Earlier this year I engaged an excellent internet marketing agency ( http://www.agito.ca) to help us improve our Pay per Click advertising results and beef up the search engine optimization on our web site.
Not long into project, we concluded that a complete web site revamp was needed if we were to have any hope of reaching our plan to increase visitor conversions significantly.
Like most other tech companies, we had built a web site that did little more than showcase who we are and what we do. It provided the content we chose to share with our visitors, rather than the content our visitors were actually looking for. We’d never taken the trouble to step back and analyze what prospects wanted to get out of a visit to our site.
So, what are they looking for? Well, this depends on where they are in the buying cycle:
Early visitors - typically technology users or their direct managers - are looking for a solution to a specific business problem.
Later, as the company narrows down its choices, and as other stakeholders become involved in the decision-making process, different visitors come by. These include technology influencers and economic buyers and, in some cases, decision makers themselves.
Each of these site visitors is looking for different information. The user wants to know if the product can address his or her pain. The technology influencer wants to know how the product is architected, how easy it is to integrate into their current environment, and to understand the implementation process. The economic buyer wants to understand price points and ROI. The decision maker is more likely to be looking for information about the vendor. Is this company reliable and trustworthy? Will it be there for the long haul, and what levels of post purchase service and support does it offer?
Personas Help You Get Into Your Visitors Heads
To maximize your chances of being shortlisted, and eventually selected as vendor of choice, it’s vital that your web site delivers the information these different stakeholders are searching for. If it doesn’t, you’ll never make it to the prospect’s shortlist.
The good news is that it’s not that difficult to present yourself effectively to all these different characters. By gaining an understanding of their needs and motivations you can arm yourself with the insight you need to architect a web site that speaks more effectively to them. The simplest way to do this is to create four or five ‘personas’ to use as guides.
Personas are fictitious users of a website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, their motivations, needs and goals. They act as ‘stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about site functionality, content and design. Although fictitious, personas are created using input from real people. This mean you need to conduct end user research before defining them to ensure they truly represent end user needs rather than the opinions of the person developing the personas.
Our agency helped develop our personas by interviewing 15 customer stakeholders, asking them what they look for when they visit web sites like ours. From this, they developed four ‘personas’ we could use to guide the development of our site content.
The process also took into consideration different behavioral styles (spontaneous/ expressive, methodical/analytical, humanistic/relational etc.). This meant the personas not only helped us define site content but also how to optimize it’s delivery to align with these different behavioral styles.
A Journey Starts With One Small Step
The end result is a site that no longer relies on the usual ‘buckets’ of content that you see on most technology web sites - Company , Products, Support, News, Contact Us. Instead our site content demonstrates an understanding of our prospects’ business pains and ties our solutions to these pains. It provides price guidelines for both products and professional services and outlines solid ROI benefits. All the information that our personas tell us they’re looking for.
While we still have to refine and expand some of our content, we now have a web site that’s firmly focused on the customers purchasing cycle - from initial research, through product and company evaluation to final decision. And we have a process that ensures every site enhancement we make speaks to the needs of one or more of our personas. You can take a look at http://www.commsolv.com.
I encourage you to pause for a moment and review your own web site through your prospects’ eyes. Are you doing all that you can to engage them and provide them with the information they’re looking for? If not, I suggest you consider developing some personas of your own to guide the changes that will make your web site stand out from the crowd. By enhancing the visitor’s experience you increase the chances that they’ll stay engaged long enough to enter into a purchasing dialogue with you, which ultimately is what we all want.
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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads -www.funnelbuilders.com