persuasion

What is The Conversion Scientist reading this week?

Neuromarketing – A Simple Hack That Makes You MUCH More Persuasive

If you love the science of persuasion like we do, you should definitely be following my friend Roger Dooley’s blog.
Here’s a great example of how he uses research to deliver actionable advice to marketers and business owners like us.
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Perfect Landing Page Webinar · Formstack

This is a great overview of Landing Page best practices complete with examples. You’ll find a lot in common with our
Chemistry of the Landing Page

    presentation.

    1. Headlines and Ad Copy
    2. Clear and Concise Headlines
    3. Impeccable Grammar
    4. Trust indicators
    5. Call to Action
    6. Buttons
    7. Lose the Links
    8. Visuals (images)
    9. Above the Fold
    10. Always be testing

read more

Landing Page Examples: Untapped Secrets and Sources

We just can’t get enough info on landing pages. We love them.
This article helps you design landing pages for three kinds of visitors:

      1. Cold visitors (no they don’t live up north)
      2. Warm visitors (not necessarily friendly)
      3. Hot visitors (don’t necessarily got it goin’ on)

How do you address these different visitors? Read on.

10 Ways to Convert More Customers | Infographic + eBook

If you enjoy studying the psychology of persuasion the way we do here at Conversion Sciences, you’ll love this infographic from the folks at Help Scout.

A Unique Home Page Split Test Experiment on TimeDoctor.com | Biz 3.0

In my book Your Customer Creation Equation I talk about the two conversions that online services have:

  1. Conversion from visitor to trial
  2. Conversion from tryer to buyer

I recommend that online services find ways to get the visitor started as soon as possible. Online services have the advantage that we can try the product right there online.
This article is further proof that getting the visitor engaged with questions is a more effective way to find more tryers and buyers than the typical home page.

Want to get Brian’s For Further Study posts delivered right to your inbox? Click HERE to sign up.

An easy way to model your best visitors into 4 modes of research, the limits of demographics for buyer personas and how to overcome them, how to use analytics to uncover persona behavior. And we finish up with a fun conversion quiz to test your knowledge.

Demographics can lie to you. In fact, they often do. This makes them very unreliable when you are trying to make decisions about what to put on your website.

How demographics mislead us and how analytics can set us on the right page again.

The Content, headings, copy and images all impact the success of your site. Knowing how to develop these components for your particular audience is the key to higher and higher conversion rates.

I will guide you towards understanding your target audience showing you:

  1. An easy way to model your different buyers.
  2. How demographics often mislead us.
  3. How to find your ideal customers in your analytics.
  4. Then you get to test your own knowledge in the Conversion Quiz: What to Test?!

Accelerating Your Online Business by Optimizing for Buyer Personas

So you have a fantastic testing tool. You have this opportunity to test things on your pages, increase your conversion rates, move your business forward, hit the goals that you want.

The question is, what are you going to test?

Unless you have unlimited traffic, you can find yourself spending months trying to test through all the options.

I’m going to show you some basic principle that will help you better understand who you’re marketing to and help you choose the first thing to test.

You’re going to take a scientific approach and develop a list of hypotheses that are most likely to move things forward for your business or digital marketing strategies. Make those the first things that you’re going to test, and then we’re going to play the conversion quiz show.

An Easy Way to Model your Best Visitors: The limits of Demographics

First of all, the ground rules. Your business has only three or four customers living in thousands of addresses.

There are only three or four people coming to your website or your other online marketing from thousands of computers. And the point here is to try to sell to everyone.

And if you try to optimize a website for anyone that could be coming to the site, you are going to end up optimizing for no one. You’re really not going to learn very much. And the marketing you’re doing is not going to land.

Specificity is the hallmark of good conversion, high conversion rates.

So how do you get specific and target the right people that are coming to your site?

The answer is: you want to know who those best customers are, target the best customers.

What you’re doing is going to effectively target a much wider audience of those that are coming in. And it’s going to have this effect, those that are not as qualified pretty quickly are going to go away.

Let’s talk a little bit about demographics. We want to find and understand those three or four who are really the key visitors to our site that we really want coming.

Demographics is not sufficient.

Here’s a great example. Where does someone making $175,000 dollars a year live?

The marketing director might think $175,000, how can you even afford a house on that salary? The copywriter on the team might say, wow, with $175,000. I’d live in a mansion.

This is a simple illustration of why demographic segments don’t really give us the information that we need to know what to test.

Buyer Personas and Triggers

The key here is triggers. We don’t want to understand who people are. We want to understand why they’re on our site right now.

And if we can understand those core stories, we get some really powerful insights that are going to narrow down the content we’re making, how we’re talking to people.

