, , , ,

Who Are Your Customers? Targeting A Customer Persona

A shop owner interacting with a customer.

Your marketing is essential to your business’ growth, but it needs to be focused. You can cast a wide net to get a few catches of the many fish in the marketing sea. That can be a functional strategy in some circumstances, but it is far more efficient and effective to aim your marketing towards certain target groups interested in your business’ products and services. To determine these targets, marketers create customer personas, which significantly improve the performance of all your ads. Targeted marketing is up to 5.3 times more effective for increasing click-through rates, nearly 40% of people prefer targeted ads, and targeted ads have shown to increase brand searches by 800%! Along with those conversions, these results will only increase your ROI even more, since you will spend less on target ads than on widescale, untargeted marketing. This guide will explain what customer personas are, how to create them, and how to use them in your marketing.

What are Customer Personas?

A customer persona is an imaginary person defined by certain demographics and characteristics of a key member of your current or desired target audience. Qualities that can define a customer persona are their interests, profession, finances, age, gender, language, locality, etc. These qualities need to be specific enough to define a subgroup of an audience, but also broad enough to reflect more than just one individual. Typically, a business will have multiple customer personas within its whole audience.

How to Define Your Customer Personas

To create and define your target personas, you will need to some research about your business’ current and/or desired audience. If you have been running your business for a few years, you should already have some familiarity with your business’ target(s). If you are already using Google and Meta for your advertising, these platforms collect valuable information about their users. They will provide you with a wide set of analytics about your business’ advertising and search to help generate target personas. There are numerous other research methods for determining target personas, including surveys, interviews, observing industry trends, and analyzing your competitors and their target audiences.

Don’t Forget About a Persona’s Role

An important aspect of these personas is their role. Certain individuals are more likely to make purchases based on certain roles in their personal lives. For example, Old Spice’s series of “Hello Ladies” advertisements that began in 2010 were a result of the deodorant company determining a major target audience of women customers who purchased deodorant for their male partners. While Old Spice’s primary audience consisted of men with the role of users, these women had the purchasing role that made them a critical target and essential to the company’s rebranding this past decade.

These roles can be more difficult to determine than the raw demographics provided to you by various marketing platforms and tools. They rely on observing and analyzing your customers’ behaviour. However, they can prove invaluable for understanding and strategizing around the purchasing power and decisions of a target customer.

How to Use Your Customer Personas

Customer personas will allow you to plan and specifically strategize any focused marketing campaign. Specific products or services of your business may not appeal to your entire audience, so knowing your business’ targets will allow you to properly focus on individual marketing campaigns. For example, PPC advertising platforms like Google Ads and Meta will allow you to set targets for each ad campaign. By defining your customer personas, you will be able to appropriately target each one of these ads. 

You will similarly use these personas in your social media marketing, to strategize which posts will best attract engagement. An important strategizing factor is customer personas’ preferred platforms. Certain targets may be specific to one platform for your digital marketing such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Any marketing on these platforms should be targeted toward the interests of that specific customer persona. 

The Importance of Refining and Redefining Your Customer Personas

Defining and targeting customer personas is not simply a one-and-done deal. You should regularly refine them as you receive more data and complete more research. This refinement will help you determine whom to exclude from your customer personas. For example, women might be a general target audience, but you may find that those under the age of 20 or those over the age of 60 are not typically your customers. This kind of information refines your business’ customer personas to be more accurate targets.

You will also need to redefine your target and customer personas as both your business and audience naturally change over time. To come back to the Old Spice example, the company is currently again retargeting its marketing as they have determined new younger customer personas. This continuous research is also important for developing and strategizing your business’ brand, products, and services. It’s not enough to merely know your audience, you need to keep understanding them.

Keep Your Eye on the Target

Creating and maintaining customer personas is essential to effective marketing and business strategizing. Knowing the subgroups of your audience will allow you to more directly communicate with them and grow your business’ reach among these individuals. It will also ensure your business isn’t pursuing audience dead ends. If you need help creating, finding, or redefining your target audience and customer personas, contact Rosewood’s digital marketing team. They’ll help you get and keep your eyes on the target.

