Personas
3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads
Want to ramp up the conversion rate on your lead generation site?
Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:
1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.
2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.
3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.
Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons, but for now, these three culprits are enough to start you identifying specific problems on your site and determining action items for optimization.
Keep in mind, more leads may not be what you need. You may need more qualified leads, and a properly planned Web site should help the visitor qualify herself.
We’ve worked with several companies that have seen a decrease in the number of leads, but increased sales and optimized the sales team time and closing ratios because the quality of their leads was improved.
Exchanging Value: My Name for Your Service
Many sites offering “free” whitepapers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information do a poor job of merchandising their downloads. Your downloads contain valuable information. Treat them as such.
Stop thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information “merchandise” your downloads better. Show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange, valuable information for valuable information.
- Include thumbnails of documents.
- Let them know what they’ll learn from the download.
- Let them know what they can do with the information.
- List everything what’s “in it for them” in the download.
- Let them know what will happen with their information. Will you be calling them? (More on this, below, under “Establishing Trust and Expectations”.)
If you offer a free trial or demo period, provide clear information about what they are getting. Is it a fully functional trial with a time limit? What happens when the demo runs out? Will you offer them support during the trial? (Sounds like a good way to win over a potential customer doesn’t it?) Disclose system requirements before they begin the sign up process.
Track the number of “bogus” e-mails you get, either bad e-mail addresses or e-mails from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If you get too many emails from lucilleball@yahoo.com or elvisp@hotmail, rest assured that visitors don’t see value in the offer and the exchange.
Beware, sometimes these tactics will cause a drop in the number of leads, but rid you of junk leads. You have to determine if this is an acceptable trade off (it almost always is).
Help for the Informationally Challenged
Information, information, information is all around us. Some is useful, sometimes it’s hard to find what’s useful, and some information is just plain not helpful at all.
One approach to determine if you have info problems is to examine time spent on page. Often times I work with sites that have low time spent on main content pages but their FAQ page gets more visitor time. This may indicate that visitors aren’t finding information they need elsewhere. If a visitor relies on your FAQ to get information, it reduces trust. Why aren’t these frequent questions answered frequently (or linked to) on key pages like home and service/product pages?
Often sites put up so much information that visitors cannot find the piece of info they seek. This occasionally indicates an information architecture problem, but more often indicates that the visitors’ needs and motivations aren’t addressed in the content.
Another key issue often neglected is that often the person doing the research on the Web site isn’t the decision maker. She’s trying to gather, sort, and print (you do make it easy to do that, right?) information to give to the person making the decision. Are you making your site easy to understand for this person as well?
There really are no easy solutions to get your information in order. First begin to establish a persuasive framework, building personas then planning each persona’s interaction or persuasion scenarios with your site, and determining what information they need and when and where they need it on the site.
Establishing Trust and Expectations
Visitors must trust you. If they don’t, they don’t become leads or often they become bad leads. Visitors may even fill out a lead form if they mistrust you. Sometimes they are just going through the motion of getting proposals and pricing and are planning on buying from your competitor. You might have the better solution for them but the site or the lead process doesn’t instill enough confidence to take you seriously.
Most visitors who aren’t confident simply won’t contact you. They fear harassment from the sales team. Or sometimes your site is ineffective in communicating the values of the visitor and they bail. Again, this is a tragedy especially when you consider they could be in the market to buy what you sell.
Other times, visitors are in early stages of the buying process and an overly aggressive lead form will cause them to tighten up, assuming you’ll push them somewhere they don’t feel ready to go. Here are some things you can do to help instill trust.
- Include information about what it’s like to work with your company. Let them know when you will contact them. Assure them that you will only help them determine their needs and not pressure them.
- Ramp up your About Us page.
- Ask as few questions as possible in your lead form. Don’t force them to give you all types information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs.
- Include short, friendly lead forms in several places on the site (not just your contact page). This will help you track where they filled out the form and better inform you what they might be interested in.
- Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their info, tell them how soon they will be hearing from you. If possible give them a choice of how and when they prefer to be contacted.
- Some visitors like to be prepared for the call. Provide a checklist of information they might need to have handy when they speak with you.
- Some visitors prefer to call. Provide the phone number near the lead form.
Now go get some leads.
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Originally seen on ClickZ.
Editor’s Note: Want more tips on lead-generation? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Interview on Persuasion Architecture, Personas and ROI
In case you weren’t able to join me today at the King Conversion: Websites that Sell conference in Erie, PA — put on by the fabulous folks at eBizITPA — I at least wanted to share a recent interview on personas and persuasive planning.
