An effective and successful digital marketing campaign relies upon customer engagement.
The key to engagement is to know what your audience wants.
Whether you are designing text ads, or carrying out keyword research as part of an SEO outsourcing strategy, it pays to know your customers.
One of the best ways to do this is to create buyer personas.
This allows you to clearly define your customer base.
Too many businesses overlook the importance of this.
Taking the time to define your buyers can give you a clear purpose and help you make sure your online content is targeted.
In this post, I explore how to better define your buyers, in order to boost customer engagement online.
Engagement With Your Customers
The single best way to define your buyers is through direct communication with your customers, or audience.
Take time to regularly speak to buyers who made a purchase from you.
But also with those who eventually decided not to.
Many companies rely heavily on internal discussions or complete guesswork when creating buying personas.
This leads to generalizations and inaccurate assumptions.
As a consequence, the business’ idea of its audience becomes very different from the reality, and online content subsequently fails to hit the mark.
Group Buyers Together
It is important to focus on key similarities between buyers.
Do they have similar traits, viewpoints, needs, and locations?
Grouping buyers together in terms of what they have in common allows you to appeal to a wider audience.
At the same time it makes sure your content is targeted.
Ardath Albee explained during her speech at the 2016 Intelligent Content Conference:
A lot of us get excited when we find a unique attribute of one of our customers. The problem is, if you focus on the interests of the person wearing the red shoes, you miss all the people in the white shoes.
Although it is important to build an idea of who your customers are, ultimately, your online content should influence their behavior.
In many cases, the hope will be that you can convince them to make a purchase, so you need to prioritize buyer decisions over some of the more irrelevant personal information.
When speaking to customers, ask them what influenced them to buy from you.
Also ask those who did not end up buying from you what made them decide against it.
By learning about their priorities and expectations, as well as their opinion on competing products or services, you can make sure your online content is able to influence purchasing decisions in the future.
Create Personas with Depth
Now you have an open channel for open and frank dialogues with your customers.
You sorted your buyers into groups and placed a focus on buying decisions.
It’s time to create buying personas.
These should provide you with an overview of specific target audiences, based on real research.
It is fine to create multiple buyer personas, because your content, products and/or services will likely appeal to different groups simultaneously.
However, there should be sufficient depth to each of them.
You should be able to explain what drives each group, what their problems are, which questions they raise, and their content preferences.
What would you add to the above?
image credit: shutterstock