Keywords, conversions, user experience, search engine optimization

What do these words and phrases have in common?

They all relate to how you will attract and convert your target audience.

The challenge of any good campaign digital marketing It is about identifying the specific characteristics of your ideal clients, including geographic, demographic and psychographic variables.

The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will be.

At some point, whether in a Marketing for Beginners course, you've probably heard that Knowing your audience is essentialThe above means that it is not enough to know the demographics and location of your prospects, you must know as much as you can about them, including:

• Personality traits
• Interests
• Values
• Opinions

Knowing all this will help you:

• Create an accurate list of topics and keywords for better targeting
• Better configure pages to convert better
• Creating a great user experience
• Optimize content
• Developing effective calls to action
• Finding key influencers in your market

Here's a step-by-step guide you can use to get to know your audience, help you create a successful marketing campaign, and turn you into a marketing star.

1. Conduct market research

The goal of market research is to gain as much detail as possible about your target audience, so you can then use that information to create buyer personas.

There are many methods to collect this information, including the following:

Consult with other departments

We often work in silos, meaning we stay within our own team or department and don't contact anyone outside of our group.

When you work with digital marketing, you need to take advantage of the vast amount of information that exists between other departments.

For example, the sales team will know what questions prospects are asking and will also know their interests and desires.

If your business has a customer service team, they can provide you with insights into the words customers are using (i.e. potential keywords) and the concerns they have.

Even if your company isn't that big, there are people who are in constant communication with customers and prospects. Take the time to sit down with them and ask them questions about your target audience.

Collecting data using tools

There are many web tools that can help you gather data about your target audience. These tools vary in price, but they can help you build a foundation of information, from basic demographics to specific habits and interests. Some of the tools that can help you can be found in the following links:

https://today.yougov.com/
http://www.demographicspro.com/

Social media research

If you ever wanted to read your customers' minds, social media is the closest you'll get.

This concept is known as social listening. It involves monitoring different social networks to find out what is being said about your brand, your competitors, and topics relevant to your business.

You can even identify trends in your audience's interests and problems.
Additionally, you can determine which social networks your target audience is most active on, as well as the influencers in that space.

Instead of asking your audience questions, you can listen to their social conversations and determine what type of content will be most valuable and relevant to them.

Create a quantitative survey

You'll need to gather more information about your audience than just general demographics. However, that doesn't mean you're going to rule out demographics like age, gender, income level, education, employment, etc.

To gather this information fairly quickly, you can take a quantitative approach. This research method is ideal for surveying a large number of people, such as your existing or potential customer base.

The easiest way to conduct this research is by using an online survey. The data is then quantified, giving you statistical results about your population.
You will be able to see the general characteristics of your target audience.

This approach won’t give you specific insights into individual experiences. Instead, it reflects trends and commonalities among your audience. Tip: SurveyMonkey is a great surveying tool.

Conduct interviews

Interviews are considered a qualitative research method, delving into motivations, thoughts, and even opinions. It's a way to get to know your audience on a more personal level.

Because interviews are time-consuming, the population you research will be small. Generally, you'll aim for 10 to 20 interviews.

One of the simplest ways to conduct qualitative research is to conduct interviews with several existing and prospective customers. Questions should be prepared in advance and designed in such a way that they reveal the respondent's answers:

– Personality traits.
– Purchase preferences.
– Interests.
– Motivations.

The interview itself should be treated as a conversation and you should pay close attention to what is said in it.

Be careful not to put words into the respondent's mouth. Instead, take the time to allow the person to penetrate deeply into his or her thoughts.

A tactical tip: ask permission to record the conversation. Doing so will ensure that important information is not missed. It will also allow you to capture the exact words used.

If you actually listen to the interviews, you will discover a wealth of information that you can use to successfully market and sell to your potential customers.

2. Build your buyer personas

Now that you’ve gathered detailed information about your target audience, you can start creating buyer personas. According to Aberdeen Research, marketers who use personas achieve 73 percent higher conversions.

