If you’re struggling to make your website work and feel that somehow or other you are just not hitting the target, here’s a good exercise for you to consider. Take a sheet of paper and imagine that somebody is sitting on the other side of the desk from you. This person is your ideal target persona. It’s your job to “interview” this person and to find out everything about them. You will need to determine their age group, their income bracket, their lifestyle, what they like and what they don’t like.
Your products or services might appeal to a number of different types of persona. In this case, you need to conduct your “interview” with each and every demographic persona, once again being very detailed in assessing who you should be trying to reach.
This is an interesting exercise and one which we should all do for our online businesses. It’s remarkable how many organisations simply do not take the time to create such a detailed picture, yet it is essential if we are to make the best of our online endeavours.
When you construct your website, you need to make sure that you are aiming it squarely at the demographic of the persona you have identified. Again, if you have several different targets then you need to create a strategy so that you are presenting your products or services to each, independently. Don’t think for a minute that one size will fit all and that you will be able to create a website that will generically work.
It can be difficult sometimes to get even the “warmest” visitor to stop and have a look round when they arrive at your site. If you have chosen the wrong layout, the wrong colours, the wrong graphic images and simply lack precision, you are going to lose potential clients.
Remember from a search engine marketing perspective as well, when you engage in link building you have to be sure that you are engaging with websites that appeal to your persona. Understand where your audience is likely to “hang out.” You need to focus your SEO services so that you get high traffic from your target audience and must avoid the trap of attracting random website visitors.
Some major organisations place a lot of effort on defining their client personas. Indeed, some consultant support organisations exist that will conduct extensive and very technical behind the scenes efforts to “nail down” the makeup of the persona, to the nth degree.
If you don’t focus on trying to attract the right kind of visitors, those who fit the demographic of your persona, all of your search engine optimisation efforts are going to be mediocre at best. You need to make sure that the traffic that you do bring to your website gives you a high conversion rate and you are simply not going to get that if your website and all associated efforts are simply too generic. Far too many organisations fall into this trap, basically because they just do not understand their audience.
Do you know who your target audience is? Let us know in the comment section!
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