Let me give you this example. Here is a woman, early 30s, and she needs a plumber because she wants to remodel her bathroom. So, she’s going to come to a plumbing website. She’s going to be interested in:

  • Are they bonded?
  • Are the crews qualified?
  • Do they work with the materials used?
  • Have they done anything with anybody else in my neighborhood?
  • How long have they been in business?
  • She’s going to really want to dig in because this is a big expenditure.

Same woman, same demographic has a leak and the water is about to ruin her new wood floors. She doesn’t care about whether you’re bonded at this point. She does not need any references. All she needs to know is:

  • that you have trucks traveling the city
  • that you can be there quickly
  • and the phone number.

Same demographic, two very different sets of of conversion strategies that we would put in place on the plumbers’ website for those.

Four Modes of Research to Model Buyer Personas

Here’s a great model that the Eisenberg brothers put together in their book, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark. And it divides visitors into what we call their mode of research. They call it their mode of persuasion.

But this is how people are coming and how they want to get information on your website.

And there are two indices. They can be making decisions very quickly or very deliberately, very methodically, and they’re going to make decisions, emotionally or logically. And you’ll see how powerful this is.

We give this quarter some names.

The Competitives

The first quarter are those who make decisions quickly and logically, we call them competitives. These guys are goal oriented. They’re looking to solve a problem. They’re looking for something specific. They know what they’re looking for. And so they’re going to come to your website expecting you to help them drill down into what they’re looking for very quickly.

The Methodicals

The methodicals, on the other hand, make decisions deliberately and logically. They’re going to need more information. Methodicals don’t like the human touch. And in fact, they are probably not even going to call you. They already know, most of the answers to the questions that they might ask.

The humanists

The humanists make decisions very deliberately and very emotionally. These are some of the hardest folks to convert. They are looking for relationships in general. They want to know who they’re dealing with. They want to know the personalities of the company. And people in relationships are at the center of how they make decisions.

The Spontaneous

And then finally, the spontaneous visitors. They’re going to make a decision quickly. They’re going make a decision emotionally and they are looking for action. They’re activated by action. They’re not going to spend a lot of time doing research. This is the crowd that lends credence to the statistics you hear that you only have 8 seconds to get somebody’s attention on your website. That is not true, except for this kind of a visitor.

Understanding Buyer Personas Mode of Research

So let’s apply this to our early 30s woman, if she’s remodeling her bathroom, she’s probably going to come in a very methodical mode. She’s going to take time, research and take time to make a decision.

However, she’s going to be very spontaneous if you show her on the site, we have an emergency number. Here’s the number. She’s not going to think twice. She’s going to take action.

How to Use Analytics to Uncover Persona Behavior

Now, for those of you in the audience who might be a little competitive or methodical as you like to look at things logical, I’ve got a way of dicing this up, using analytics.

This is an illustration of how we can use what we learn from our analytics systems and from our tests to apply to this.

On my website, I can measure a couple of things. One of the things I can measure is how much time someone spends per visit. I can also measure how many pages they visit.

Time on site tells me if they’re spending a lot of time on site, then the approach is more deliberate.

If they spend less time then they are probably more quick decision making.

Visiting a lot of pages. I would think they’re proceeding in a more logical manner as opposed to fewer pages where they’re going to have more emotional triggers.

So I’ve given them these names.

  • Bouncy Bob, the guy that didn’t spend any time on the site only visits a few pages and includes those people who are unqualified and bounce away.
  • Lost Lucy, she’s spending not very much time on the site, but she’s visiting a lot of pages. And I call her Lost Lucy, because it’s like somebody trying to find what they’re looking for. This could be a frustrated competitive.
  • Methodical Mary. Lots of time on the site. She’s going to look at a lot of pages.
  • And One hit Juan, he’s going to spend a lot of time on site but he may only hit one or two pages. On my site there’s video pages where Juan is all over. He’s going to spend 40 minutes watching some video. That may be the only page that he looks at.

So when we put these into our analytics, we can get some interesting profiles. Of course, you may discover you have a high bounce rate due to more technical reasons and here’s how to fix your conversion problem.

Here’s a neat dataset that I have access to and 66% of the traffic is bouncy.

The first thing you might say is “I need to talk to my advertising guys because they’re not sending qualified traffic”. Conversion rate is very low 0.05%. About 7.6% of that traffic would qualify as a lost Lucy.

Again, a very low conversion rate. If these are those competitives that are coming, looking for something and we’re not doing a good job of selling it to them, we need to look at that. We need to get that conversion rate up. That’s a fair amount of traffic.

Juan in this data set was almost 6% of the traffic, a little bit better conversion rate 0.7%. So we’re doing something right.

But look at Mary, 23% of the traffic and she’s converting at over 3%. Here is an opportunity, 23 percent. What can I do to make sure that Mary is getting that information? She needs to make that deliberate and logical decision that she wants to make.

This is a great way that personas can play out in analytics.

How to Leverage Buyer Personas Mode of Research

So, let’s talk about how we use this. Let’s say we know what the stories are. We know we’ve got buyer personas coming in certain research modes and we may have someone in all of those research modes.

