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- Herausgeber: WS
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Digital marketing is an essential component for any modern business. If you are an SME looking for a way to get ahead and stand out from the competition, this book is your ticket.
As an agency that delivers digital marketing for our clients, we understand that it's something that is constantly evolving. To be successful, you must be able to capture each stage of your customer journey and identify an approach that will allow you to gain traction in your market and take you from strength to strength as your business grows.
This book includes background on why digital marketing is so important and a step-by-step guide on how to develop the right strategy and manage the key elements such as websites, social media, and email.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 295
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Drive Sales with Digital Marketing
Peter & Charleh Dickinson
Published by KUB
Copyright © 2022
Published by KUB Ltd
Albion Wharf, 19 Albion Street, Manchester M1 5LN
www.kub-uk.net
Copyright © 2022 Peter & Charleh Dickinson.
First Edition 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7398858-0-9
All Rights Reserved. The right of Peter Dickinson and Charlotte (Charleh) Dickinson to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and / or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publishers
All titles, content, publisher names, trademarks, artwork and associated imagery are trademarks and/or copyright material of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Forward
Why did we write this book? There are a huge number of videos and online courses on digital marketing.
Our research showed that nobody had really tried to show how these resources should be managed in order to drive sales.
After working with over 500 businesses over a 20-year period there emerged a pattern as to what successful companies did in order to use digital marketing to drive their businesses forward.
This book encapsulates these patterns and links it back to marketing strategy.
Whilst the world of digital marketing continues to evolve at a pace, the concepts behind managing it haven’t and so, although the specific details of implementation may change, the general principles remain the same.
Drive Sales with Digital Marketing
Contents
Section 1: Why Digital Marketing?
1. Understanding Why Digital Marketing Is Important
2. Understanding Your Market
3. Developing the Customer Journey
Section 2: Digital Marketing Resources
4. Get to the Top of Google
5. Develop a Content Marketing Plan
6. Manage & Develop Your Website
7. Manage & Develop Your Social Media
8. Generate Leads on LinkedIn
9. Use Email Marketing to Grow Sales
10, Measure Your Digital Marketing Activity to Drive Sales
Recommend Reading
Acknowledgements
About KUB
Section 1
Why Digital Marketing?
This section will look at the fundamentals of digital marketing and give you an overview of how it works and how you can make it work for you.
Chapter 1
Understanding Why Digital Marketing Is Important
Welcome to the complete guide on how to get started with digital marketing. This guide looks at what digital marketing is, why you need it, and gives you some ideas on what you need to implement to grow sales in your business.
This book will cover the groundwork you’ll need to complete in preparation for creating and launching a successful digital marketing strategy and provide an overall summary of exactly what digital marketing is and why you need it.
With the information you’ll take away from this book, you should be left feeling confident that you have a good knowledge of why digital marketing is essential for your business’s success. You will also come away with a succinct outline of your audience and what kind of marketing activities will be useful for communicating with them as part of your overall strategy.
Most people already have some idea of what kind of activities digital marketing involves, so this guide aims to build on that base-level knowledge and equip you with the vital information that many SMEs tend to overlook.
Digital marketing is ubiquitous, but it’s also something that’s constantly changing and evolving as new technologies develop and consumer behaviours adapt.
Because of this, you’ll find that there’s a lot of misinformation out there on how it should be used, which means there are many businesses that, too late, find out their resources have been wasted on techniques that are unsustainable in the long run or simply don’t work.
With the information supplied in this book, you’ll be able to identify the difference between good and bad marketing techniques, as well as what kind of groundwork you’ll need to put in before diving in to creating your strategy for your marketing, and wider business, development.
Ultimately, you’ll come away with an understanding of what it takes to compete in a digital world.
This means that you’ll be ready to hit the ground running and begin digital marketing while saving the time, money, and the headache of trying to figure out what’s gone wrong when you’re further down the line.
So, without further ado, let’s get started on everything you’ll need to know about digital marketing to build success within your business.
1.1 Why Do You Need to Embrace Digital Marketing?
Welcome to the first chapter. In this section, we’ll look at why digital marketing is so important and what’s changed over time to make other methods of marketing less impactful.
1.2 Why Digital Marketing?
For digitally-native generations, the answer to this question is pretty simple: we live in an increasingly digital world, where there’s very little that you can’t do online.
In marketing, it’s important to get your message across in the places where you know people are spending their time. Places which, as time goes on, are becoming increasingly digital.