I had a chance to sit down with Cathy von Birgelen to talk about what’s on the mind of Pennsylvania business owners, and what they want to know about improving their websites and other online marketing efforts. You probably have a lot of the same questions and I think I may have some answers for you.
You can either download the interview (by right-clicking here) or just listen to it streaming below:
Click here for Holly’s interview
Hot Topics
Need to bookmark this for the next time you’ve got a few minutes? No problem. I’ll be going into more detail in the actual presentation, but…
Here’s what’s covered in the interview:
• How to start a meaningful relationship with Customers. (Hint: don’t ask them to marry you on the first date.)
• The four buying modes — Spontaneous, Competitive, Humanistic and Methodical — and how to increase conversion based on understanding what information each type wants and how they want that information presented. (There’s no such thing as an average customer.)
• How to use personas to create persuasive messages that speak to people in their language about what they care about. (Because it can’t always be about you.)
• The real purpose of your homepage and how to reduce those nasty battles over that prime real estate. (I know, I’ve seen the scars and bruises.)
• Common conversion mistakes and how to make simple changes that can have a big impact on your bottom line. (Seriously, you’ll be smacking your head and going, “duh” — here’s how Amazon does it.)
• Content for search engines vs. content for customers (Who said you had to choose?)
• What analytics to focus on that can actually tell you something about your site and where it’s most broken. (Hey, if you want to go ahead and read those 20 page analytics reports,knock yourself out. But if you want to know 5 specific metrics to look at, let’s talk.)
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About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys; and co-instructor of FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, June 2nd in Manhattan.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Bryan Eisenberg on Using Personas to Improve Sales
Got eight and a half minutes to learn about how customer personas boost sales?
In this interview from London’s recent Search Engine Strategies conference, Bryan sits down with Ralph Wilson — in what appears to be either an airplane hanger, a convention hall, or a school gymnasium — to discuss how planning websites with personas will increase revenue and ROI . . . for a few reasons:
- Personas show copywriters and designers who they’re writing and designing for.
- Personas allow customers to choose their own buying experience.
- Personas prevent customers from being stereotyped.
(If video doesn’t load, click here.)
Want to learn more about Persuasion Architecture? It’s how our clients get results with personas.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Persona Models Presentation at SMX West 2008
Last week, I had the privilege of speaking at Search Marketing Expo (SMX West) about using Persona Models in Search Marketing. It was a pleasure to share the dais with Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro Research and Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive — both outstanding, smart people who gave great presentations.
Our presentations went over the high-level basics of creating personas and planning content that speaks directly to your personas. We had a full house for our session and I’ve received lots of insightful questions since from audience members. Overall, the feedback has been extremely positive. But what struck me most was the coming of age of the notion that personas ought to be an integral part of any online marketing plan.
This really excites me, to see people so open to a concept that Future Now has proved effective in almost every interaction. The sheer number of seminars about visitor behavior and the number of times I heard “persona” used in comments and questions suggested a bold new era for interactive marketing.
The rest of the conference was equally thought-provoking. I thought it showed a deeper level of thinking and debate than I’ve witnessed at past industry conferences. (Hats off to Danny Sullivan and the crew at Search Engine Land!)
If you’d like to see my presentation, here it is:
For more in-depth instruction on how to creating personas for your business, read Part 1 and Part 2 of Howard Kaplan’s series on “How to Get Started with Personas.”
If you’d like help planning your online content strategy with personas, contact us.
[Editor’s Note: Brian Bond is VP of Marketing and Product at Future Now.]
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Written by:Brian Bond
Why “Harmless” Stereotypes Kill Marketing Campaigns
We all use stereotypes. They’re a shortcut to understanding people who are not like us.
Occasionally — perhaps more often than we’d like to admit — there’s at least some grain of truth in stereotypes. There are a few attributes that may be accurate about each of the groups others lump us in. So why are they so harmful?
In an article for MSNBC (”Science Gets the Last Laugh on Ethnic Jokes”), Kathleen Wren discusses a recent study showing that real personalities don’t match stereotypes. It seems there’s further proof our prejudices may be misleading…
A possibility is that some very specific components of a stereotype may be accurate — for example, Italians may gesture with their hands a lot — but that they don’t necessarily tell us anything more generally about personality.
