It is important to understand the profile of your website’s target audience to maximise its effectiveness as a communication tool. The most effective way of getting to grips with your potential users is through web personas.
Your target audience are people that currently, or potentially will, buy your products and services via your website. By grouping your customers by similar characteristics and needs, you can manage your website more effectively.
The more specific you can be about your target audiences and markets, the more effective your website will be when it comes to:
- Creating relevant and engaging content
- Using strong messages and calls to action
- Building better and more meaningful relationships with customers
- Attracting new customers who will care about products and services
The benefits of more targeted and relevant website content are increased conversions and return on investment due to the improved quality of traffic that’s coming to your website.
Customer profiling builds a picture of your target audience
In order to profile your customers you need to gather all the data you have from various sources including your accounts, transactions, customer feedback, marketing newsletter sign up, web analytics and social media analytics.
- Demographic – who are they and where are they?
- Behavioural – what have they purchased from you, via what channel, how often and how much do they spend?
- Attitudinal – what are their values and motivations?
- Webographic – how do they use your website?
The ability to group your customers into segments is dependent on the state and availability of the data on your customers and their behaviour.
Web personas complete the picture of your target audiences
A web persona is a summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and environment of a key type of website user. They enable you to fill the gaps in your existing data and provides attitudinal and webographic data to enhance your customers’ profiles.
We will work with you to create a simple questionnaire for your staff to complete with your customers in mind, based on their experience and knowledge. We would also look to interpret the data collected from this process to identify groups of customers with similar profiles which then in turn will become your web personas.
Using web personas to improve the relevance of your customer communication
- Design the best user experience for your website customers and ensure content relevant and functionality is helpful.
- Ensure the content of your email newsletter is of interest for each web persona group
- Ensure you are using the right social media platforms to communicate with your web personas
- Identify the best prospects when you receive a sales enquiry
For more information about our work on customer and persona segmentation, email customerservice@mackmangroup.co.uk or call 01787 388038.