Over a couple of decades ago, marketing messages would have been delivered primarily through TV, radio, and billboard advertising, but these techniques weren’t always the most cost-effective, leaving businesses with lower budgets to rely on word-of-mouth and communication tools like brochures to reach their customer base.
Nowadays, the prevalence of social media and other digital channels has created an opportunity for more businesses to engage in effective techniques, making impactful marketing more accessible than ever before. And, luckily for SMEs, the best marketing methods no longer need to be the most expensive, either.
So, let’s look at exactly where your audience might be spending their time online.
At least a quarter of the planet is on Facebook. The largest demographic is 25–34-year-olds, and most members exclusively use mobile devices to access the platform. It’s a great opportunity for B2C eCommerce to advertise using techniques like Pay-Per-Click, otherwise known as PPC.
There are over one billion people with an Instagram account. 25–34-year-olds represent the largest advertising demographic on the platform, but this is followed closely by 18–24-year-olds. As a visual platform, it’s perfect for B2C branding campaigns, eCommerce, and methods such as influencer outreach.
LinkedIn has around 740 million members. It’s the home of decision-makers, with the largest age demographic sitting at 46–55-year-olds, but millennials also make up around a quarter of the platform. As a professional platform, it’s a great choice of focus for B2B selling.
Twitter has around 330 million monthly active users. The largest demographic is 30–49-year-olds and is therefore a great platform to help with customer relationship management and PR.
The average person also spends almost 18 hours a week on a variety of social media platforms. With people spending so much of their time online, it should come as no surprise that the majority of marketers already use social media as a core part of their marketing strategy.
As social media users across various platforms can be segmented by aspects such as age, you should already have a pretty good idea of which platform you should be prioritising.
1.3 Changes Since Lockdown
As you’ll be aware of, the Coronavirus pandemic has become a pivotal point of change across many aspects of life.
Any form of successful marketing needs to reflect human behaviour and changing consumer habits, and so it, too, has had to quickly adapt to stay relevant in the face of such vast change.
Many of these adaptations are based around technology and have also fundamentally altered the way businesses are run.
For example, we’re now familiar with video call software like Zoom, but this was actually created in 2011; it took nine years and a pandemic for it to explode onto the scene.
For the tech-enthusiasts out there, a frustration prior to the pandemic was businesses being slow to adopt such technology, but the lockdown shifted all this, and now people are far more in-tune with technology and better understand how simple changes can make lives easier.
But how does this impact marketing? For one, it’s given us the ability to adapt faster.
Professionals’ newfound comfortability with video calls means that businesses are now able to work more seamlessly with international partners and build successful networks that bring in business – something that’s now more crucial than ever following Brexit.
Working globally enables businesses to transform their traditional marketing and introduces blended networking, where online as well as face-to-face communication is utilised more effectively.
This inevitably seeps into marketing strategies – whether it’s around building sustainable referral networks or finding new and better ways to communicate with customers.
This covers how business culture is shifting. Next, we’ll take a look at the shift in consumer behaviour.
1.4 Changing Consumer Behaviour
One of the fundamental changes to consumer behaviour is defined by access to information. Almost three-quarters of consumer journeys start with a search engine such as Google or Bing, and even more will consult a search engine before making the decision to buy.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also reported that, at the start of 2021, 36% of total retail sales were done online – a significant increase of almost 30% from ten years before.
This demonstrates the importance of ensuring your online presence is both visible and user-friendly. Without these fundamentals, your target audience will end up looking past your offering completely, no matter how great it is.
Despite digitally-savvy users completing in-depth research online, word-of-mouth is still powerful, with many users consulting online reviews, Facebook groups, and specialist forums before making a decision on whether or not to buy.
As a result, your business may need to consider its approach to referral networking to generate more sales – this again is where software like Zoom can serve a purpose beyond team meetings with colleagues.
2.1 What Elements Are Involved in Building a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy?
There’s a whole range of elements that your business can incorporate into its digital marketing strategy. You won’t need to use all of them, but it's good to be aware of what they are so that you can choose the ones that you know are likely to drive success.
This section will provide a rundown of some of the key marketing elements that your business could benefit from using.
If you don’t have the capacity to do it all in-house, it could be worth considering outsourcing at least some of them, as the return on investment is usually well worth it. And, if you’re new to marketing but don’t have the income to outsource, getting one-to-one training on some of the specifics could be the answer.