Stereotypes keep us from digging deep enough to truly understand people (e.g., your customers). We see one or two traits and assume several others must also be true. Very dangerous.
But here’s the really scary part:
We may be “hard-wired,” to some extent, to maintain inaccurate stereotypes, since we are less likely to notice and remember information that violates our stereotypes.
When analyzing data, surveys, focus groups, and other information we gather about customers, we may be more likely to focus on information that reinforces our stereotypes since, well, it just “feels right.”
Think this can’t happen to you? Think again.
When I create male personas, I check in with the men on our team to make sure they’re accurate. (I’m not trying to brag here, but… ) I’ve been helping clients create customer personas for a long time, and my results confirm that I know what I’m doing. Still, there have been several times where the research information I was getting just sounded dead wrong. I simply could not believe it. But after extensive checking, it appeared it was indeed true.
I’ve done enough research on the difference between men’s buying processes and the ways women buy to know there are indeed some BIG differences. So when I see something that goes against my gut, I don’t just write it off. I investigate and try to keep an open mind. But this is why it’s so dangerous when marketers (even yours truly) claim to know something’s true in their so-called “gut”:
Generally, according to Robins, when we encounter people who contradict prevailing generalizations, we perceive them as unique individuals rather than representatives of their national or cultural groups.
How true. But stereotyping doesn’t end there. When ethnic stereotypes don’t fit, it’s gender stereotypes to the rescue!
I see this all too often: “Oh, the research says this woman is happy with her weight. She even thinks she looks good, even though she’s obviously overweight. That can’t possibly be true. All women want to be skinny.”
Guess what. There are many women whom the beauty industry would consider overweight who are perfectly happy with their bodies and do think they look good. (Look at the success of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, or Jenny Craig “plus size” spokeswomen Kirstie Alley, Valerie Bertinelli, and Queen Latifah.)
How can you break through stereotypes and really understand your customers? First, consider that stereotypes are the single biggest reason why so many marketing-to-women efforts fail, then read my post on Copyblogger (”Surprise! Not All Women Think Alike”).
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[Editor’s Shameless Plug: Holly is co-instructor of our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar on March 28th in San Francisco, and co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys.]
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Getting the Most Out of Your Personas
Personas are everywhere these days. They’ve long surpassed the buzzword and fad stage. They’re mainstream.
Marketing firms, usability firms, even companies’ internal marketing teams are crafting personas. Posters of personas are hung proudly in conference rooms. Tacked-up personas dress cubicles from coast to coast.
Sadly, many of these personas are only attracting dust bunnies. They don’t see any recognition past the initial creation.
If you spent any amount of time and resources building personas that represent your customers, it’s reasonable to consider getting more out of them.
Instead of letting your personas drift into a faint memory, here are a few things you can use your personas for.
Tweak Your Personas
A reason some personas get put in drawers is they aren’t as effective as they could have been. Profitable personas are representatives of all buying modes your customers have as they consider you or competitors. The measure for effective personas is that they must evoke empathy in your team and be tied to your business goals.
Go ahead and tweak your personas if need be.
Your Personas and Your Competitors
See exactly how well your competitors are doing with your personas. Take your personas through their site. Be brutally honest.
For each persona, note where your competitors do well and where they fail. In some cases, you’ll find they do better with one or two of your personas. Use this information to shore up your site to provide a superior experience for all your personas. Many times you’ll find new ideas and inspiration for changes in your persuasion scenarios.
Keyword Research
We’ve had many clients who eagerly used personas for everything but researching keywords. We often have to remind them to use their personas for this purpose. Start by brainstorming some of the terms and phrases each persona would use in relationship to your product/service in the early buying stages. Then move on to middle and late stages. By going through this simple exercise, you’ll immediately have a list of potential keywords you may not have otherwise considered.
Be sure not to ignore the low-traffic keywords you dig up. Often times these terms cost much less, reveal true buying intent, and, as a result, convert at astounding rates.
Offline Inspiration
Personas can also be used to inspire and guide your offline marketing efforts. Run all your creative through your personas, and estimate their response. Often you’ll find a particular creative works for some personas and not for others. Instead of ignoring the rest of your personas, adjust the creative to reach them as well or produce additional creative for the other personas. Have you noticed that Geico has very different simultaneous campaigns? The gecko and cavemen campaigns appeal to different customer segments.
Give Personas a Say in Your Marketing Budget
A well-crafted, well-researched persona set represents all your potential customers. But not all personas are equal in their monetary value to the company.
