The usual marketing questions don’t suffice when creating buyer personas. Using educated guesses can have your marketing team working overtime and just plain guessing can leave you confounded. While knowing certain descriptors of your target market (age, sex, location) can get you started in the right direction, you’ll need to go that extra mile to get  that information that can help you hit the buyer persona bull’s-eye.

The number of buyer personas that you need to create and understand depends on how many you want to reach and how many you identify. Segmenting your current target market into neat personalities can help you refine your marketing campaign and increase conversion rates, but why stop there? Identifying what personas you want to reach and crafting your marketing campaigns to appeal to them ensures that you’re investing in the future of your company’s profits.
Let there be no misunderstanding.

When creating buyer personas, you don’t have to learn everything about your customers.  But what you do need to learn is everything about them that can be used in a successful marketing campaign. You should be looking for specific nuggets of information that go above and beyond simple target market statistics. These can help you make a very solid connection with your prospects as part of your first impression.
The first step should be obvious. You should learn what your buyer persona’s immediate problem is and how your product can remedy it. These two fundamental questions can build any marketing strategy.

But here’s the meat of the buyer persona world…

You need to learn about buying processes and what makes your buyer personas tick when in a buying scenario like Goal Centric illustrates. There are a few different ways you can do this, but you can start by:

• Looking at purchasing habits. Do they discuss purchases beforehand? If so, with who? Do they refer to trade industry literature? Belong to any organizations that may influence who they buy from? Do they confer with current or ex-customers, read reviews or smart shop?
• Learning what types of media they best respond to. What are potential customers’ attitudes towards different types of media? Does your buyer persona consider print advertisements more legitimate than television ones? Is your buyer persona more likely to click on Internet ads? To go further, and as an example, do they click on plain text Google Ads or complex flash graphic ads?
• Understanding what resonates with a buyer persona. How do they speak? What kind of words, phrases and slang do they use? In addition to helping you create copy that will appeal to them, David Scott points out that learning these speech pattern details will help you implement even more focused marketing campaigns by predicting search engine entries. These specific search engine entries can then lead them to pages full of marketing content you developed specifically for the buyer persona.
• Understanding how they think. Are they visual people or are they more likely to buy something based on a cute jingle or a no-frills written description? What are their key purchasing motivators? What do they expect from your product or by purchasing from you, aside from the obvious?

Of course, when asking questions, you’ll have to find the appropriate conduit for answers.

If your website is in the pre-launch phase, try building buzz for your website and then keeping your website lean with enticing copy on the front page. Encourage visitors to opt-in into your mailing list so that you can simultaneously open the channels of communication with your prospects and keep them apprised of your products like Raed Malhas did. The traditional routes of online surveys, interviews and polls are great standbys for established websites and can serve you well if you ask the right questions.

Because each buyer persona is so specific, asking the right questions largely depends on the buyer persona itself. Consider each question you pose to buyer personas a jumping off point for more detailed information. But do remember to be aware of where and to who you are directing your questions. You don’t want to confuse a buyer persona with a user persona and have your hard work go to waste.

Note from Ayat: this is a guest post by Samantha Gonzales

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© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

Just because you are online does not mean you are attracting or engaging an international audience!

Take a look at your sales. What percentage of your sales are based in North America? Let me guess, over 90%?

This is not US-bias, I say this as someone living in England, by the way.

The important thing to take into account is the way we market, the content we produce, how we communicate, and even the times we are online in venues such as Twitter, all have an impact on who we attract and how.

I have clients in France, Norway, Australia, Philippines, India, Pakistan and Hawaii, but the majority of my clients either speak better English than I do, or are based in North America. This means, culturally, I am speaking to people just like me and therefore missing out.

If you are serious about selling internationally then you need to understand the cultures, needs and language of the target countries you are aiming for. Everything changes, you can not treat it as business as usual.

Even between the UK and USA there are differences in approaches to marketing, for example sales letters that convert powerfully for an American audience can be a turn-off for Brits. That’s before you get to words and phrases that change meaning depending on which side of the ocean you are located.

For anyone interested in learning about international marketing check out the fantastic free resources offered by Cindy King.

Bottom line is if you treat everyone as just like you then you will cut off the majority of your potential market!

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© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

Substantiated or not, I find even the thought of underestimating the power of buyer personas dangerous, as should anyone who has and will find success by correctly using them.