2.2 What are the Key Marketing Elements?
Some of the key marketing elements you need to be aware of include: your website, social media, content marketing including articles and video, SEO, LinkedIn lead generation, and email marketing and automation.
In most marketing strategies, each of these activities props their counterparts up, and so it’s worth noting that when you’re choosing the marketing activities for your strategy, every element needs to work together so that your marketing system works as a cohesive whole.
For example, there’s no point spending all your energy on your social media with the aim of driving more traffic through to your site if your website then isn’t up to scratch – users simply don’t have the time, patience, or trust to navigate information and resources that don’t put the customer experience first.
Think of each element as making up part of a marketing ecosystem – if one element is performing poorly, the others that support and rely on it are also likely to suffer.
2.3 Systematic and Sustainable
Once you have an idea of what sort of marketing activities you want to invest in, the next step is to ensure that they’ll work systematically and sustainably as part of a holistic marketing strategy.
But before you start creating a map of your strategy, there’s a little work you’ll need to do in terms of internal analysis.
This section looks at the individual components so that you can start to build your own digital marketing strategy.
2.4 Internal Analysis Overview
The first thing you will need to do is identify your products or services.
Then, dig down into their benefits, including how they solve your customer’s problem or make their lives better.
Next, look at how your products or services differ from the competition, this will usually be the additional benefits that go beyond solving their immediate problem.
Finally, consider your ‘why’, the reason behind why you’re selling your product or service – it’s often defined by the values behind your business and what you’re passionate about.
Once you’ve identified these aspects, you’ll better understand the kind of messaging you’ll need to communicate in your marketing and can then move on to the practical steps of deciding which elements will produce a sustainable marketing model.
If your customers complete most of their transactions or submit their enquiries through your website, your site will need to sit at the centre of your strategy, and the rest of the marketing elements will aim to direct traffic to it.
The key activities and components we recommend as part of your internal analysis include completing a site audit, keyword research, content plan, SEO strategy, social media strategy, LinkedIn lead generation strategy, email marketing, and automation strategy and analysis.
Let’s take a look at these in closer detail.
2.5 Website Audit
For most businesses, their websites sit at the centre of their marketing strategy, as it’s normally where customers complete transactions or submit enquiries, and all your other marketing elements will direct traffic here, making it your most valuable marketing asset.
This means that your site needs to be easy to find, and when a potential customer visits your site, they need to be able to navigate easily so that they can quickly find the information they’re looking for.
Your site audit will need to consider your overall site performance including load speed and on-page SEO performance.
You can look at aspects such as how long people are spending on each page and bounce rates for an indication of what customers make of your site.
Some of the useful tools you can use to complete this audit include Moz and Megalytics for handy base-level analytics, or SEMRush and Google Analytics (which is completely free) for more in-depth analysis.
See Chapter 6 for more in-depth information on how to manage and audit your website.
2.6 Keyword Research, SEO, and Content Planning
The next step is to define how you’re going to make your site visible so that your target audience can find you through search engine results pages (SERPs). One way to do this is with a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy that is both systematic and sustainable.
The starting point to this strategy is keyword research. SEO tools like SEMRush are a great place to start for detailed analysis, or if you want to explore a free option first, try UberSuggest.
These tools provide insights into how many searches are being made for certain keywords and indicate how difficult it will be to get them to rank highly on the search engine results pages.
Once you’ve built up a relevant list of keyword search terms, you can begin to compile a content plan that puts them to use. The easiest way to kick off your content plan is by writing articles that are informative and relevant to your target but bear in mind that content can also include things like videos and podcasts.
If you’re not sure where to start, try entering some of your keywords into tools like AnswerThePublic, which then produces a map of related questions and queries people are searching for around the topic of your keyword.
If you have a WordPress site like many other businesses, you will also need to make sure that you have the plugin Yoast SEO installed so that you can start gaining traction through your keywords. (A plugin is the phrase used to describe a piece of software that enhances the capabilities of your WordPress website.)
Remember, the payoff from a content-led SEO strategy will build up in the long term, but if you start putting the effort in now, the results will be well worth your time.
Don’t worry too much about the long-term aspect of SEO, because the content you produce can serve your shorter-term needs, too. You can gain traction in the short term by distributing it through your other marketing channels, such as social media, which will then start generating traffic immediately.
You can find more detailed information on what you need to build a great SEO strategy in chapter 4.
2.7 Social Media
Social media is an important part of any digital marketing strategy, so it’s crucial that you’re able to understand what works and what doesn’t.