When you’re trying to make tough budget decisions on where and how to market, you can use your personas as a guide. We had a client who had more marketing opportunities than resources and time. Using his personas, we were able to help plan the rollout of an ambitious redesign project by starting with the site elements that appealed to two of his most valuable personas. The redesign’s second phase was to shore up site elements for secondary personas.
You can use this same line of planning to determine how and where to spend marketing dollars, online and off-.
Conclusion
Don’t let your personas get off easy by using them for only one or two projects. Instead, drag them out for everything. Run all your new creative by them, even use them to come up with more effective site optimization ideas. (That’s a column for another time.)
What have your personas done for you lately?
Reprinted from my ClickZ column.
[Image from Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 classic film, Persona.]
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Does Your Website “Show-up and Throw-up”?
We laugh when we see parodies of bad behavior in marketing and sales, but have you really thought about how NOT to do this with your web copy?
If a sales person avoids the dreaded “show-up and throw-up” technique by engaging in honest conversation and asking intelligent questions while answering yours in a respectful manner, then how is your Web copy supposed to be a substitute for that?
It’s as simple as ABC — and, no, I don’t mean “Always Be Closing”…
A) Hire a great copywriter or become one yourself.
B) Blueprint/plan persona-based copy.
C) Write persuasive hyperlinks that fit into your plan/blueprint.
Personas let you see your customers real. And that allows you to write to them instead of writing at them, which is huge. But more importantly, personas let you hear the other side of the conversation by giving you insights into your customers’ motivations — and that enables you to anticipate your visitors questions, which is where embedded links come in.
Every click a visitor takes represents a question they are asking you (or possibly a response to a prodding question your copy has raised). By anticipating the questions visitors are most likely to have, a smart copywriter can use embedded hyperlinks to model the interactive flow of a conversation. Your copy talks, then your visitors talk by clicking on the links most relevant to them. The more often a visitor clicks on a link and feels she’s been heard, the more she has her expectations met and questions answered, the more her website visit resembles honest dialog. And that’s effective selling.
Conversely, the more your website fails to answer — or even to acknowledge — visitor questions, the more your Web copy resembles the “show-up and throw-up” doofus in this video:
Does your copy speak to your visitors or are you just vomiting up a canned sales pitch? Are you anticipating visitor questions and concerns with your hyperlinks or are you expecting them to respond to ridiculous questions (“What will it take to put you in a new car today?”)?
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Creating Personas 101
Want to take a stab at creating personas for your business? If so, you really should check out the most recent installment of SEOmoz “Whiteboard Friday” screencast.
In this 20-minute tutorial, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive and SEOmoz founder Rand Fishkin discuss how to create simple customer personas and use them to boost the performance and relevance of your website.
As anyone who’s read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark may know, we have quite a bit of experience adapting the customer experience to fit the needs of personas — and I’ll share some more ideas for how to create them in a moment — but first…
Take a moment to watch Ian and Rand’s wonderful crash course on personas:
Ian’s first step is to “Brainstorm 7 to 10 people.” If you’d like some ideas on how to do that brainstorming, here are some specific steps you can take to get started.
Ian’s 3rd step is to measure and research. At Future Now we call that “uncovery” and it’s absolutely key to your success. Successful uncovery plus personas is how you go from knowledge to understanding.Ian’s 4th step is writing out the personas’ stories — usually 500 to 700 words — including who they are, demographics, and psychographics. (If you need some help with the psychographics part, read about the four personality temperaments; a great starting point for understanding how people make buying decisions and how they’re viewing your website.
Avoiding Stereotypes
In Ian’s 4th step, the issue of stereotyping comes up. Stereotypes are incredibly harmful to personas. Why, if stereotypes are based on common attributes shared by a group, how can that be all that bad? Well, stereotypes keep you from digging past a few surface-level facts to truly understand the real person. They are a shortcut used by people to try to understand those who are different from them. This shortcut prevents you from having real empathy for that person, especially since the majority of stereotypes are negative. Ian seems to send some (understandably) mixed signals on this point. On one hand, he explains that it’s not so cut-and-dry as it may seem. Meanwhile, he recommends giving the personas funny nicknames (like “Ian The Angst-ridden”) to help us remember their core motivations. Although this does help you get inside their heads, be careful that the qualities you lump onto your personas don’t end up causing new, unintended stereotypes just from the name you give them. But Ian’s right; it’s not as simple as it seems.
