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…
How do you define a complex sale? Is it a B2B purchase? Is it planning a family vacation for 2 adults and 3 kids ranging in age from 4-12. Can it be purchasing new pillows for your bed? How about when deciding on an enterprise testing and targeting solution? As marketers we use the term frequently but as I often find people sort of know what it is when they see it, but don’t really define it well. You’ll often…
Good Copywriters Are … “What makes for good online copywriting?” Both marketers and copywriters have their reasons for asking this question. “Can you recommend a good online copywriter?” Ah. Unfortunately we have considerably fewer answers to that one (although we wish we were busting at the seams with them). So one day, I enlisted my colleagues in brainstorming the answer to this related question: “What qualities must a good onlne copywriter possess?” Here are 13 things that we would look…
Google+ may be growing, but anyone who spends time on it wishes it had more engagement with their connections and more content being shared. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Why is this happening? It is not just lack of people, it is the lack of integration with the content marketing ecosystem. Even though there is a great mobile app for Android and iOS, it is still very web-centric. People will share content when they come across content they encounter on the web…