For this year, as a business owner, while developing your marketing plans and campaigns, you should have two things: user personas and content marketing strategy that benefits your users.
Benefits your users? Yes. Websites or any “content” that we “generate” out there should be helping our customers or benefiting them one way or another.
User Personas Can Help Improve Your Business
When it comes to your content strategy or your content on your website, are you keeping your target market or your ideal client(s) in mind? Do you have user personas of your ideal clients? If not, it could help with visualization while developing content marketing strategy or your overall marketing strategy.
Your target markets or your ideal clients should always be on your first and foremost when it comes to your content strategy. You should be addressing their needs at every stage of their journey with you. When they are first learning about you. When they are in the process of making a decision about you. When they are about to buy and finally when they have made a purchase with you.
Remember, “a confused buyer buys nothing.”
Why You Need User Personas
Success in marketing and in product development comes from understanding your target customers or ideal clients. That is your ability to put yourself into the shoes of your customer – to understand their pain points, needs, wants, aspirations, work and home environments. Being able to think and behave like your customer is the key to being able to communicate with them effectively.
It is much easier to develop content for your website, marketing content and campaigns when you know exactly who the customer is and how they will react to different kinds of marketing.
What is Buyer or Customer Personas
Buyer personas describe your ideal target customer. The customer is the person making the purchasing decision to get your product or services instead of a competitor. But this person isn’t always the same person as the one that usually uses your product or service.
A case in example of this would be a company that is searching for a new cloudbased cybersecurity protection application for their organization. They might have an executive make the purchasing decision even though he/she may not be using the app on a regular basis. In this case you would need a persona that describes this type of person who is in charge of making the purchase decision.
A buyer persona will help you make decisions about your marketing and sales processes. When you’re thinking about your content or new campaign, you should be thinking, how will my buyer react to this?, or will my buyer like this?
Acronym as a Guide for Content Strategy
You may or may not have heard of the E-A-T acronym. It stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. E-A-T.
Back in 2014 or 2015, Google set this as a guideline for search quality guideline. (SQEG) To be clear, this is a not an algorithm, not a score nor it is a direct ranking factor. Google has at least 200 ranking factors including page speed, HTTPs or use of keywords in title tags.
E-A-T acronym’s role in rankings is rather indirect. In 2019, Google updated its SQEG (search quality guidelines) and Google makes a reference to beneficial purposes in their updated text, in section 2.2: What is the purpose of a web page? “Websites and pages should be created to help users.”
In the next three days, I’ll break down how each letter in the acronym can help with your content as well as with your SEO rankings.
Take the time and watch your business grow
For 2021, it would be well worth your time and investment to create a customer persona that will accelerate your marketing, and sales efforts. The time you take to create solid persona will pay off over in the growth of your business.
Have you developed your user persona? If you need assistance, contact us today or fill out our survey.