Sunday, June 12, 2011

Defining Personas for Search Marketing

Search marketing is such a dynamic field because it deals with the full customer recruitment cycle from advertising to converting visits into sales. As a result, search marketing combines both marketing (segment) and human computer interaction (usability persona) views of the customer. In search marketing, a persona is a personification of a class of people with the same purchase intent and who are going to use your website in the same way.

It's basically a way of trying to understand your web customers as people who are going through a selling process on your website and empathizing with the task they face so that you can improve it, making it easier for them to buy. As you might imagine, one of my search marketing students faced with such a task might find it daunting. There's a lot to put together.

I'm happy to report that our student groups are starting to get it though. Here's a presentation by the group working on Liberty at Home, an organization that provides services to senior citizens:

I particularly liked how they summarized the person in one slide with a name, photo, web behavior, and ways to measure success in getting her to buy. They'll need to continue to refine and verify this persona by talking with their non-profit and looking at the data, but it's a good start.

The group working with Dance Marathon at University of Michigan also made a good start at a detailed persona. You can see their work here. I would have liked more refinement on how to measure sales success with this persona, but I think they nailed the concerns a person responding to this site's campaign on autism might have.

6 comments:

  1. Defining personas is just as important for search marketing as it is for every other kind of marketing! I don't know why anyone would think otherwise :)

    Fred | SEO Nottingham

    ReplyDelete
  2. Keen purchasers are immediately occupied from exhausting substance and they will choose not to see and a hard of hearing ear to your viral advertising message. PaxFax FaxBroadcast

    ReplyDelete
  3. Having mentioned this, it clearly shows how SEO acts as an Internet and Web-centered business, that whatever positively happens on the Internet will benefit the industry. Moreover, as industries become reliant and dependent on the Web, competition swells up as companies vie for rankings, mainly, on search engines.SEO

    ReplyDelete
  4. Online consumer behavior is the name of the game. Targeting is getting advanced every passing day – and now, it’s all about reaching the right person at the right time. Businesses that are doing it successfully are reaping the benefits. I have a friend who started out as a freelancer, providing email marketing writing services, and he later made the decision to get into the world of online advertising. Now he runs his own agency and earns millions – all because he can target effectively.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is a great article on how to create effective personas for search marketing. It covers key points such as understanding user goals, motivations and behaviors and law essay writers. It also provides useful tips on how to create personas that are tailored to specific search strategies. Highly recommended read!

    ReplyDelete
  6. We are expert academic creative writer are here. Those provide the academic writer in UK on the every topic. So a lot of student are happy from our services. Also, we suggest to the all students those are taking the need of the creative writer.

    ReplyDelete