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Do You Know Your Audience?
You already know that if your business wants to increase traffic and boost sales, you need to create relevant content for your audience. You need to have a holistic perspective of what your audience wants and needs if you want to build valuable content for your customers.
User personas are one tool that business owners often overlook, but user personas are also an essential tool to producing great content for both your target audience and search engines. Not only do user personas help you create content more efficiently, but they also help you improve your rankings in Google!
What Is A User Persona?
User personas are models that represent general characteristics of your audience. While each customer is unique, you can identify common trends, identifiers, and features among core segments of your clients.
These personal profiles are developed to help you understand different segments of your audience so you can create focused, relevant content in your marketing campaigns. As essential piece for your business marketing efforts, user personas identify core elements of your customers, including:
- Demographic characteristics
- Customer needs
- Interests and expectations
- Purchasing habits
While these elements are general in nature, you should be able to customize them based on your industry and products. Understanding the needs and expectations of your customers with user personas helps you identify opportunities to improve your marketing efforts and search engine rankings.
How User Personas Make User-Centric SEO
Search engine algorithms and user intent for individual searches are two essential elements that can help your business rank higher in Google. As search engines become more advanced, they are looking at many factors to determine the content quality and SEO rank values.
Once I create a few versions of user personas, I work to apply these tools to my insight of my current customers. In each user persona, I include some critical information that includes:
- The primary motivation for using the search engine at that moment.
- What keywords they are using to find answers to their needs.
- How they talk, what products they consume, and how they interact with their friends.
- What types of content they consume and where they consume that content.
- What goals they want to accomplish with their experience.
- Desired results based on their online search and with your website.
Keyword Research
There are plenty of keyword research tools available to find data about specific keywords. These tools show you which search terms were typed the most, but this information is irrelevant unless you can apply it to your target audience.
User personas help you understand who and why people searched those keywords. It is helpful always to start with your customers before performing keyword research, and a user persona is a perfect tool to help your business choose the right keywords.
Effective Messaging
Great marketing is all about your messaging, and effective messaging goes beyond simple keyword research. Your message is the result of who and how your audience consumes your content.
Based on your customer preferences, you will need to adjust your marketing channels, tone, and voice, design elements, etc.
User personas help you recognize opportunities and the best approach for all your marketing efforts. You will need to coordinate your marketing efforts based on your audience, and user personas help you through the process to plan and distribute quality content.
Choosing The Right Content
Not all types of content are a good fit for all businesses. Choosing the right types of content depends on your industry, your products, and your customers. For example, white papers are ideal for highly technical industries like engineering and mathematics, but they are not competent in other fields like board games enthusiasts.
Since you know your industry and products, you need to have an intimate understanding of your customers to align their needs with your marketing strategies. User personas help you match your content production strategies with the needs of your clients. The process your business goes through to create an SEO marketing strategy should revolve around your audience and their needs.
Identifying and guiding your resources with a customer-centric focus helps you maximize the efficiency of your marketing dollar and increase ROI.
Efficient Content Production
Producing and optimizing content for search engines requires a lot of time and resources. Many business owners invest into marketing campaigns that result in low ROI because they never understood their target audience.
Your audience is the first step to developing a successful marketing plan. User Personas are tools that your business can use to identify, validate, and understand your customers before investing in marketing materials.
As a result, your business has a better chance to produce content that will boost sales and have a high ROI.
User Experience
From building your website, to customer service, your business relies on your clients having a great user experience. One of the only ways to create a user experience that drives revenue is to know who and why people use your site. User personas help you identify the underlying needs of your audience so you can build a marketing strategy around your customers.
Putting The Pieces Together
Once you are able to recognize the needs of your audience you can begin to build a strong online marketing strategy. Too many small business owners jump into digital marketing campaigns that don’t produce ROI. The main reason for this because their online strategy does not align with the needs their audience. Build user personas by understanding your customers and then base your online marketing plan for success!
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