One of its benefits is that it doesn’t require a long-term strategy to start generating results. With techniques like PPC, you can get your brand in front of your target audience immediately.
But building a loyal following on your social platforms can take more time. To do this, you’ll need a solid content plan which you know your audience will find useful, relevant, and entertaining.
A great place to start is by sharing some of the content that you’ve written and published on your website to help educate your audience, demonstrate your expertise, and drive traffic to your site.
However, video content tends to perform best and can work really well, even if you don’t have a big budget. For example, a successful social media video could be as simple as filming yourself on your phone talking about your product or service. Of course, your video content will ultimately depend on your business, market segment, and solution.
Written and video content and podcasts can be implemented into your content plan along with other posts that advertise events, relevant news articles about your industry or mission, and incentives for your audience to share their email, such as free downloads and offers.
If you're not sure where to start, take a look at what works for some of your close competitors for inspiration – but remember, the content you share needs to be highly specific to your audience and in-line with your own brand guidelines.
For more in-depth information on implementing social media marketing, see Chapter 7.
2.8 LinkedIn Lead Generation
Social media isn’t just useful for posting content and advertising with pay-per-click (PPC), it can also be the ideal place to build up a strong network which you can then feed into your email marketing and automation.
This approach is most effective for B2B businesses on LinkedIn as the Sales Navigator feature allows you to find more or less everyone on LinkedIn who fits your target market.
You can filter by job titles, sectors, company headcounts, and so forth until you're left with a list of potential connections with whom you could benefit from connecting.
Then all you need to do is invite them to your network and begin building relationships through techniques like conversational marketing, which is aimed at generating more sales through building relationships.
If done well, a good proportion of your new contacts will provide their email addresses to find out more about you and your business. This is where email marketing comes in.
For more information on generating leads using LinkedIn, see Chapter 8.
2.9 Email Marketing and Automation
If you follow each of the processes I’ve just outlined, you’ll begin building up a contact list from website enquiries, LinkedIn lead generation, as well as emails exchanged for incentives.
At this point, you’re ready to begin email marketing. Email marketing is essential for communicating with qualified leads and keeping your business fresh in your target audience’s mind.
A monthly newsletter is usually enough to do this. In it, you’ll need to include relevant information and updates about your products or services.
Not only that, but they will need to provide some form of value to keep your contact list interested and subscribed.
This value could be in the form of free trials, downloads, and events like webinars or networking groups you’re hosting.
Automation is growing in popularity, so if you want to go further than a monthly newsletter, then an automated welcome or sales email series could be the answer to creating an even more seamless customer experience, boosting sales, and gaining insight into where leads sit within the customer journey.
You can find more information on how to drive more sales using email marketing in Chapter 9.
2.10 Analysis
Once you’ve connected the dots between each element of your marketing, you’ll need to ensure that they’re continually in motion.
This will improve the likelihood of results improving month on month and help to generate sustainable growth within your business.
However, the only way to ensure this is happening is through regular monitoring and analysis of each individual activity on their given platform, as well as your marketing system as a whole, with analysis tools like Google analytics, SEMRush, and Megalytics, for example.
You can read more on how to go about measuring the results of your digital marketing in Chapter 10.
2.11 Practical Application
When you’re considering what aspects need to be added into your overall marketing system, it can be a challenge to understand how each one interacts with the others.
At KUB, we like to use a free tool called Creately, which allows you to build a visual map of your marketing process.
This makes the task of creating an interconnected omnichannel strategy that utilises your customers preferred communication channels much easier.
It could be that some customer groups prefer different channels over others, for example, older customers may prefer to reach out over the phone while younger customers want to get in touch over a live chat on your site.
It’s down to you to figure out how your customers are most likely to get in touch. After that, these aspects can be built into your map on Creately to provide a full overview of everything you’ll need to consider for seamless digital marketing, from the place where your audience enters the customer journey to where they convert into paying customers.
3.1 Creating Your Digital Marketing Plan
Once you know what aspects need to be involved in your strategy and how they interlink, you’re ready to start creating your digital marketing plan.
At KUB, we follow a planning process that takes everything into granular detail, so that when you finally kick your strategy off, everything is accounted for.
This section will talk you through each section of the plan and what you’ll need to do to fill it out thoroughly.
To get the most out of this section, I’d recommend getting a pen and paper so you can begin outlining your plan as I take you through each stage of the planning process.
