2. The aim of marketing is to know the
customer so well the product sells itself.
“
3. The aim of marketing is to know the
customer so well the product sells itself.
“
SEO
G
4. 1. Improve seo, marketing
& communication.
2. Attract ideal customers.
3. Reach goals faster.
PERSONAS
5. WHAT ARE PERSONAS
• Representation of people
• Ideal customer avatar
• A targeted demographic,
attitude or behavior
6. MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
1. How do they find you?
• Are they mobile users?
• Which browsers do they use?
2. What are their goals?
• What motivates them
• What keeps them engaged
• Have that drive your content
3. Who’s worth it?
• Missed attributable ROI for SEOs
• Organize around high value personas first
8. Searcher Query
“keyword”
Detection
• Who
• Where
• History
• Not personalized
• Social
• Etc.
Action
• Sign up
• Subscribe
• Demo request
• Starts a trial
• Etc.
Who is
this?
PERSONA
9. Human Query
“inbound”
Profile
• Mark
• Boston
• 3 past visits
• Subscribed to
blog
• B2b
• Etc.
Recommendation
• Display demo
request
My name is
Mark.
WITH PERSONAS
10. • First list all the common traits.
• Create a full profile : name, age, occupation, hair
color, family, etc.
• Give ‘em a face.
Caution: This is an INTERNAL exercise.
BUILDING PERSONAS
12. 1. What is their demographic information?
2. What is their job and level of seniority?
3. What does a day in their life look like?
4. What are their pain points? What do you help them solve?
5. What do they value most? What are their goals?
6. Where do they go for information?
7. What experience are they looking for when seeking out your products or services?
8. What are their most common objections to your product or service?
START HERE
13. • What keywords would the buyer use to search for a solution like ours?
• Where would the buyer look for information on a solution like ours?
• What influencers and thought leaders is the buyer familiar with in the industry?
• What type of content would the prospective buyer want to see and use to learn more
about a solution like ours?
• What other companies is the prospect aware of that offer a solution like ours?
• What trends does the buyer see in the industry?
• What are the typical titles and roles of the prospective buyer?
• What is a problem in the industry that our business can solve?
INTERVIEW CUSTOMERS
14.
15.
16. MARKETING MARK
Profile
• Professional marketer (VP, Director, Manager)
• Mid-sized company (25-200 employees)
• Small marketing team (1-5 people)
• BComm (BU), MBA (Babson)
• 42, Married, 2 Kids (10 and 6)
Goals
• Support sales with collateral and leads
• Manage company communications
• Build awareness
Challenges
• Too much to do
• Not sure how to get there
• Marketing tool and channel mess
• Easy to use tools that make his life easier
• Learn inbound marketing best practices
• Easier reporting to sales and CEO
Loves HubSpot because
29. WHY MOST STINK
1. YOU are not your persona.
2. You think they are real.
3. You are too general.
4. You don’t target first touch.
5. You forget about customers.
6. You don’t REALLY listen.
7. You forget to adapt.
8. You only have a primary persona.
9. You forget about their needs.
10. You confuse personas and job titles.
31. Do You Want Your
SEO to be Effective?
Business
G
32.
33. • Know your customers’ deepest fears and desires.
• When customers feel YOU understand them better than they
understand themselves - you’ve established a deep level of
trust.
• Deep trust = sales, repeat customers and a long-term
business.
GO THE DISTANCE
34. Role in sales process
Each page has goal
Each page has a clear conversion path
Reinforces your brand, generate leads, and supports customers
Serves as a storefront for different personas
Converts visitors into prospects and customers
Personas + Website =
35. 1. Keep product and company info up-to-date on the website
WHY: get found by potential customers and analysts.
WHY: be a legitimate company.
2. Complete market research and help establish clear value proposition
• Keyword and competitor research.
• Learn how your personas search and what they expect for solutions.
• How do they consume content?
WHY: understand your customers and focus on UX.
What’s an SEO to do?
36. 3. Create tools to attract more people and engagement
• Tools include calculators, games, mobile apps, social media apps etc.