How does that affect our decisions? I’m going to show you some examples. Don’t go out and change your pages based on this, because the Conversion Scientist told you this is the way to lay it out.

These are some examples of things that you would test first if you knew who your personas were.

First of all, we’re all aware of the fold, the dreaded above the fold. We want that to appeal to our quick decision makers, our spontaneous and our competitors. We’ve got to get their attention above the fold because they’re not likely to scroll and stick around unless they see something relevant.

And below the fold, our consumers are methodical, who are a little bit more studied, paced and deliberate in their decision making, are more likely to scroll and see the information there.

What to Test with Competitives

So let’s look at our competitives. What would we put above the fold? Well, again, these guys know what they’re looking for, so we need what I call PAY-OFF copy.

We need a what’s in it for me headline and lots of what’s in it for me copy it them very quickly. Let them know why they need to stick around and take action.

These guys again, if your navigation is not satisfying them, give them a search box so that they can get to what they’re looking for.

They are looking for relevant pictures. They’re scanning for a reason to stick around and by relevant, I certainly don’t mean to stock photos that so many of our B2B sites have of pretty people. They want something that tells them they’re in the right place or at least on the right trail.

Spontaneous Buyer Persona Hypotheses to Consider

For our spontaneous type, quick facts, these guys are not going to spend a lot of time. If we can, above fold, give them the basic information they need to take action and give them an obvious way to take action, these guys will do that.

Bulleted benefits, details that they need to make a decision on the sale such as price. And a quick summary of what other people think of that are some ideas.

And then anything else that you want to support there, if you’ve got a guarantee, or anything to support the decision, it needs to be done in a very high contrast way. I facetiously call these the bright, shiny objects. But someone who is looking for ways to take action is going to be drawn to those.

Ideas to Test on Methodicals

Now, the methodicals, this one is a little bit of an exception. So above the fold, they’re going to be looking for a logical navigation.

And we all focus a lot on our basic tree navigation, our main navigation primary NAV. It appeals very much to these guys and to people who aren’t finding anything on the site.

But below the fold, you will want the details. These guys want to process that. They want to understand the details of how something works or what the details of the product are, depending on what you’re doing.

Also below the fold for humanists, we could put some social proof. So they’re looking for, again, a relationship and they put a lot of stock in what people think of a product. So the reviews and testimonials, those sorts of things would be valuable for them. And trust symbols, again, based on the relationships. If you have third party symbols, if you’re a member of associations, if you won awards, those will generally resonate with more humanist visitor.

These are the first things to test. As I said, don’t go off and just change things. This is where you want to start.

Fun Conversion Quiz to Test your Buyer Personas Knowledge

So that’s all very illustrative. Hopefully you’ve absorbed what I’ve said and you understand the concepts here. And we’re going to find out.

The way this is played is I’m going to describe a persona that is coming to a business and I’m going to provide 4 alternatives sources of things that we could test.

Your job is to tell me which ones you would test first. This one’s a gimme. So this is a practice.

The business is a plumber. This persona we’re calling Miriam the trigger is the sink is leaking profusely on new wood floors. Her mode of research: she’s coming to the site in a spontaneous mode.

What calls to action should we test first with this sort of a visitor?

  1. do we want her to contact us?
  2. do we want to provide her with a phone number?
  3. do we want a big red button that says emergency hotline with that number?
  4. big red button that gives her a vanity 800 number?

Actually, you might want to test both 3 and 4. She’s not going to be as interested in whether or not she’s paying a toll and an 800 number might sound like a national company.

So perhaps number three will be the one that we first test.

Let’s move on to another example.

The business sells sports equipment online. James is a soccer player, he plays to win and he spares no expense on game. His trigger, his teammate brought some hot new gear to the game and he is interested in keeping up. He’s coming in competitive research mode. He knows what he’s looking for.

What categories would we put in front of him? eCommerce sites typically divide things into categories functionally. So which ones would be the first ones we would test for him?

  1. Is it going to be soccer equipment?
  2. Is it going to be hot new products?
  3. Is it going to be editor’s choice
  4. Is it going to be best deals?

The twos and threes seem to have it, and I agree. So, hot new products is definitely what he’s looking for, an editor’s choice, something that the editors have found that is exceptional may also appeal to him. But I would say number two is awesome.

Why isn’t best deals the choice? Because he’s not looking to save money. He’s looking for what’s new and hot.

Let’s say we’re writing copy for a business software manufacturer, Roy is an operations manager. His boss asked him to research some workflow software. And now his job is kind of on the line. He’s spending somebody else’s money. So he’s going to come in a more methodical mode and take his time. This is a big decision.

What style of copy would appeal to Roy?