3.2 Defining Your Vision
The first thing you’ll need to define in your plan is your vision for your brand and the ‘why’, which is the reason behind why you began your business in the first place.
This section can also summarise what you want to achieve for your brand, but you’ll also need to ask yourself what it is that you believe in, and why people should care about what you do. If the answers are unclear, it’s well worth taking the time to find out what they are.
To get to the core of the answer, you’ll need to look past what your product or service is and its benefits and identify the purpose that sits behind your inspiration.
Completing this exercise can take some thinking time, especially if you’ve lost your passion getting caught up in the day-to-day stresses of running a business, but doing a good job of it can help you visualise the bigger picture and even help reignite your passion for your business.
And don’t worry, the other sections are much quicker to fill out.
3.3 Key Strategy Points
The next section you’ll need to fill out is the key strategy points you want to use. You’ll be able to fill this out with the information outlined in the previous section.
A key strategy is where taking a course of action results in an advantage over your competition. So, this might be promoting a particular product or service in your portfolio because it has features that your competitors don’t have, it might be offering a one stop shop so that buyers can get everything they need from you. Or it might be a close collaboration with a synergetic business to create a combined offering that, again, sets you apart from the competition.
This is important because knowing what you want to focus on will dictate what tactics you use in your digital marketing.
3.4 Target Audience and Buyer Personas
After completing your strategy points, you’ll need to fill out a section identifying the market segment that your target audience sits in.
The purpose of this exercise is to ensure that your product or service is positioned correctly.
To do this, you need to understand exactly who you’re marketing to and what aspects might influence their buying decisions by creating an outline of your market segment.
Your target audience can be outlined by their geography, including country of residence, city, language, population, and density.
You’ll also need to outline their demographic, including age, gender, income, occupation, family, and social status.
Then there are psychographic factors to identify. These include aspects like lifestyle, opinions, personality, social and cultural norms, and values.
Finally, you’ll have to think about your target audience's behavioural traits, including their hobbies, habits, buying habits, how loyal they are to brands, and so on.
This gives you a good overview of who you’re selling to, and you can then develop this understanding further by creating buyer personas that help to bring your segment to life.
This is because buyer personas are fictional representations of your target customers – and so you’ll have to use your imagination as well as your knowledge of your market segment to define them.
If you can’t represent your segment with a single persona, you can create more than one. I’ll take you through the specific details of how to do this in the ‘Creating Your Buyer Personas’ section.
3.5 Competition Intensity
The next part of your planning needs to take into account what competitors you have, and what intensity the competition is, within your market.
Note down the immediate competitors that come to mind, as well as the number of competitors you have, the difference in product or service quality as well as any other differences, what level of brand loyalty your customers have, and what are the switching costs or barriers to customers leaving?
Next, you’ll need to complete a SWOT analysis, where you identify the strengths and weaknesses in your business as well as opportunities and threats. This will give you a good overview of where your business stands in its market.
Overall, these activities will help you identify how high the competition is as well as what differentiates you from your competitors. These differentiators will need to be included in your marketing messages, as they’re what will set you apart and allow you to access parts of the market that the direct competition doesn’t occupy.
3.6 Who’s Responsible for What?
One of the most important aspects you’ll need to identify in your digital marketing strategy is who’s responsible for what.
This will ensure that there’s someone who’s accountable for implementing the strategy and that it will actually get done.
Marketing a whole business takes a lot of time, so if you’re taking your marketing in-house, you’ll need at least one person who takes care of running it.
If you don’t have the budget to pay for a full-time in-house marketer, you may want to consider outsourcing at least some of your marketing activities to an agency.
At KUB, we offer flexible approaches to this, and in some cases we coach our clients’ employees so that they can become more effective at marketing in-house. We’re also able to offer support on some of the aspects they don’t have the time for.
Whatever approach you choose, the people responsible will need the time and knowledge to make sure everything is watertight to ensure you’re getting the best results possible.
3.7 Your 12-Month Objectives
At this point in developing your plan, you’ll have a good outline of the contextual information that you need to put your aspirational yet achievable objectives into place.
So, the next step is to define what you want to achieve over the next 12 months.
We find that the best way to do this is by defining four SMART objectives, with each objective applying to its own respective quarter.
SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, a method which helps to keep you on-track. So, for example, you might want to increase the sales through your website. which would mean increasing the number of visitors. Your SMART objective might be to increase the number of visitors by 50% over a three-month period as that is time-bound, easily measurable, can be attained using some form of advertising, and relevant because as the number of visitors increases there should, all things considered, be an increase in sales.