WHY: increase acquisition and engagement.
4. Champion content
• Includes blog, ebooks, whitepapers, datasheets, videos etc.
• Publish QUALITY content.
• Test and measure.
WHY: attract traffic, leads, and engagement.
WHY: thought leadership and branding.
37. KEY TAKE-AWAYS
• Aligning SEO with business goals
• Generating qualified traffic
• Generating qualified leads
• Shortening sales cycles
• Understanding customer needs
• Knowing where users spend time
• Creating alignment and consistency across your business
• Gathering closed loop analytics
• Improving product development
43. SAMPLE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
Team & roles
Describe the team & roles
Your day-to-day
Who do you work with the most
What’s the role of marketing within the greater organization
Goals & plans
What are the key goals
Short term vs. long term goals
Marketing plans
Biggest challenge
Tools
What tools do you use
How frequently do you change tools - pick up new, drop old
How do you evaluate tools
Example of a particular tool from need to evaluation to purchase to implementation
Metrics/analysis
What are your key metrics
When do you look at analytics - monthly, weekly
Example of monthly report
How many web properties (websites/domains) do you have? Do you analyze separately or together?
What are individuals measured on
What’s an example of a great accomplishment your team or someone on your team had?
What’s an example of a really bad time in marketing?
Editor's Notes
More and more, online marketers are using buyer personas – fictitious characters that reflect various user types within their target demographic- to effectively reach new and existing customers. Similar to a marketing persona, creating a search persona helps marketers to accurately identify their target customer, to understand how users are actually searching for their business online, and to ultimately drive higher conversion. To help you get there, B2B buyer personas can be an essential, since understanding the goals, needs, and limits of a buyer are important to crafting the right content needed for SEO and social media marketing.
Representation of a group of peoplePersonas are archetypal characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product a similar way. Personas are often combined with market segmentation to represent specific customers.
What devices do they useAre they mobile users?Which browsers do they use?As an SEO you have the responsibility to understand and define user goalsWhat motivates themWhat keeps them engagedHave that drive your contentAssign value for personas Missed attributable ROI for SEOsOrganize focus around high value personas first
Without personas you have this
Without personas you have this
Then, roll all those commonalities into ONE person. Pull a picture from the internet
What motivates them
“What keywords would the buyer use to search for a solution like ours?”An (hopefully) obvious starting point for uncovering an initial list of terms and phrases to begin keyword research.“Where would the buyer look for information on a solution like ours?”This question helps uncovers possible link opportunities and social media destinations for outreach strategies.“What influencers and thought leaders is the buyer familiar with in the industry?”Similar to the last question, this helps define social media and third party site focus, which in turn impacts link acquisition and referral traffic.“What type of content would the prospective buyer want to see and use to learn more about a solution like ours?”This question uncovers opportunities for content development to be used for link acquisition, keyword strategy, and lead generation.“What other companies is the prospect aware of that offer a solution like ours?”This helps uncover competitive websites to review for SEO, social media, and content marketing strategies.“What trends does the buyer see in the industry?”Not only does the answer to this question help keyword research, but it might assist link building and competitive research.“What are the typical titles and roles of the prospective buyer?”The answers to this question can lead to LinkedIn exploration for industry groups, organizations, and important publishing websites; in turn generating link building and social media opportunities.“What is a problem in the industry that our business can solve?”The answers to this question help spearhead keyword research and enable a more refined search for third party sites and social media conversations to investigate for link outreach and social networking.
what makes B2B buyer personas different than general user personas is the complex sales cycle of B2B solutions. There are usually multiple decision makers involved in the process. B2B Internet marketers need to think about SEO, social media, and content marketing efforts meant to satisfy a more diverse set of requirements across multiple personas.