  • Number one, something like “Our on-demand software provides the best of breed solution to quickly drive performance information to the right people in an organization.” Just sounds like a viable value proposition.
  • Number two, “New IBM case study. Business Transformation achieved using SOA and other technologies for Texas Health and Human Services Commission.”
  • Number three, a page that’s got a lot of detail, charts, graphs.

What do you think is going to appeal to our methodical Roy? I thought he would the IBM case study would appeal to him if it was relevant.

If it was a business like his or a specific problem like his or if he knew what SOA meant, number two might be a good one to test. But I think 3 would be the first thing that I would try.

This is a pet kennel business. Sarah, is a sales engineer, and she travels and she has these doggies that she loves and she needs a safe place for them when she goes on her business trips. And since these are her dogs and she’s very religious oriented, she’s going to come in a very humanist way.

So when she comes to our site, what headlines would we pick for her?

  1. The best price in town on kenneling services.
  2. Our trained staff looks forward to caring for your pet.
  3. The largest kennel in the city.
  4. Or give your dog a vacation.

What do we have here? Everybody seems to agree on to give your dog a vacation may also appeal to her. But I would say number 2 would be the first thing that I would test on this is our trained staff.

Again, relationships. You’re talking about your employees, not your business. That sort of language is going to appeal to a humanist.

All right, last one. The businesses: IT software. This is Rick, he’s an IT admin. Trigger: one of his servers is down and he needs a quick way to diagnose the problem. His mode of research: competitive. So you’re going to present him with a form, a demo form.

What text would you put on a button that would more likely ensure that he would finish the form and click the button?

He’s coming in a competitive mode. He knows what he’s looking for. He could also model as spontaneous. But since he’s an IT guy and he might be a little bit more logical about his decision making.

  • Number one, Free demo. Submit.
  • Number 2, Free demo. Start demo.
  • Number three. Free demo. Next step.
  • And number 4 Free demo. Download now.

Both 2 and 4 are good. To start the demo says I am about to get close to doing a download. Now I’m about to get closer to what I need to solve the problem. Submit, what is he submitting to? And next step sounds like, am I really getting there? Is there something else going on? He may bounce back and try a different site and download the demo there.

How Buyer Personas will Rock your Conversion Rates Summary

So this is one simple facet. I don’t know if you’re familiar with buyer personas, but they are a powerful tool. There are other facets because more commentary can give you great insights and the keywords, the list of what we call points of resolution, pieces of information they need to feel comfortable taking action is very important, where they’re coming from.

Are they coming from a search engine on certain keywords? Are they coming from an ad?

All of these play into a persona’s profile and each of them help you make better decisions about what to put on your site and what to be testing to get more people to convert to deals and move the business forward.

Ultimately, personas tell us and the entire team why they came. And if you’re dealing with managing a team, perhaps that is putting up the website, you’ve got designers, developers, it guys, copywriters, photographers, videographers, depending on the kind of content you’re putting out there, aren’t all of them going to have a different view of the customer?

You can give personas to each one of them and they will very quickly get an idea of who they’re designing for, who they’re creating for, etcetera.

It’s a very powerful tool for the team.

Webinar: Accelerating Your Online Business by Optimizing for Buyer Personas

Watch it now.

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Thanks to Maxymiser for the opportunity to share this information with you.

PPC Help: Improving your Landing Page | Trada

I’ll say it again: If your SEM company isn’t INSISTING on helping you with landing pages; if they are satisfied to pick any page on your site as a destination for your expensive PPC marketing; then you are being taken to the cleaners.

Most of what you need to know is right here in this article. Contact me if you still have questions.

Tags: PPC help landing page landing pages

How To Implement Rel=Author

Google+ is affecting search rankings for authors on the web, so we need to make sure we’re playing the game. This article from @AjKohn of tells us how to establish ourselves as the masters of our content in the eyes of Google using the “rel” attribute in our links.
Tags: google seo rel=author google+ author
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Fiber One Sparks Up Boomer Love With Cheech and Chong | ClickZ

It is always tough to market to a specific target. Here Fiber One is clearly targeting boomers, and a particular brand of boomer. No doubt this will hurt their sales to conservative families. There will be some backlash. But, we all must be creating content for more and more specific markets, and walking away from the others if we’re going to grow our businesses. Hat tip to Fiber One: may your bravery be rewarded with sales and market share.

Tags: content targeting Boomer Fiber
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Language, context and conversions: thoughtful prose from the pros | SEO Copywriting

“The Internet isn’t passive. When you search online, you plan to do something:  buy, learn, play, find.  As soon as you go to Google, Yahoo or Bing, you’re on the hunt.”

There are those among us who have a true command of words and their use. I marvel at them. It is a power that is critical to persuasion, conversion and selling. Gabriella Sannino clearly sees it as a power to help people solve their problems. What better brand experience can you deliver than to help someone find answers to their questions?