I don’t believe that anyone reading this blog would require a primer, but Adele Revella offers a very small one, if you’re interested. Even in a few paragraphs, she manages to convey how important buyer personas are to any marketer. She says that marketers "use buyer personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their customers."

Pretty important, huh? Given her definition, one could venture to say that any extremely focused and successful marketing campaign would find the neglecting of buyer personas impossible. Buyer personas are intricately wound into the fabric of marketing.

I’ve gathered that the naysayers don’t truly value all of the information collected and integrated into a buyer persona. They seem to think that some, if not most, details are unnecessary, make marketing jobs harder and can often result in disappointment because of hyper-segmentation.

And to that, I say this:

It’s true that creating and catering to buyer personas can result in wasted effort, marketing money and lowered sales…but only if one or the more major components of identifying and appealing to a buyer persona is off.

But I know how they would counter…

They would say that the danger of relying too heavily on buyer personas to sell a product is simple: predictable personas, regardless of the amount of research put into identifying into them, cannot account for the unpredictability of real, live people. My retort would be that they’re missing the entire point of using buyer personas. The goal is not to collect as much irrelevant information about a particular group of a buyers as possible and throw it into a buyer persona. It’s to collect information and identify relevancies within it. To do that, you have to examine all the information you have and delve a little deeper for more.

Buyers are puzzles and their personal details are the pieces that make the whole. To see the big picture, you simply have to find connections to the different parts and have them work together in a marketing campaign.

In addition, creating buyer personas helps potential customers understand you. It aids marketers create copy that speaks directly to them.  David Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, puts it simply: taking buyer personas seriously helps differentiate your copy from the "ego-centric gobbledygook" that characterizes so much marketing material today. By using buyer personas, marketers understand that buyers have problems (often immediate) that need to be solved and they won’t necessarily be "sold" on a product if you simply list your business’s achievements and incomprehensible product specifications in an effort to get them to buy. The worst thing any marketer could do would be to leave prospects on their own with this type of information and hope for the best, but that’s exactly what some businesses do and they often suffer for it.

Regardless of what types of information a marketer may gather about his target market and what he discards and uses in his marketing efforts, one thing cannot be denied: buyer personas were created and are used to help give an extra marketing edge in highly competitive markets. It’s a popular and successful strategy because everything in a person’s past and present (including the supposed extraneous details) influences his future. This includes his future purchases.

I know that some readers may remain unconvinced with this post. As mentioned before, questioning the value of buyer personas may be in vogue. But to those people who remain adamant that buyer personas bear exaggerated importance, I would direct you to Kim Klaver’s challenge: create a buyer’s persona for yourself using one of your favorite products. Apply all the buyer’s persona principles to yourself and dare to realize just how valuable buyer personas are.

Note from Ayat: This is a guest post by Samantha Gonzales.

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© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

Psychology is at the core of any conversion optimization project. Just trying to understand simple human behaviors such as social validation, social proofing, dissonance, etc. will give any ecommerce or website designer a better perspective on what to do and how to do it.

But is unethical to apply some of these tactics to on visitors? For instance, in a study done revolving around how heightened emotions lead to “irrational reasoning,  two groups of men asked to cross two different kinds of bridges. One was rickety and scary while the other was a very normal bridge. Before crossing the bridge, a very attractive woman was always there to give instructions to the men. Guess which group of men was more likely to ask for the woman’s number? The men who crossed the scary, rickety bridge. To be exact, they were almost 75% more likely to ask. WHY? As their heart rate went up, and they had that adrenaline rush, what did they attribute that feeling to? Well of course not the bridge (although that is exactly what giving them that heightened frightened feeling); but the woman.

How is this even related to conversion optimization. Well, those are tactics that optimization experts use. Raise that fear, interest, dissonance, and you can play on that heightened emotional feeling of a user to persuade them to purchase from your website.

So now let’s go back to the initial concern. Is it ethical? We’ll  probe into this further in the near future.

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© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

Okay, social media might be tricky to measure. Let’s talk about more specific examples.

Many companies allocated or are in the process of allocating their budgets for 2009. And the economy expected to continue to get worse, so how do determine which activities you are going to spend money on? Should you continue spending on SEO? How much should you allocate to PPC? How about a PR agency? And of course how about conversion optimization?