Houston says there “were a couple of important inflection points.” The first occurred after Dropbox released a demo video that captured Y Combinator’s attention and helped Dropbox secure an invitation to join the exclusive startup program. Milestone two occurred a year later when Dropbox released a separate video on Digg during its private beta launch.In that second video, Houston says his team layered “easter eggs… aimed at the Digg audience” into the otherwise mainstream presentation. The splash of creativity worked. Within 24-hours Dropbox “had 75,000 people signup for the wait-list.” They were expecting 15,000, tops.Not wanting to risk testing a buggy product on all 75,000, Dropbox carefully screened who could kick around early versions by extending invites through “a Gmail style closed beta.” Their strategy paid off. Just seven months after public launch Dropbox hit 1-million users. Roughly a year later they counted 10 million.One of two big reasons he cited for his success was Social Media Optimization. He built a cool video of what he was planning to build and posted it on Hacker News and got some initial momentum. He built a better video and posted it on Digg.com and it hit the front page and stuck there for awhile building a huge b/l of potential beta users. His video was SMO'd -- he studied how digg worked and built the video just right to encourage folks to digg it...he put a bunch of easter eggs in the video for the digg crowd.
Everything in one place. The intro video on the homepage even explains that exact scenarioHouston says there “were a couple of important inflection points.” The first occurred after Dropbox released a demo video that captured Y Combinator’s attention and helped Dropbox secure an invitation to join the exclusive startup program. Milestone two occurred a year later when Dropbox released a separate video on Digg during its private beta launch.In that second video, Houston says his team layered “easter eggs… aimed at the Digg audience” into the otherwise mainstream presentation. The splash of creativity worked. Within 24-hours Dropbox “had 75,000 people signup for the wait-list.” They were expecting 15,000, tops.Not wanting to risk testing a buggy product on all 75,000, Dropbox carefully screened who could kick around early versions by extending invites through “a Gmail style closed beta.” Their strategy paid off. Just seven months after public launch Dropbox hit 1-million users. Roughly a year later they counted 10 million.One of two big reasons he cited for his success was Social Media Optimization. He built a cool video of what he was planning to build and posted it on Hacker News and got some initial momentum. He built a better video and posted it on Digg.com and it hit the front page and stuck there for awhile building a huge b/l of potential beta users. His video was SMO'd -- he studied how digg worked and built the video just right to encourage folks to digg it...he put a bunch of easter eggs in the video for the digg crowd.
A lot of brands struggle with agility in marketing: thinking on their feet, coming up with original and fully custom responses, being innovative in the way they influence conversations. Marketers are used to running campaigns that take three to six months to produce.Everyone wants the perfect flying experience: cool, fun, comfortable and most of all, VIP. I mean ... who doesn't want to feel like they're part of the cool kids club? Virgin America does something that all of the airlines don't by not only promising this kind of experience in their marketing, but actually providing it in real life. Take a look at this ad, for example, that shows a cool and hip flight with blue lights, sweet TV screens, plenty of leg room, and wireless internet.
A lot of brands struggle with agility in marketing: thinking on their feet, coming up with original and fully custom responses, being innovative in the way they influence conversations. Marketers are used to running campaigns that take three to six months to produce.appeal to your customer's ego through the fully personalized experienceEveryone wants the perfect flying experience: cool, fun, comfortable and most of all, VIP. I mean ... who doesn't want to feel like they're part of the cool kids club? Virgin America does something that all of the airlines don't by not only promising this kind of experience in their marketing, but actually providing it in real life. Take a look at this ad, for example, that shows a cool and hip flight with blue lights, sweet TV screens, plenty of leg room, and wireless internet.
Nothing like appealing to your customer's ego through the fully personalized experience
But what if you are not them. What can you do?
Your personas will generally stink if you are doing one or all of these:YOU are not your persona. You think they are real. You are too general. Many don’t go in-depth. Forget to actually talk to people. More detail to followYou don’t target first touch. Often times people will target the C-suite, forgetting that they aren’t the ones necessarily doing the research or work in the end. Be realistic. They may be the decision makers, and you will need their buy in but don’t target just them.You forget about customers. Personas help us relate to our idealcustomers as real human beings.You don’t REALLY listen. You think you already have the answers.You forget to adapt. You have to update these regularly as your business and the market changes.You only have a primary persona. But there are secondary as well as negative personas. And then determine which is most important to your business.You forget about their needs You confuse personas and job titles. there's overlap between personas and roles, you can have multiple personas with the same role or one persona with different job titlesEnd result:You’ll attract less than ideal customers and business will not be funNo matter how hard you work, you’ll struggle to reach your business goals, yet won’t know why
So ask yourself this. Do you want your business to be effective? Your seo to succeed?To be effective you need to understand the space you are working in and who you are solving for, which should be your customers.
