Understanding Your Audience: SEO Marketing

It may seem intuitive that knowing your ideal customers, what they do and what they like, is a must if you want to establish awesome SEO strategies.

You wouldn’t try to sell a haircut to someone who’s bald, right? The same thought process goes behind outlining who your audience is and the different buyer personas that may be attracted to your business. How can you really connect with your customers if you don’t know them?

Buyer personas are basically profiles that your ideal customers might have. For example, if you sell chocolate bars, you probably have multiple buyer personas. One buyer persona would be a young child who loves candy, another could be women who like to bake with your chocolate bars. Makes sense, right? Buyer personas outline archetypes of real potential people who would like to purchase your products or services.

How does understanding your audience have anything to do with SEO? It’s simple. If you’re writing content, like a blog for example, that you want to share on your website, you want your audience to be interested in that blog post. If you want to drive people to your website and increase your website’s SEO, the first step is to have relevant content that your audience actually wants to read and share. If you don’t truly understand the different buyer personas that fit your customer-type

Outlining Buyer Personas

There are plenty of ways to capture information that you can use to understand and outline buyer personas for your business. Social media, sales, and in-store surveys are just a couple ways that you can understand more about who shows interest in your business.

If you monitor your social media channels, and you SHOULD be, you can watch the types of people  that are engaging on your social posts, following your page, or clicking on your page links. Use social media ads? If you do, you probably are targeting specific types of people based on demographics. If you look at the results of your social media ad campaigns you can see if that type of targeting is working, so you can build buyer personas based on what you’ve seen to be most effective.

Does your business have one of those nifty email lists? A quick survey to your email subscribers can be a wonderful way to understand even more about those people who are already engaged with your business. By asking relevant questions, you can get snapshots of your customers.

Effective Buyer Personas

The more detailed your buyer personas, the better. It’s like anything else, the more information you have, the better. If you’re trying to really catch the eyes of your buyers, you want to have content that is crafted for that audience.

There are some components that you will definitely want to capture when creating your buyer personas.

• Background info – Understand their gender, occupation, age, education, income, location.

• Behavior – What do they like to do on a day-to-day basis? How do they like to shop?

• Motivations – Okay, this one is extremely important. This takes getting into the heads of your customers to really understand why they are buying goods and services, so your team can create marketing plans and content that speaks to these motivations. For example, you may realize that many of your customers buy your products because they are environmentally friendly

• Obstacles – There are probably some obstacles that some of your customers face when trying to buy your products. Maybe it’s that you don’t sell online, or it could be the price-point of some of the items that you sell.

• Q & A – If you really want to make your customers happy, you should be prepared to have clear answers to questions that they have. Anticipating what your customers may be wondering can save you from a headache later, as your team can work on answers to these questions.

Keywords, Anyone?

The difference buyer personas that you outline probably use different terms and keywords whenthey are searching for those things that relate to your business. So, if you have one buyer persona type that is more focused on eco-friendly products, they would probably Google phrases that include: environmentally, eco-friendly, and sustainable. Whereas, you may also have a buyer persona that is more focused on high quality fabric, so this consumer-type probably uses keywords like, premium fabric, high quality, and quality fabric. See the difference?

When you understand the keywords that your buyers are using, you can craft content that incorporates those words and phrases, so you can attract more customers to that information. You could, and SHOULD, use these keywords on your website and advertisements.

Knowing the Channel

Personally, I prefer emails from my favorite shops, but not all customers are the same. When you are looking to create content for your customers, whether it’s to promote a super sale or to share info about your newest products, your audience members have different preferred channels for receiving that information. This is where outlining buyer personas can be super beneficial.

It possible that you have one type of buyer persona that prefers printed marketing materials, like promotional mail (yes, that’s still a thing), or you might have a buyer that loves to see all your store’s updates on Facebook. Finding a way to not only know what the preferred methods of communication are for your buyers are but to also communicate to your customers on difference channels, can seriously spark your sales and help your business. Not to mention, your customers will love you even more for “getting them.”

The Customer Journey

Your customers are people who go through changes, just like you and me, so understanding your buyer personas and their life changes can help you anticipate their needs and wants along the way. This can help your team plan content that fits different stages in your buyer personas’ lives. Maybe it’s a new baby! Maybe it’s buying a house! Whatever life brings, you can map out those moments so you can build a long-term relationship with your customers.