One of our regular blog readers, Audio bible, asked a very valid question. He understands the importance of conversion optimization. The problem he has with it is the amount of investment it requires without guaranteeing any results.

Good to see some conversion numbers, in the real world of single digits.

Sure we would all like to have double digit conversation rates, nothing wrong with aiming for the moon.

Throwing down $10,000 on conversation optimization would be worth it IF you can give some kind of guarantee on minimal results.

Audio Bible echoes what we hear from many top executives. They hesitate to invest money in projects without knowing what kind of results they get. If a company has an X dollar amount to invest, they must invest it in the activities that will bring the highest possible return. How can you determine this?

The reality is that the MAJORITY of marketing (especially consulting) companies (online and offline) don’t guarantee results. Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ argues that reputable SEO firms don’t promise guaranteed search engine rankings.

I am sure I can make our sales team job a lot easier if I can tell a client we will guarantee a 20% increase in conversion rates or average order sizes. But the reality is that there are too many unknown elements in the process of conversion that stop us from making such promises. There are elements beyond our control as experts in the field of optimization.

Consider this: How do you think you conversion rate will be impacted during a down-spiraling economy Or when you are side-tracked with a competitor running 40% discounts?

That being said, conversion optimization does not operate in a vacuum. But accounting for such unexpected issues prevents specialists from making promises.

Our structured methodology, the Conversion Framework, is implemented on all of our projects. It guides our optimization process. Futurenow follows the persuasion architecture. Marketing experiments follow the conversion formula. Each of these methods attempt to bring structure to the optimization process. With a methodology, your chances of better results are higher.

Online marketing companies cannot offer real guarantees, but where does that leave the clients?

We’ve left you in the same boat, eh? Any project, with or without guarantees involves risk. It does not matter whether the risk is real or perceived. Your job is to minimize the risk.

As marketers it is time to put your money where our mouth is.

I am not calling for guaranteed results.

I am calling for performance based models. These models will shift the risk from the client to the marketer. Of course with that shift in risk, there should be larger reward. Marketing companies who choose to adopt this model must be compensated at higher level compared to companies who decide to stick with the traditional approach.

As a consulting company, we had gone back a forth about implementing this model. It has many challenges that must be addressed. But since many new clients wanted to the assurances that we stand behind what we offer, our team decided to offer pay per performance for some of our clients who meet specific criteria.

There is a lot more to cover in this topic. But I will leave the rest to future blogs.

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© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

I hear this a lot, and most urgently from people who were previously doing very well with StumbleUpon traffic. So what is the answer?

There are two main reasons why someone who previously received a healthy amount of Stumble visits might no longer be doing quite as well:

1. Their account is weak
2. Spam control measures

To understand how this works you need to look at things from StumbleUpon’s perspective. What do they want in a membership and in terms of submissions they receive?

• Good quality submissions
• On a variety of sites and domains
• That are viewed and voted up naturally
• Leading to organic distribution of stories and friendships

Is that what you are doing? If the answer is “no”, then you know what you need to do.

Here is what most people who are promoting their own sites do:

1. Write a so-so story
2. “Discover” the story in SU using the toolbar
3. Email and “send” the story to all their friends
4. Wait
5. Complain that SU is broken because it doesn’t send traffic any longer

If you look at my two main reasons above, you will see the pattern of behavior raises red flags for both reasons.

By only stumbling your own stuff, and not particularly red hot stuff at that, you weaken your account. Instead you should be looking for cool material to discover and vote on, with your own best stuff mingled in to the mix.

Plus don’t vote on your own domain more than once or twice a month. This is typical spam behavior.

What about all those lovely votes you begged for and received?

Well, it is a little known fact about StumbleUpon that if you get a strong account to discover your page then the overall effect will be far greater than using your own lame, flagged as spam, no-friends account. So build up your account and make influential friends. Oh, and when you ask for votes, use IM or email, and don’t always send folks directly to the page. SU can tell how your friends found the page.

Got any more stumbleupon tips? Disagree with anything I say here? Share in the comments …

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Download your free landing page templates: Two easy to customize, highly converting landing page templates you can use right away

© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

Business is war. Any serious entrepreneur will tell you so. But businesses with online presences face especially difficult battles because of how easy it is for potential customers to choose competitors’ businesses over their own.