Tags: writing copy seo conversion
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Your conversion marketing practice is actually a “stack” of disciplines or online marketing strategy components each of which you will have to master or have some level of capability with.

Mastering all of these online marketing strategy components may sound like a tall order, and it is. However, if you are marketing online, you are involved with conversion issues by definition.

The Quintessential Guide to Online Marketing Strategy Components

You may be wondering if marketing automation is really worth the investment. But if you’re a performance-oriented marketer–focused on the science of turning prospects into future customers, always concerned about knowing exactly which of your marketing efforts worked and why – that’s like asking if you’re getting your money’s worth from Microsoft Word; it’s something you just can’t do your job without.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through the modern online marketing strategy components – a strategy that cannot be implemented without automation.

To automate something, we must first understand it. Performance marketers are focused on turning their online channels into lead generation engines or revenue streams. They focus on conversion.

“Conversion” is the term given to a series of magical events in the life of a customer,in which a stranger becomes a suspect, a suspect becomes a prospect and a prospect becomes a customer.

In online marketing, a marketer focused on converting visitors to prospects or sales must embrace a set of capabilities, each enabled by and depending on its predecessor. These steps create a capability “stack” (see Fig. 1) that is helpful in planning the implementation of the efforts that make conversion marketing possible.

The online marketing strategy components for conversion you need to master.

Figure 1: The Conversion Marketing Components

The Online Marketing Strategy Components or Conversion Stack

Today, when one thinks of conversion marketing, one generally thinks of Website Optimization or Conversion Rate Optimization. These practices focus on measurement and optimization, and represent the top of the stack of capabilities that online marketers must master to outpace competitors online.

Before a business can begin measuring and optimizing a website or other online marketing strategy, the foundational issues of business goals, visitor profiles, content requirements, and delivery channels must be addressed.

Every business with a Web presence has invested at some level in the conversion stack. However, those companies that embrace these capabilities develop a momentum and velocity in their online strategy that allows them to accelerate past entrenched businesses.

These businesses use the conversion stack to leverage their marketing efforts, changing the math of marketing in their favor. The goal is to grow revenue while reducing real marketing costs.

Marketing automation helps marketers define and carry out each capability in the stack with a precision that would be difficult if not impossible to achieve otherwise, and therefore plays a crucial role in an organization committed to performance marketing.

Business Goals: The Base of the Marketing Strategy Components

Knowing exactly what you want your website to do for your business.

The digital space cannot meet all of the goals a business has for growth. However, your business can accomplish things online that are impossible or cost prohibitive through another channel, such as:

  • Improve the quality of leads, reducing sales costs and increasing close ratios.
  • Reduce inbound calls for information by moving interactions online.
  • Eliminate expensive marketing channels.
  • Reach prospects not found via other media.
  • Add online services that make your offering more valuable.
  • Increase cross-sells and up-sells.
  • Increase average sales price.
  • Steal market share and mind share from our competitors.

At this stage, we seek to define the integration points of our marketing automation system, and to establish our baselines performance metrics.

Defining Your Marketing Automation Integration Points

While we can measure many things with sophisticated marketing automation tools, it is critical that we focus on those capabilities that are necessary to our business goals, and ignore (or defer) those that are not.

If our business has a long sales cycle involving direct sales efforts, integration with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is crucial; it is how we track our leads through the sales process.

If we are tasked with reducing the sales cycle, we will want a two-way integration between our CRM and our marketing automation system so that we can monitor our success over time. Otherwise, a simple one-way integration may be sufficient.

Likewise, if we seek to increase the average sales price of new customers, we will need to integrate with our financial system to retrieve and measure that goal.

Choosing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

There is a metric that we can use to either define our success for each goal, or approximate it. For example, “reducing sales costs” means that the sales efforts are converting more leads into customers.

However, there is no off-the-shelf metric for “sales cost” reported by our marketing automation systems.

Instead, the close ratio – the number of leads converted divided by leads generated – would be a reasonable proxy for reducing sales costs.

Likewise, the success of cross-sells or up-sells may be measured by the frequency of repeat purchases or by the average lifetime value of existing customers.

There should be a small set of KPIs that define your top-level online business goals. All other metrics help you answer the question of “why.”

Don’t let the metrics drive your curiosity. Let the business goals drive the choice of metrics.

Defining Your Baselines

There are lies, damn lies and analytics, to paraphrase author Mark Twain. Analytics are rarely accurate.

You must instead measure changes in your KPIs. To measure changes, you must first establish baselines for each.

In most industries, a year’s worth of analytics data is necessary to fully account for seasonal changes in the marketplace, but don’t let this stop you. Implement your analytics tools and let them begin collecting data. In the mean time, estimate your KPIs manually, by gathering data wherever you can. Eventually, your analytics will determine your baselines.

The goal is for the current performance of any KPI to exceed its baseline. Proper reporting is done in terms of percentage increase or decrease. If a KPI consistently rests above its baseline, you have established a new baseline to beat in the coming weeks and months.

