The last couple of years have been difficult for many people. People struggled with all kinds of issues. Some publicly and some privately. I was in the later group. I tried my best to keep a happy appearance, but honestly it was easier to withdraw and focus the little energy I had on my family. I don’t regret it at all. My friend Alan Stein Jr, author of Raise Your Game & recently Sustain Your Game, shared an incredibly powerful…
In part one of this post, we took a look at the challenges a home remodeler or contractor might have at getting prospects to contact them and fill out a form from their landing pages. Before I go through the process and list all the questions our Persona might have, I want to ask you who do you think is the most successful SEM advertiser of all time? If you answer Amazon, then I would have to agree with you.…
Take 30 minutes during your lunch break today and catch Jeffrey’s webinar with Marketo on “More Effective Lead Generation Using Persuasive Scenario Planning.” Jeffrey will show you a scenario narrative process that ensures all business decisions are made explicitly by the team that owns the results instead of implicitly by the creative and/ or technology teams. Following this process will help you drive more micro and macro-conversions, improve testing and boost the effectiveness of your marketing communications. If your bottom line…
Did you know most persona efforts fail as soon as the personas are completed? Teams create their personas, design slick posters to put on the walls, and say “these are our personas!” Creating personas is really just the beginning. A persona is not a document — it is a clear understanding of a target customer that exists in the minds of your team. Personas evolve as your data around them evolves as well. Every test you do, every insight you…
When it comes to stuff in which you have a huge personal investment (your kids, your homes, your businesses), you risk losing your objectivity. Hey, it’s a human thing. Too much knowledge about your company and what you offer leads you to answer questions nobody is asking. When you’re inside the bottle, it’s hard to read the label. But that’s also when you risk pushing your own interests at the expense of your customers’ interests. This will often lead you…
In order to plan the click-through-experience models, or persuasion scenarios, on a web site, we develop archetypical fictional characters composed from real data, called personas, who represent your buying audience. We must allow for multiple personas to reach many of the same pages or marketing entities (emails, ads, tweets, etc.), but must separately address their needs. Before designing a single pixel or writing a single word, we get a feel – using a wireframe – for the experience the personas…
The web is littered with uninspired flaccid words, words with virtually no meaning. What some people might call web copy or content. In most cases it exists because the marketer was designated a box to fill in with words. You’ve seen it the 100-150 word count blocks that sit on homepages here and there. Think of it as checkbox copy, copy that had to be written to check off a box. It has gotten a bit better over the last…
Last week, Jeffrey and I were in the Bay Area of California to do some client training and work. On a quieter day we decided to visit our friends over at Marketo to catch up. A few months ago, we worked with their very talented team in redesigning much of the website, but two areas were set apart as a focus point of the redesign. As co-founder and VP of Marketing, Jon Miller would tell you how important having a…