Understanding Your Customers

Any marketing initiative whether traditional marketing, search engine optimization or social media starts with understanding your buyers or potential customers. You do not want to take a “One size-fits-all” marketing approach that targets everyone, but appeals to nobody. By understanding your customers and segmenting them into very distinct groups you will be able to reach each segment with the message that resonates most to them.

To do this we recommend developing buyer personas for each of your target customer groups. A buyer persona is essentially a mini-biography for each of your target customer groups. These buyer personas will be the basis of your keyword research, content strategies, link building and more.

Developing Buyer Personas Steps

1) List all of your customer groups (customer groups): You want to break your customers up into as many segments as possible which will enable you to develop specific content, keyword phrases and messages that will drive the most results.

2) Rank the list of customers from highest priority to lowest: This can be done by evaluating each group in terms of highest purchasing power, most influence, easiest to reach, highest frequency/concentration etc.

3) Start Creating the buyer persona profiles for your top customer groups

After prioritizing your core customers begin developing buyer personas for each one. Talk or survey your customers or at the most basic level try to think like them. You should then answer the following questions about each of your buyer personas (customer groups)…

• What are your target customers goals and aspirations?
• What are their problems?
• What types of resources do they use to find information?
• How can we reach them?
• What sorts of images/multi-media are appealing to them?
• What websites and publications do they read?
• What makes them tick?
• What phrases would they use to search for your product, service or the information above?

Going through that exercise will give you a great starting point for your online initiatives.