These baselined KPIs define your “dashboard.”

However, as you will soon find out, dashboards are unsatisfying because they don’t answer the question, “Why is this KPI changing.” We’ll talk about understanding “why” a little later.

Visitor Profiling: Aligning Your Business Goals with Visitor Buying Habits

Let’s review the second of the online marketing strategy components. Understanding the best visitors needs, the reason they are visiting today and the information they need to feel comfortable taking action. Traditionally, there has been a disconnect between the websites and the needs of visitors. Most business sites follow a “brochure” style approach, in which the site talks about the company and its products.

This is not what your visitors want.

They want you to talk about them and their problems.

Touchpoint Personas differ from traditional customer segments in one significant way: We are only interested in what they need at the moment they are interacting with our measurable online communications. This singular focus allows us to zero in on those things that a visitor needs. Touchpoint Personas are the important tool at this stage and you can click on the link to read my article on touchpoint personas and points of resolution.

These become the content that you will use on your website, in your outbound marketing and throughout your channels. As you will see, content allows us to answer the question “why” when our performance changes, for the better or worse.

Content Strategy: We are No Longer Marketers

What content will you create for these important visitors? Will it be articles, video, or audio? These are important considerations made easy from your touchpoint personas.

We are no longer marketers, but publishers. In almost any industry, any market, it is absolutely necessary that we provide information, guidance, education and entertainment to the marketplace. The Internet has turned our prospects into researchers, and we must provide them with the content that answers their questions.

Our personas give us a complete picture of those visitors that will move our business forward. We know why they are visiting and how they like to receive information. Their demographic profile will tell us which technologies they use and this helps us select the proper format for our content. The points of resolution tell us exactly what our content should cover.

At this point, our content strategy should unfold like the board game “Clue.” In the popular board game, we use a process of elimination to understand who committed a murder, which weapon was used, and where the deed was done.

In our game of “persona clue”, we create a list of similar actions. We deduce who we are targeting, which point of resolution we are addressing, and where this information will be delivered.

We might say, “Darla Decider will download ‘Ten Reasons Projects Fail’ as a white paper on our website.” What we have done with this step is change the conversation from, “Which landing pages do we need to develop?” to, “How can we make this important content available to our best prospects?” Content is the coal that will stoke the furnaces of your marketing automation system and one key ingredient of the online marketing strategy components you need to master.

Media and Channels: Mixing Media in the Right Proportions

How do your visitors want to hear from you? Where can your visitors be reached? Your choice of channels may include webinars, email, social media, blog posts and more.

If our content strategy is about giving prospects what they need, our media strategy is about placing content where our prospects can find it.

Touchpoint personas will be immensely helpful in identifying the right mix of channels through which to deliver and advertise content. Demographics will give you some idea of your prospects’ media preferences.

For example, prospects over 55 are still best reached through email.

Media selection is an evolving process, especially in a world in which so many new channels are appearing every year. In a few short years, we’ve moved from Web pages, email, and banner ads, to search marketing, social networks, RSS feeds, blogs, microblogs, and mobile applications.

It’s an exciting time to be a marketer.

This is where marketing automation becomes indispensable. It is your publishing and distribution system. It must help you manage a stream of content delivered through a variety of channels and track results along the way. Your investment in publishing automation will also allow you to test multiple versions of your content to see which affects your KPIs most positively.

Your System Should Be Easy to Use

You should be able to intuitively setup a variety of content campaigns and see the results. The days of the “launch and watch” website are over. In most industries changes must now come weekly or daily.

Your System Should Not Be a Silo

Producers will need appropriate access to create and stage new content. It should be easy for members of the team to check content and settings to ensure the campaign will launch successfully.

Your System Should Offer a Variety of Metrics

Each content format and channel will be measured differently. You must be able to track downloads of whitepapers. You must be able to track the conversion rates of email-based content. You must be aware of how often a link is shared on social networks.

Needless to say, you will need some help coordinating all of this activity and measuring the results. And this leads us to the another one of the online marketing strategy components. If you aren’t intimate with your marketing automation tool, you’re not doing performance marketing.

Online Marketing Strategy Components: Measuring and Optimizing

Putting the analytics and processes in place to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. This often means designing your online presence differently to enable tracking of visitor behavior. Testing your assumptions is the only way to achieve the high conversion rates that make you seem invincible to your competitors. This is how you reduce the cost of all online marketing efforts.

At the pinnacle of the online marketing strategy components is optimization.

Optimization involves making changes based on the metrics you’ve captured.

Every communication is a test.

Each time you send a communication, you are testing a set of assumptions – assumptions about what your prospects want and need in their buying process, about the format of the content, and about the places they want to consume it.

Every communication can tell us the “why” of our success or failure.

For each communication, you must devise a strategy to measure the effectiveness of the content. Each communication will have a set of primary KPIs.

