for them. Customers are likely to remember such a move and are more likely to do business with you in the future. By investing in them, you have made it easier for them to invest in you.

Secondly, your personas can alert you to problems you might not have known about. For example, while doing your research, you may discover that your customer base is larger and wider than you imagined. Knowing this shows you that there are two or more very different audiences that you must address. This could lead to creating a whole new product or set of instructions to fit more advanced users, while still catering to your more inexperienced ones. It could also lead to adding more pages to your website or incorporating more appropriate text on each page.

Drawbacks of using personas

Many companies resist the idea of personas because they don’t understand how they work. They may design personas that are too vague to be efficient in helping with the direction of their company. If not done correctly, personas may cause companies to pigeonhole their audience, negating the basic purpose of creating personas.

Another drawback of using personas is that no matter how much research you do or how deeply you analyze it, you can never know for sure that your customers feel exactly the way that your fictional personas do. If you tailor your campaigns too closely to a persona, you risk alienating some of your other customers. This is why it's important to create multiple personas: You have a better chance at targeting the largest number of users.

At the end of the day, despite your best efforts at analyzing your customers’ personalities, all you are left with is a best guess about what they’re looking for and who they really are. Using web personas allows your guess to be an educated one and provides your company with an invaluable tool to help keep users’ interests in mind.

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