Use Personas to Improve Marketing Accountability and Competitive Advantage

Personas are fictional descriptions of people. People with needs. People such as target customers or information seekers. Personas have a hidden power widely untapped by marketing.

Personas enhance the impersonal user requirements lists that typically drive technology projects. User requirements lists work for simple products with few functional goals. Websites on the other hand are complex interactive experiences that have to satisfy a myriad of visitors and visitor goals. In designing online Web experiences, personas have been most widely accepted and used to improve usability. However, personas can also be used to strengthen marketing and make marketing more accountable for results.

Using personas should not be completely new to marketing. Profiles are used widely in marketing to craft brand messages for specific market segments. Take these profiles to a more granular level and create personas. Then use these personas to help prioritize marketing initiatives, define success measures and hone in on how the Web can help us boost an organization's competitive advantage.

When personas are created so that they bring the most important prospects and customers to life, personas can help you and your organization:

• Agree quickly on Web visitor wants and needs. By representing your target audience as individual personas and understanding what each needs to satisfy their goals, a multitude of people will be satisfied. Online features are less likely to overbuilt or underbuilt, although there's always room for improvement.
  
  
• Help identify the measures of success that matter. Rather than collect data on everything possible, collect the data that will help you track indicators that tell you whether you're succeeding in serving target personas or need to take action by redirecting your efforts.
  
  
• Strengthen your competitive advantage. Don't just follow what appears to be "current practice" on the Web, regardless of whether you sell on the Web or use it for lead generation or building credibility. How do you want to set your organization apart from your competition? By understanding your customers, why they go to the Web, and your site specifically, you'll quickly hone in on how you can out-service and out-perform your competition.
  

The only way to appreciate how this is different from working from a long list of "user requirements" is to try this process in your organization. Create personas and use them. Compare the outcome to previous efforts created to satisfy the "average user". (If you do try it, we'd love to hear about your experience.)

We have some tips on persona design on our website. If you need more, I highly recommend the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing (see on Amazon), by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa T. Davis.

What's your experience? Has designing for personas improved results and marketing accountability?

June Li
ClickInsight

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Google Subscribers Now Counted Individually

Does your web analytics data show visitors coming to your blog who are returning visitors but you appear to have few subscribers? Are you a Feedburner publisher? Until two days ago, even if you had hundreds of subscribers who used either Google's Reader or personalized homepage to read your blog, all you'd see is a grand total of ... one.

No more! On February 17, Feedburner began reporting "Google Feedfetcher" subscribers individually. See Feedburner's Google Now Reporting Subscribers and Google Reader's One subcriber, two subscribers, three... where Google writes:

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds...[read more].

For this blog, Google Feedfetcher subscribers now lead in share of feeds.

June Li
ClickInsight

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Google's Adwords Quality Score Bug: Check Your PPC Metrics

If you have Adwords campaigns, check your Adwords acquisition and conversion metrics for a possible dip due to inactive keywords.

Earlier today, some of our Adwords campaigns went sideways. Quite a few keywords, including one that had a 25% clickthrough rate (CTR) over the past 4 weeks and a good landing page, all of a sudden went inactive because of poor quality -- "Increase quality or raise bid to $11.00 to activate". The odd thing was that other lower CTR keywords were still active. Google's Inside Adwords blog posted about a Quality Score Update "coming next week", but nothing about a quality score algorithm change this week.

Anyway, thanks to info from Lunametrics, this is in fact a glitch in the Adwords Quality Score. Robbin Steif forwarded Google Adwords Score Has Major Bug, which links to Quality Score Update - It's Broken?. Read the comments on both posts, which quote responses from Google about the problem.

If you've had to raise your bids to $11.00 CAD, or $10.00 USD, to activate keywords and maintain conversion, hopefully this will be temporary.

Update - February 19: Problem fixed. All's back to normal. Thank you Google for taking care of this quickly.


June Li
ClickInsight

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