An email newsletter may invite readers to purchase a new line of shoes, and to join your Facebook page as well. If the primary goal is to sell shoes, you must be able to measure the conversion rate of the email.

It isn’t sufficient to increase sales of the shoe. You must have a strategy to know how many sales were generated by this email.

Watch the Results

The final step of each communication – the step too often overlooked – is reviewing your results. When the communication has run its course, you simply look at the KPIs to learn the secrets desires of your audience.

  • Which articles are read most?
  • Which subject lines convert well?
  • Which discounts generate sales?
  • Which tweets draw the most visits?

Your marketing automation system should provide easy drill-down to the metrics that define the success of each effort.

The Online Marketing Strategy Components You Need to Master: Conclusions

You are sitting in the monthly executive meeting. You have created a slide deck with your top-level KPIs as reported by your marketing automation system. They are a summary of how your individual efforts have affected the bottom line.

When the questions come, you know the “why” and the “what’s next” for your marketing efforts. “Why did our conversion rates go down, but our revenue go up?” the VP of Sales asks.

You know the answer. You tick off the four or five programs that delivered solid results, and then list those that drew unqualified traffic to the site, stating that they will be modified or discontinued.

You’re a performance marketer.

The Business that Knows Grows

Each item of content you produce will have different versions, be available through multiple channels, and will be measured differently. Today’s online businesses won’t function without a useful marketing automation system, a tool that be used by many members of the team.

The Online Marketing Strategy Components aren’t linear, and businesses can expand their capabilities in any of these areas.

However, those businesses that dominate in their industry through online marketing will be proficient in all of the capabilities presented here.

Online Marketing Strategy Components Resources

For an explanation of KPIs read “Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity” by Avinash Kaushik.

To develop touchpoint personas, read “Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing” by Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa T. Davis.

For designing measurable social media campaigns, read “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” by Dave Evans

Online Marketing Strategy Components: Don’t Worry

The good news is that the folks at SiteTuners.com, lead by the always brilliant Tim Ash have put together the Conversion Conference.

The attendees will be leading the online charge in each of their industries.

I can think of no better way to get up the many learning curves that your conversion practice needs than this two day conference.

Topics at Conversion Conference include:

You’ve likely read books written by some of the Conversion Conference Speakers, like Landing Page Optimization and Web Design for ROI. There’s no question that the speakers at this conference are the folks you want to be learning from. Check it out. You can even save $250 if you use promo code CCE650 when you register on the Conversion Conference website.

If you won’t be there, I pray that your competitors won’t be either.

P. S. I do a complete writeup of the Online Marketing Strategy Components in The Quintessential  Marketing Automation Guidebook, Conversion  Stack: Marketing Automation for Performance Marketers. It is free and you should find it enlightening.

Why do so many marketing departments have trouble turning personas into actionable marketing gold? I believe it is because traditional “buyer personas” are too broad in their definition.

In this post, I introduce you to Touchpoint Personas and identify their key components.

I will compare the concept of touchpoint personas vs buyer personas. If you are interested in user personas check them out on this article.

Personas are fictional representations of your customers designed to help you understand what to say to prospects and how to deliver content to them.

There is no better predictor of conversion success than the availability of personas.

“Your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt.”

The Anatomy of a Great Online Persona

Melanie is your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt. Bill is the voice that rings through the headsets of your customer service support people, unwavering in his desire to get what he wants. Amy is that segment of your house list who got distracted before she finished ordering online.

None of these people exist, but they are powerful guides for any business that wants to grow in an age of digital content.

Melanie, Bill and Amy are touchpoint personas, and they can walk right into any meeting you have and “lay down the law.” They know what they want, and they are your ally in getting the resources you need to deliver.

Read on to learn why a touchpoint persona is so powerful and to figure out what information you should include to help you understand the customer.

Creating online Touchpoint Personas for increased persuasion and conversions. Key components and differences with buyer personas. Read on.

Creating online Touchpoint Personas for increased persuasion and conversions.

How is a touchpoint persona different from a buyer persona?

Those businesses with the most effective content marketing strategies are using buyer personas as their guide. But, buyer personas have the following limitations when it comes to creating a customer journey and its implementation:

  • They may not be found in every channel. A buyer persona that visits your brick and mortar store may never buy online.
  • They often do not comprehend the limits and strengths of individual channels. In the store, the salesperson is the primary way customers interact with your brand. Online, there are far more communication options.
  • The demographics associated with each are open to interpretation. What kind of home does a person making $175,000 a year live in? Some may say a mansion. Some may say a small ranch.
  • Touchpoint personas focus the team on one channel: the store, the website, the phone, the social graph, etc. The result is fewer personas per channel and more specific personas, which means a more consistent effort on the part of your production teams.

