Get acquainted with your customers
Building a customer persona is important for better understanding your customers. This is a way to improve your chances of bringing your proposal to the most likely users. To build a strategy for content marketing, it is important to consider how your content will look to your target audience. Creating a user persona will be useful in this case.
What is a user persona?
A user persona (also user profile, consumer persona, or buyer persona) is a collective image of the target audience. This concept emerged in the 80's and became popular after the publishing of Alan Cooper’s book in 1999. Cooper created prototypes, or fictional characters, who represented typical segments of customers. Along with the description of their lifestyle and consumer habits, he gave them names and attached photos of faces. This helped the development team to keep in mind concrete image of the customers to whom the team was dedicating their work.
The importance of each component in a user persona
Gender
Everyone knows that men and women slightly differ in psychology. Many men tend to be more rational and practical. The quality and functional characteristics of products matter for them. Many women are guided by emotions and impressions, so when creating site content or advertising aimed at female audience, show more creativity.
Age
Young people are more open to the new and extraordinary, and do not fear experiments. Representatives of the older generation are often more conservative. You can get their interest by pointing out characteristics of reliability and stability.
Location
One’s place of residence — a metropolis, town or countryside, affects its inhabitants in different ways.
If you are an international business owner, you have to take into account the mentality, customs, traditions and the difference in time zones. If you are planning to open an office or retail outlet, then your clients’ geography will tell you where the largest cluster of your target audience is situated.
Knowing where your clients usually are means knowing where you can reach them. Within the Internet, it may be different related sites, forums, communities in social networks and more. You can place advertising banners, promotional announcements, press releases and other information about your products on those sites.
Income level
When building a pricing policy it’s important to know your customers' ability to pay. Even if justified, high prices deter buyers, while prices that are too low can cause distrust in people with high incomes. Also, these data are important in all kinds of stocks, sales, and discounts of different percents.
Needs & wishes
A famous American marketing author and professor Philip Kotler said: "People don't want a drill machine, they want a hole in the wall." In other words, people buy not a commodity, but a solution. Compare, for example, two phrases: "Our product is made only of natural ingredients, it was approved by many experts," and "Our product will give your child a complete set of vitamins, which school meals don’t provide, especially in spring."
It’s not effective to praise the product itself without specifying what concrete needs it can satisfy and how it can change people's lives. So, knowing what problems the target audience is facing means knowing which solutions to offer. Your customers’ desires and dreams will inspire you to improve or expand the range of your goods or services.
You can also add other data to the portrait of the consumer, depending on the particulars of your business.
The benefits of a customer-oriented strategy
The final sight of your products (goods, services or website content) depends on you. You can control it. So it’s easier to adapt it to the consumer rather than vice versa. Experience shows that a client-oriented strategy, especially for a B2C business model, is more effective than a product-oriented model, because of its loyalty.
Listen to your customers. They can tell you how to make the business profitable, because they know if a product is no longer in demand, and therefore the time and money invested in its creation is not worth spending. They also know what new things should be created, and what to improve or refine in products that already exist. Your site visitors are your friends and advisers. You can probably guess what they look like and what they think, but to build a business on intuition is not very professional. This is why we offer a way to introduce you to your customers more directly.
Analyze the present to create a desirable future
There are many tools for web analytics. The leading position is rightfully occupied by Google Analytics. It is a free online service with an intuitively understandable interface. It is very powerful, and provides maximum options for tracking a visitor’s behavior on the site. The collected data are presented in a form of tables, graphics, charts and diagrams. With the Google Content Experiment — a tool integrated with Google Analytics — you can find out which version of your page visitors react most positively to, in order to understand which changes should be implemented and which shouldn’t. For proper interpretation of Google Analytics reports and get the maximum practical benefit, however, it’s better to appeal to professionals.
So if you have any difficulties or questions about this or any other service, Drudesk will willingly help you install and understand all settings. We will tell you how to use all the web analytics capabilities for your goals.
Earn your clients’ credibility by justifying their expectations, and earn their loyalty by offering exactly what they need. Your customers are your key to success, so don’t ignore their voices if you don’t want them to ignore yours.