You’ll need to review these objectives regularly to make sure good progress is being made.
If you’re able to do this systematically, you’ll find that your 12-month objectives are much easier to achieve, getting you another step closer to your overall business goals.
3.8 Choosing Your Strategy for Your Marketing Resources
At this point, you’ll know which key products or services you want to promote, who you need to target your messaging to, and who is going to make things happen.
The final step of filling in your planning template is deciding on the marketing elements that are going to help you achieve your objectives and identifying how they need to be applied.
For this final step, you’ll need to create a list of all the elements involved and then add the corresponding information: what do you do now? What should you be doing? How do you measure progress? And what are you going to do over the next 90 days?
If you’re still not sure what elements you should be including, I’ve got a few suggestions for you to consider.
These include:
Once you’ve completed your entire marketing plan, you’ll need to use it as a point of reference for anything you’re doing in your business.
If you’re starting marketing from scratch, your plan will probably require a little fine-tuning, so it’s important to review the information in it every 90 days and to make adjustments for anything that isn’t working.
4.1 Understanding Your Customers
Everything we do in digital marketing is about meeting the needs of our customers to help them decide on the product or service that’s right for them and is going to somehow improve their life or make it easier.
Ultimately, the product or service you sell probably isn’t for everyone. There’s usually a particular segment of people that will find it useful.
If you have a medium B2B business, those people will usually include decision-makers in the relevant roles and sectors.
To market to them effectively, you not only have to be able to reach them online, but you also need to understand what makes them tick so you can strike a chord with your marketing.
In the last section of this chapter, I’ll be taking you through which factors you can use to narrow down your target audience. I’ll also be taking things a little more in-depth to demonstrate how a good understanding of your audience translates into the best digital marketing strategies.
4.2 Creating Your Buyer Persona
As I mentioned in the last section, buyer personas are there to help lift your market segment into life. The example above shows three buyer personas who may be looking for help with their marketing.
To create one, you’ll need to use your imagination to come up with an imaginary customer who sums up your typical audience.
How you create these personas might differ slightly depending on whether your business is B2C or B2B. For example, with B2C, income may matter, but the job title of your customer may not be as relevant.
To create your buyer persona, start by giving them a name, an age, a job title, and the industry they operate in. Then, if you have a B2B business, summarise their company profile.
Next, fill in a section that goes into detail about the responsibilities your persona has within their role. If you're targeting your product or service at the right market, it will probably deal with some aspect of your persona’s responsibilities.
For the next part, you’ll need to get to know your persona on a more personal level by listing the traits that make up their personality type. This can provide insights into things like your audience's preferred method of communication.
For example, if you define your persona as introverted, and this reflects the rest of your audience, they may prefer to learn more about your brand and build business relationships through tools such as online webinars delivered by one person as opposed to fully interactive networking events.
The next section to fill out is your persona’s values and goals. Ideally, your solution should somehow help them fulfill their goals, and the way you position your marketing messages should reflect their values so that they resonate.
This brings me on to your messaging strategy. Taking all the information you’ve just recorded about your persona’s role, traits, and values, you’ll need to record which channels will be useful to communicate on as well as what aspects like content, language, and tone your persona is likely to identify with.
If you’ve put in all the legwork in the previous sections, this should be fairly straightforward.
Next, summarise some of your buyer persona’s top challenges. For example, does their role involve something time consuming that could be outsourced or made easier through technology?
Again, your product or service should tackle at least some of their problems.
Then, you’ll need to consider your persona’s motivators. This needs to be a summary of what real motivator your persona has that would get them to invest in your solution.
For example, if you're marketing project tracking software, one of your persona’s motivators is likely to be something like the fact that they’re looking for more efficient ways to track projects.
The final section to fill in is how you help. If you’re following a pain-point model of selling, where you’re looking to solve an issue that is making your customer’s life more difficult, this section will include the underlying factors that alleviate that ‘pain’.
If you complete this exercise and find that your buyer personas aren’t reflecting the marketing strategy you thought would work, you may need to have another look at how you can reposition your marketing to best serve these personas and their specific needs.
4.3 Creating Your Empathy Canvas
Once you have an in-depth understanding of your audience, there’s an additional step you can take to create a visual in order to see how your product or service will benefit your audience from their perspective.