Creating online touchpoint personas: the 7 Components

Here are the components of the touchpoint personas that Conversion Sciences creates for clients. Much of this has been adopted from the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

1Demographics

Demographics play only a small part in the touchpoint persona. Age and gender give us an idea of their technical savvy and possible communication styles. Business role will be important for B2B and some B2C sales.

Don’t muddy the water with demographics that don’t apply. For example, marital status may not be helpful in a B2B sale. If not, don’t include it.

2Customer Commentary

The customer commentary answers the question, “Why are they coming to this site at this time in their lives?”

Unlike buyer personas, the customer commentary is written in the voice of the persona. This helps the marketing team empathize with the people visiting your site. It provides the proper vocabulary for writing and keyword research. Answer this question, and you will know exactly how to create content and ad copy for them.

3Mode of Persuasion

The customer commentary will tell you much about the way a certain kind of visitor is going to make a decision, from which you can identify their mode of persuasion.

Will they decide to take action quickly or slowly? Will they seek to decide emotionally or logically? The Eisenbergs outline four primary modes of persuasion to guide your designers and writers: Competitive, Methodical, Humanist and Spontaneous.

4Funnel Points or Customer Touchpoints

What is bringing the persona to this touchpoint, and where are they arriving?

  • Did a referral drive them to type in your domain?
  • Did an online search bring them to your home page?
  • Did a banner ad or email bring them to a landing page?

List these scenarios here, and strive to get visitors close to their points of resolution as directly as possible. Don’t limit these touch points or funnel points to those currently in your marketing mix, but consider new outreach methods based on how these types of customers will find you.

5Points of Resolution

What are the important pieces of information this kind of visitor needs to feel comfortable and confident in taking action? This is your content guide, from which your editorial calendar will rise. Points of resolution may be as simple as “price and delivery” or as complex as “a full understanding of our manufacturing process.”

6Conversion Beacons and Conversion Points

The conversion beacon calls a visitor to action. A conversion point tells you that a visitor has taken action. In the online world, a big red button may serve as a conversion beacon, and a confirmation page may be the conversion point that tells you that a visitor has completed a form.

These map the visitors’ buying processes to the businesses’ selling processes. They also tell you which key performance indicators will gauge the success of your changes.

7Priority

Touchpoint personas are quite thorough and will generate more ideas than can be reasonably implemented, but one conversion beacon or one content item may have a significant impact on leads and sales.

The Eisenbergs recommend listing out the actions generated from these personas. Estimate the minimum time, positive impact and smallest effort for each of them on a scale from one to five. Add these three values together and start working on those with the highest total.

Keep your customer personas out of the drawer

Your touchpoint personas should influence your decisions, and they should evolve as you learn what is working and what is not. Don’t put them in a drawer when you’re done. Print them out and put them in your conference room or break room.

Consider placing them on a collaborative system so that the organization can change them organically.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is easy to create personas and customer journey maps, but it is more difficult to breathe life into them.

To thoroughly explore the power of touchpoint personas, I strongly recommend the book Waiting for your Cat to Bark? by Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg. For more on touchpoints please read Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by David Evans.

Do you use touchpoint personas or something similar? If so, are there additional things that you include?

The Anatomy of a Great Web Persona was originally published on a post for the Content Marketing Institute

Brian Massey

P. S. Get full access to the Lab when you join The Conversion Scientist email list.

You can connect with thousands of visitors to your site by understanding only four modes of persuasion.

Modes of Persuasion: Relate to Four Connect with Thousands

Relate to Four Connect with Thousands

Communicating is connecting. If you’re communicating successfully, each of your readers will feel that you are writing directly to them.

I’m going to introduce you to a method of writing that will forge strong connections with your readers.

You will understand your readers when you understand the four “Modes of Persuasion.” Every visitor fits into one of four modes, and, as will see, each mode describes a different way of connecting. If you can master each of these modes, you can effectively draw anyone closer with your words.

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The Four Modes of Persuasion

Each of your visitors will come in one of four modes: Competitive, Methodical, Humanist, or Spontaneous.

COMPETITIVE visitors are looking for information that will make them better, smarter or more cutting-edge. Use benefit statements and payoffs in your headings to draw them into your content.

METHODICALS like data and details. Include specifics and proof in your writing to connect with them.

HUMANISTS want information that supports their relationships. They will relate to your writing if you share the human element in your topic.

SPONTANEOUS visitors are the least patient. They need to know what’s in it for them and may not read your entire story. Provide short headings for them to scan so that they can get to the points that are important to them.

When you understand that every visitor consumes information differently, you can build empathy with more of your readers. In time, your content will appeal to a wider audience making your Web site more enjoyable and accessible.

You can learn more about these four Modes of Persuasion in the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.


21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks to Skyrocket Conversions

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

  • 43 Pages with Examples
  • Assumptive Phrasing
  • "We" vs. "You"
  • Pattern Interrupts
  • The Power of Three

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