(NOTE: Ian and Brian Bond can discuss these finer points in their upcoming panel discussion on personas at the Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara. In the meantime, here are a couple more ways to get started with personas.)
Personas are powerful. Sure, some people claim they’re useless because they are artificial, not real people. But here’s the thing: Not everyone thinks or behaves like you do. (Yes, I hear the echoes of “Duh!” reverberating from your monitors right now, but how many times have you had an argument with a client or colleague because they want to run a commercial, create copy, or add functionality that they like. Personas give you a framework to have informed discussions about who your customers are, how they behave, and what they want.
Personas allow you to have empathy for customers who aren’t like you. Besides, if they don’t work, you can always fire them.
Finally, Ian’s 7th step is perhaps the most important: TEST your assumptions! Personas give you a framework for not only seeing what people do on your website, but for understanding why they do it. Think about it. You may run a test to see what happened, but do you really understand why? That’s where personas can really yield fantastic results.
P.S. If your personas aren’t working as well as you’d like, we can always help you optimize them.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Search Marketing Expo (West)
Who: Brian Bond, Future Now VP of Marketing & Products, Ian Lurie (President, Portent Interactive), Bob Tripathi (Search Marketing Strategist, Discover Financial Services), and Gord Hotchkiss (President and CEO, Enquiro) uncover “Search Marketing & Persona Models“.
What: Search Marketing Expo - SMX West is certain to be to the “must-attend” interactive and search engine marketing event of the year on the West Coast, delivering superior value to conference delegates and exhibit hall attendees alike.
SMX West has sessions designed just for you, whether you’re just starting in search marketing or you’re a seasoned expert. Your All Access registration pass gets you in to the more than 50 search marketing sessions on the agenda.
- New to search? Participate in the SMX Boot Camp which covers all the bases of search marketing success: copywriting, link building, paid search fundamentals and search engine friendly web design. After the Boot Camp, you’ll have two full days to dive deep on your areas of interest before SMX West unwinds.
- Got some experience? Learn the latest techniques for achieving superior results in both paid and organic search marketing. There are more than 20 sessions designed just for your skill level.
- An expert? Heard of Search 3.0? Search 4.0? SMX West has entire days dedicated to keeping you ahead of the curve with the inside scoop on future developments that only the editors of Search Engine Land can deliver, topics like the personalized search revolution, the social graph, and searcher behavior.
Where: Santa Clara Convention Center — Santa Clara, California
When: February 26 - 28
Why: Because your customers are personas just like you (but different) and they’re more likely to find your business if you know what’s motivating their search.
More Info: Visit the SMX West homepage.
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The Difference Between Knowledge and Understanding
Seems everywhere I look there are articles about Toyota’s rise from small Japanese company to the largest car manufacturer in the world. There are several theories for Toyota’s success, including their much touted use of Karzai Kaizen, or continuous improvement. But another practice is equally, if not more important, is genchi genbutsu.
In a recent American Marketing Association article (”How Toyota Got So Smart“), Travis Adkins explains genchi genbutsu:
One of the most religiously followed of these practices is something that Toyota calls genchi genbutsu - roughly translated as “go and see.” In essence, this means that to truly grasp an issue, employees must get up close and personal with it.
The New York Times article gives an example of this practice with the story of Yuji Yokoya, a Toyota engineer who had been charged with the redesigning of the Sienna minivan:
He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans — on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets — and make Toyota’s superior.
In the AMA article, meanwhile, Adkins points out that it’s become much more difficult to “outknow” your competition:
There’s a difference between knowing and understanding, although the two are often confused. Two organizations might have the same knowledge, but the one that posesses [sic] understanding can see consequences and implications that remain invisible to the other.
In other words, you can’t just know the facts; you must be able to interpret them.
I believe that in order to go from knowledge to understanding, one must have real-world insight into one’s customers. You have to dig deeper, ask better questions, and yes, put yourself directly into your customers’ shoes.
We don’t all have the time and resources to go as far as driving a minivan in every state in every type of weather condition. But that’s where customer personas can be your best friend. Doing a deep and thorough uncovery is absolutely necessary. This will be the first step in going beyond just knowledge to understanding. But creating personas gives you the missing link between knowledge, understanding, and applying that understanding.
Personas help you take facts about customers turn them into insight. And not just insight, but actionable insight.
So start with genchi genbutsu -- go and see. Then apply personas to turn that very valuable knowledge into crucial understanding.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