A buyer persona is not just a buyer profile. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customer base.

The first step helps you gather this information to discover the demographics, motivations, interests, and behaviors of your target customers.

Buyer personas offer a voice of your ideal target customers that ties into your digital marketing efforts.

Think and refer to your buyer personas as real people rather than an abstract audience. This will help you engage in genuine conversations with your current and potential customers.

Below are some tips to help you create personas for your digital marketing campaign.

Identify all the people you are addressing

After conducting your market research, there's a good chance you've identified more than one buyer persona. That's okay. In fact, it's pretty common.
All of these personas should describe different target customers. You'll tailor your content and SEO efforts to connect with each of these customer segments.

For example, if you've identified millennials as one of your buyer personas, you'll be able to develop a content marketing strategy that speaks directly to them. You'll also consider the words they use and the websites they frequent.

Write a detailed description of each person

• Interests
• Pain points
• Priorities
• Goals
• Concerns
• Personality traits

You should be very detailed in your persona description. Include actual quotes for your personas, which should be taken from the interviews you conducted during your market research.

You might consider including a picture of yourself and even a name or archetype, such as Frugal Freddy, Motivated Mary, etc.

If you need a little guidance on describing these personas, there are plenty of free persona creation templates out there, including HubSpot's MakeMyPersona.

Putting people into action

Once you create buyer personas, you should refer to them periodically when you're working on any facet of digital marketing, including SEO positioning, content development and social media marketing.

For example, if you're thinking about redesigning your website, creating a social media strategy, or targeting new keywords, consult your personas.

Consider them as your real customers and focus on the best way to connect with them. You should also assign content to the different personas you identified.

3. Identify the influencers of your target audience

Once you've done your market research and defined your buyer personas, it's time to consider influencers who can help you increase your brand's visibility.

You need to identify the people who have a direct influence on your target audience. These are the people who can significantly impact your customer's purchasing decision.
While influencers can include celebrities, journalists, and even industry analysts, the focus here is on social influencers. These people are the ones who have developed a large social following and engage with their audience on a regular basis.

Social influencers will be different in each market.

For example, if you're trying to reach out to young moms, you might want to find and reach out to a popular mommy blogger. Or, if you're trying to reach out to teens, look at Snapchat celebrities or YouTubers.

Not sure who is an influencer in your market? You can use tools like BuzzSumo or Followerwonk.

When looking for one of these influencers, consider the following.

Pay attention to engagement: The number of social followers is a relevant metric to consider as an influencer, but equally or more important is the level of engagement. Ideally, you want to work with an influencer who has high engagement with followers. Influencer Zach King is a great example. King has over 21 million followers on Instagram and 2.3 million subscribers on YouTube. In an interview, he talked about the importance of an engaged audience and a strong collaboration between the brand and the influencer.

Make sure the influencer likes your brand: You want the influencer to be a true advocate for your brand. This authenticity will come through in their messaging. Consumers are savvy and can often identify when an influencer is truly a fan of a brand. Trying to mislead consumers has the potential to damage the influencer or brand image.

Reaching out to influencers

Once you determine the influencers that are relevant to your target audience, you can begin your outreach.

Take the time to get to know the influencer, just as you would get to know your target customer.

Read or watch their posts and get a sense of what is important to the influencer. Tailor your message to each individual influencer, but at the same time, make sure to clearly communicate your brand’s goals and outcomes.

You should also explain your expectations. You will likely need to compensate the influencer monetarily, so start that conversation right away.

A final piece of advice

Most of the information shared up to this point has to do with marketing.
You must apply proven marketing principles to achieve a great digital marketing or SEO campaign.

While some of these principles have evolved over time, what hasn't changed yet is that you're selling to people.

It's trendy to talk about the evolving consumer, but a good marketer should also focus on what hasn't changed: human instincts, motivations, desires and needs.

The more you know about your audience, including your target customers and key influencers, the more success you will achieve through your digital marketing.

Article taken from: Search Engine Journal