/0 Comments/by
, , , , , ,

Impress with an Effective Homepage

Someone building an effective homepage on their laptop with stats.

Your website’s homepage plays an important role. It’s the first impression of your business’ digital space. It also doesn’t have a lot of time to provide that introduction. The average user stays on a webpage for only 5.94 seconds and they judge it in only 1/20th of a second. As a result, your homepage needs to be purposefully designed to create a proper impression quickly. For that, it needs to look good, communicate effectively, and motivate your visitor to stay and use your site. Our website design team has the first steps so you can start building that impressive and effective homepage. 

Who Are You?

Your homepage should clearly and concisely present what your business is and does. Name and display your main services or top products as the central thing visitors first see as they land on your homepage. They will immediately understand your business and see its products/services. This should also come with a short description that identifies your business’ name and what it does. First-time visitors to your site will not be familiar with your business. Use this opportunity to provide that information and show off your value proposition.

Navigable

Along with explaining who you are and what you can provide your visitors, you want to make it immediately clear how they can navigate your site for more information or products. Link the central images and descriptions to the appropriate dedicated pages so visitors can access them. The top should include a navigation bar with clear categories and page titles, so users know where to look and find what they are interested in. In addition to being a directional aid throughout your website, the navigation bar will quickly impress any visitor with the contents of your website, allowing them to understand its contents and services more quickly. Furthermore, your homepage will regularly be the return point for browsing. This easy navigation will ensure customers can readily move to the next page that interests them.

Calls To Action

Another aid to navigation that also helps keep a visitor interested is a call to action (CTA). Common examples are a prominent button in the middle of the page or in the navigation bar with a unique, contrasting colour. These will encourage your visitor to go beyond the homepage and guide them through your website’s main pages. The most common examples are “Shop Now”, “Learn More”, “Contact Us”, “Book a Consultation”, or “Request a Quote”. These short, simple instructions will also help a visitor immediately contextualize the products/services your website provides.

Newsletter or Contact Form

Presenting your visitor with a pop-up of a newsletter signup or contact form is an additional call to action that will keep your visitor connected to your website. These allow customers to learn more about your business, stay connected and return, and might include a discount as an incentive to purchase from you. 

Do not present this pop-up right away. Allow your customers to get their impression of your homepage and maybe browse a bit before prompting them with signing up to their newsletter or suggesting they provide contact information. An immediate popup will prevent them from seeing your informative homepage and come off as pushy. Why would they sign up for a newsletter or want to contact you before they know who you are?

Less is Better

Not overwhelming your visitor is essential. Minimalism is a hallmark for designing your website’s homepage. A homepage with too much text, images, video, or CTAs will only confuse or frustrate your visitors. Just like when first introducing yourself, stick to the essentials and be concise for a good first impression. Provide a single large image, a short blurb, and one CTA that shows the essentials of your business. Not every visitor will have the same interests about your business, so it is best to provide the basics and have them navigate deeper in for what they want. Additional details should be placed in their own dedicated pages that visitors can easily access through the navigation bar or calls to action. 

Optimized for Multiple Devices aka Responsive

A proper first impression means your website needs to function properly on various devices, particularly computers and mobile devices. As of this month, over 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Your homepage needs to inform your visitor, allow direct navigation, and provide direction easily and elegantly on all of those different devices. If a visitor arrives on your homepage and not everything is visible or navigation is cumbersome or impossible, they will be left with a poor impression of your business and leave.

Adaptable

Your homepage should adapt to how visitors use and browse your website. Monitor website traffic to determine where users are going. If a specific service or product page is more popular, highlight it more immediately. This will sooner impress future visitors with the information they want. Remember you have less than 6 seconds. For example, if customers typically browse your new product page, it is a good strategy to link the “Shop Now” CTA to that page. Running user experience (UX) tests of your homepage and website will help you discover such potential site traffic patterns as well as unintended obstacles. Ever heard of heatmapping? Ask us about it!

Home is Where the Heart Is

Your homepage is the heart of your website. It introduces your business, directs visitors, and acts as the regular return point for browsing. It also does not have a lot of time to impress your visitors to stay and start exploring the deeper chambers of your website. These essentials will help guide you to create a homepage that gives the proper impression and welcomes your visitors. If you are looking to redesign or update your homepage to give your business the proper introduction it deserves, contact Rosewood’s website design team.  