So ask yourself this. Do you want your business to be effective? Your seo to succeed?To be effective you need to understand the space you are working in and who you are solving for, which should be your customers.
Wanna be like them
When customers have a problem, they feel desperate and alone – like nobody in the world could possibly understandKnowing irrational fears lets customers know you understand exactly what they’re going through and that your product/service is the perfect solutionKnowing deepest desires demonstrates you have a vision for them; you believe in them and can help them get where they want to goWhen customers feel YOU understand them better than they understand themselves - you’ve established a deep level of trustDeep trust = sales, repeat customers and a long-term business
Important for searchers and businessa good site plays an enormous role in your sales process and can help you to reinforce your brand, generate leads, and supportcustomers. think of your site as a storefront that serves different groups and converts visitors into prospects and customers.
a good site plays an enormous role in your sales process and can help you to reinforce your brand, generate leads, and supportcustomers. think of your site as a storefront that serves different groups and converts visitors into prospects and customers.Keep product and company info up-to-date on the website Preferably manage old (archived), current (live), and future (draft) contentWHY: when someone is looking for information on our product/company/keywords, they can get it online / we get found by potential customers and analystsWHY: present ourselves as a legitimate companyComplete market research and establish positioning WHY: understand who are our customers and how to craft sales and marketing contentCreate tools to attract more people and engagement Tools include calculators, games, mobile apps, social media appsWHY: attract more people, increase engagement (vs. just a one-time visit)Publish content Includes blog, ebooks, whitepapers, datasheets, videosPublish fresh content to attract more traffic and leads and maintain engagement via subscriptions and syndications, expanding your reachMeasure and understand how pieces of content contribute to SEO, social media, traffic, and market researchWHY: attract traffic, leads, engagementWHY: thought leadership / branding
a good site plays an enormous role in your sales process and can help you to reinforce your brand, generate leads, and supportcustomers. think of your site as a storefront that serves different groups and converts visitors into prospects and customers.Keep product and company info up-to-date on the website Preferably manage old (archived), current (live), and future (draft) contentWHY: when someone is looking for information on our product/company/keywords, they can get it online / we get found by potential customers and analystsWHY: present ourselves as a legitimate companyComplete market research and establish positioning WHY: understand who are our customers and how to craft sales and marketing contentCreate tools to attract more people and engagement Tools include calculators, games, mobile apps, social media appsWHY: attract more people, increase engagement (vs. just a one-time visit)Publish content Includes blog, ebooks, whitepapers, datasheets, videosPublish fresh content to attract more traffic and leads and maintain engagement via subscriptions and syndications, expanding your reachMeasure and understand how pieces of content contribute to SEO, social media, traffic, and market researchWHY: attract traffic, leads, engagementWHY: thought leadership / branding
Content Level – Lists: Comparative
Rand will be there. Special musical performance (not yet announced) at inbound rocks What is INBOUND?INBOUND 2013 is the largest gathering of inbound marketers on the planet with over 5,000 HubSpot customers, prospects, partners, and employees in attendance. INBOUND 2013 will take place on August 19-22 at the Hynes Convention Center, and will feature:over a dozen inspiring keynotes including Nate Silver, Seth Godin, Nancy Duarte, and Scott Harrison100+ sessions on marketing, sales, and the HubSpot producta rock concert (aka INBOUND Rocks)lots of networking opportunitiesmultiple evening eventsan awesome new experience called Club INBOUNDand more!
When should you be using them?New Product LaunchMarketing Campaign DevelopmentSEO StrategySEM StrategyUser CommunityFacebook Fan Page/Twitter AccountWebsite Redesign and More