The Internet has made it easier for prospects to find your business, but it’s also made it easier to leave it. Gone are the days when customers had to visit brick-and-mortar establishments and make decisions to do business on-the-spot. Also absent are the business owners, sales people and other representatives that could sway a fence-sitting prospect to the other side with a little charm.

A business website speaks for you and everyone associated it. Though real people aren’t there to greet your prospects when they visit, your landing page can say exactly what you and your employees can’t. It can do the charming, the smiling and the persuading. In the most competitive of markets, your landing page can even be a rallying cry. It can inspire your prospects to heed a call-to-action and buy your product.

Take Control of Your Turf

Ever hear of the “home-field advantage”? A landing page is one of the best places to convey your brand, your product and your commitment to customers. After all, everything’s taking place on your website and as the general, you call the shots.

What sets you apart from competitors? Do you have a risk-free return policy? An unbeatable guarantee? Use your company’s web space to remind the prospect about who he’s dealing with and why he should continue pursuing the relationship.

Energize Your Troops

If prospects arrive on your page, you’ve obviously got their attention. Now you need to support their interest in your product.

Remain focused

Distraction spells disaster for any solider out in the field. The same can be said for prospects who visit your page. Your visitors are on a mission to satisfy a need or desire. Your job as a provider is to satisfy them. Put the need in the spotlight. Focus on it. Create your landing page to appeal to your prospect’s need and only that need. This makes your call-to-action irresistible. Terri Wells’s “Focus is Key for Landing Pages” explains the importance of this strategy and its relation to higher conversion rates.

Keep their eye on the prize

Ensure that your referrals line up with your product. It’s illogical of a business to lure prospects onto their website using product-specific ads and then have referral links lead to a mash-up category of products with no calls-to-action, but it happens all the time. The thinking here is that prospects will be tempted to buy more products, but prospects are more likely to be turned off from buying even the one initial product if they have to look for it.

Think about it this way: on average, every extra “thing” a prospect is forced to do on a website cuts down the probability that he will complete the transaction by 10%. It affects morale in a big way.

Sound the Trumpets

So you’ve drawn lines in the sand and pumped up your troops. What’s next? You’ve got to give your prospects a signal to take action.

Provide your audience with enough information to make an informed purchase

Ideally, the content on your landing page simultaneously educates your prospect about a product and sells it to him. Usually, content should be confined to one page without having to scroll, but different products have different needs. To avoid saying too much or too little, give your prospect enough information to sell your product and no more. Center that information and your call-to-action on the page so that your prospect is flanked by it. Roberta Rosenberg has some great tips for keeping your landing page lean, mean and ready for action.

Ensure that every element on your landing page is built to sell

That includes headlines, subheadings and your copy’s body. Craft copy from the point-of-view of prospects and make it easy on the eye with standard font faces, larger font sizes and broken-up text. Don’t forget that layouts and graphics play an important part in moving the eye. Prune potentially distracting elements like navigation bars, complex images or unrelated ads. Michael Nguyen’s “11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages” provides tips on how to design product-moving pages from the perspective of the buyer.

Psyche them up, psyche them out

One concentrated call-to-action is more effective than many scattered ones. Generally, no landing page should have more than two calls-to-action because they disrupt the landing page’s purpose. Increase the efficacy of your call-to-action by using subtle psychological cues like colors, word choice and natural eye paths like Ann Smarty describes.

Give prospects offers laced with benefits or promotions they can’t refuse

Online prospects have especially short attention spans. It’s almost like they’re looking for reason to leave your website. Work to win your prospects over by not only anticipating what they want and need, but by offering it to them quickly and with persuasive flair in an urgent call-to-action. Landing pages that clearly define the benefits of choosing products or promotions they can’t get elsewhere can keep you from prematurely waving the white flag of defeat.

Readers, what’s been your battle strategy for landing pages so far? What tactics have and haven’t worked for you?

Download your free copy of “Breaking the Digg Code” Report: A step by step instruction to get on the first page of Digg in 4 weeks or less!

Download your free landing page templates: Two easy to customize, highly converting landing page templates you can use right away

© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

We often get so caught up in the day to day running of a business, chasing deadlines, paper work and sales, that we can’t find the breathing room to take a fresh look at what we are doing.

The company I mention above took an expense and turned it into a profit center. All they had to do was what they had done all along with a small twist; take their traffic and email sign ups and convert it into product trials, then convert those trials into purchases.