/0 Comments/by
, , , ,

Inspiring a Community Through Social Media

An inspiring bookshelf with various books beside a pink chair.

Your follower number is an important metric for determining your brand’s reach, but it means little if that that audience isn’t regularly engaging with your content. That engagement creates a dedicated community around your business. If your content inspires engagement, said community will become invested in supporting, maintaining, and expanding the reach of your brand. That all starts by having a content strategy that inspires and motivates your followers to engage, so here are key tactics of a strategy that builds an inspired community.

Engage and Respond to Your Community

One of your first and best tactics for forming and inspiring your community to engage is by engaging with them. Respond to their comments, posts, and feedback to your content. Be sure to engage with them on your content and theirs. Everyone enjoys some acknowledgement. Giving your community members that attention, will inspire them to engage even more. Others who see that activity will also be more encouraged to engage. Everyone will be inspired to engage with each other, forming true communal bonds around your brand.

Keep That Community Positive

You need to maintain a healthy and safe space to keep that engagement and your community flourishing. Online communities need moderation and supervision. It’s unfortunately easy in online spaces for someone to enter and be toxic. Along with being harmful, they will scare off others from engaging. Be sure to remove that kind of activity from your community to keep dedicated followers and your community healthy. Followers will continue to energetically engage and those who witness that moderation will be inspired to remain in your brand’s safe community.

Educate, Entertain, and Inform

Along with promotional content, provide a variety of content that is educational, entertaining, and informative. The variety keeps your community actively interested and engaged. Educational content can teach your audience about some niche information about your brand and industry. Behind the scenes (BTS) content showcases your company’s human element, and the insider view lets your audience feel connected of your brand and its people. Entertaining content is another opportunity to show off your brand’s personality. It can also jump on a recent social media trend. That further inspires a community who will want to engage with the momentarily relevant content. 

Championing a Cause

It may seem outside your business’ scope to have your brand comment on a societal issue, but championing a cause helps unite and inspire your community. In 2019, Edelman found that 81% of people felt they must trust a brand to purchase from them, and in 2021, they found customers are 7x more likely to purchase from brands they trust. A central factor of that trust is not just honest business practices. People’s trust in businesses relies on their stance on a social issue. 53% of customers say they need their brands to take a stand on at least one social issue, and 86% expect brands to take one or more actions beyond their business or production, primarily addressing at least one societal concern. 

Motivating your followers to contribute or benefit such a social cause will inspire and empower them. They will associate your brand and its community with a larger social impact and benefit. Posts on a certain issue relevant to your brand provide a great opportunity for your followers to engage and feel inspired. If you brand contributes to a charity, you can encourage followers to also donate or promote. Brands for charitable organizations or non-profits can directly inspire followers to action by engaging directly with your content, fundraisers, and events.

Stick to Your Brand and Its Values

Your brand shouldn’t champion every cause or jump on every trend. It will reduce your content’s impact, confuse your brand’s core personality, and undermine its authenticity. Brand personalities are like people; they need to stay consistent for people to trust them. Stick to a select few causes that pair with the character and values of your brand. Your followers and customers can associate these with your brand. A fashion business may promote a cause for body positivity or a charity that provides clothes to the impoverished. Any small business can champion a charity or cause that’s part of their local community. 

Recognize Your Community

Beyond just engaging and inspiring them, have content that recognizes your community. If your community creates their own content with your brand or participates in your charitable acts, be sure to acknowledge and celebrate those accomplishments. If your business sees some success or reaches a certain milestone, recognize how your community has played an important role in that accomplishment. This recognition of a symbiotic relationship strengthens your followers’ bonds with your brand. They will only be more inspired to engage with and support your business and brand.

Start An Inspiring Strategy

With these essential tactics you can start to build a strategy of inspiring content. An engaged community around your brand will stay dedicated to supporting your business and expanding its reach. If you’re looking to build a social media strategy and start creating inspiring content suited to your brand, talk with Rosewood’s social media marketing team. We can help you flesh out an entire long-term plan for inspiring that following.

/0 Comments/by