In my last post I wrote about using data in your organisation. While having data does not magically make your business more successful (you still need to use your brain!), or instantly bring more customers in your front door, you might convert more of the ones you do get or have a valuable asset.

Until we ran the numbers the company wasn’t sure they would be able to find the budget to maintain their sites, let alone for large scale product trial. After we ran the numbers and tried a limited test, they couldn’t understand why they had never tried it before.

Have you run your numbers? If you do not have the time yourself, get someone to do it for you. It could be the most profitable excercise your business does this year.

When most people think about how they will measure the success of their blog they look to the numbers that are provided by their analytics.  While these numbers can be a helpful in figuring out your blog’s traffic and its sources, far too many people rely on the measures provided by analytics as a sole source of data.  By doing this you are cheating yourself out of a complete measure for your blog’s success.

As a conscious site owner your curiosity has, no doubt, been piqued by the idea that there are measures of your sites success that you are missing out on. 

So let’s explore the other measures that can indicate the success of your blog:

Method One: Your RSS Feeds

The number of people who are subscribing to your RSS feed gives you an idea of how many people are keeping a watchful eye on your sites content without visiting the site.  They are a large pool of potential visitors.  They will visit when the feed intrigues them with something interesting or unique.  Appeal to them and you can turn observers into regular visitors.

This can be accomplished by surveying some of your current subscribers to see what piqued their interest, establishing connections with other bloggers or industry experts attracting them to your blog, and creating personas for your blog to really address the needs of interests of your specific subscribers.

Method Two: Year Trackbacks

Getting a track back, or a mention of one of your sites postings via a link is both a sign of "street creed’ in the blogging world, and a way to gain new readers for your site.  The more inbound links you have, the better. Monitor your trackbacks to understand where you stand in terms of success of your blog.

Method Three: Your following

These are your care of regular visitors to the site and your most loyal readers.  If your blog is hosted on blogger or if you list it in sites like Blog Catalog  you can see this as a clearly defined number.  For those of you without those advantages it may be a bit more difficult to pin this one down. But understand your following, and consistently engage them with questions, posts that appeal to them, surveys, contests, etc.

Method Four: Your commenter’s

There are a wide range of people who have sites with above average page views and few comments.  A wide variety of non-spam comments is a sign of healthy engagement with the community and an engaged commentary means loyal readers.  The kind of readers who come back to the site every day. Other good signs to watch for are repeat commenter’s, commenter’s who seem to be familiar with each other and debates between your commenter’s.  This says that people are sticking around.

Method Five: Do your posts pop up on voting sites?

Finding a posting on your site with a decent to high rating on Digg, Technorati or Stumble Upon is a sign that you can pique mass interest in your postings.  In addition to being a blank of good content it can also help you to convert more people to the site by discovering it through these voting sites.

These methods, as a compliment to your analytics data, will help you to get a more accurate view of the success of your site.  You may feel tempted to ignore some of these tools.  After all, some of them are soft measures, not like your safe analytics data.  IAnd indeed, it can be a challenge to measure community engagement or interactions but it is extremely important to define each and measure accordingly. What other measures do you utilize? Have you a found a tool that streamlines all of these measures in one place? Share your thoughts.

Download your free copy of “Breaking the Digg Code” Report: A step by step instruction to get on the first page of Digg in 4 weeks or less!

Download your free landing page templates: Two easy to customize, highly converting landing page templates you can use right away

© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting

The truth is that every client that comes to us has a unique product/service, a different customer base, and project expectations and plans unlike any other. That being said, there are templates that can be used as a jumping board for specific industries, services etc. We’d like to test to see whether our subscribers would benefit from a couple of templates we’ve created, and have used in the past, that can serve as a baseline for a landing page. These specific templates are related to more of a service type of offering on the landing page, although they can easily be customized to offer products as well.

These templates are available to our RSS subscribers. So, if you’d like, check these templates out, and please let us know whether you think they are useful or not! If we get positive feedback we’ll continue to roll out more templates for subscribers interested in this service.

Download your free copy of “Breaking the Digg Code” Report: A step by step instruction to get on the first page of Digg in 4 weeks or less!

Download your free landing page templtes: Two easy to customize, highly converting landing page templates you can use right away

© 2006-2008 Invesp Consulting