Chapter 6: Getting to Know Your Audience

One of the most important aspects of a strong marketing campaign – digital or otherwise – is getting to know your audience. At the end of the day, SEO and online marketing are about connecting with customers and prospects. Understanding who they are makes that easier for you to do so effectively on a number of levels. Strategic research and the right kind of analysis can create tools that make it easier for you to understand who you’re working with, informing everything from the language you use in your copywriting and social media updates to how you design your website and other digital products.

Developing Customer Avatars

One approach to developing a better picture of who your customers are involves creating customer avatars. Simply stated, a customer avatar is an embodiment of your typical customer. It’s an approach that can help you capture everything you need to know about a prospect or customer, such as:

• Basic demographic information, like age, gender, income, marital status, geography, and more
• More complex demographic factors that might impact buying, such as their living situation or what type of career they work in
• Their buying style, such as Detailed Researcher or Impulse Buyer
• The underlying emotional or mental problem that they’re trying to solve, in relation to your products or services
• Benefits and brands that they value and that factor heavily into the buying process (i.e. who is the competition and how do they feel about it? What do they value when they’re evaluating your product space?)
• The language that they use to describe the issues at hand
• What types of proof and endorsements they trust, from celebrity spokespeople to in-depth consumer reviews
• The publications, shows, and social media platforms where they spend time

And so on. At the end of the process, marketers end up with a picture that looks something like the following:

Anne is a stay at home mother of three living in the Pacific Northwest. Her biggest concern with purchasing laundry products are budget and health & safety. She also expects the product to be effective, but she considers that an obvious non-negotiable. She researches brands by reading mom blogs, environmental publications, and by talking to her friends. She’s not above an impulse buy, however, if she finds a great deal on a new product from a company she trusts or has heard about before.

The term “customer avatar” is borrowed from a well-established history of customer segmentation and personas in market research. Typically, a market research firm gathers a large amount of data about your audience and searches for patterns. The patterns that emerge are grouped into similar customers, and each of those segments is given a name that relates to their status or behavior. These descriptive terms could range from “The Home Craft Beer Brewer” to “The Reluctant Millennial Entrepreneur.” Another approach assigns a name to each segment, so you end up with “Carol, The Home Craft Beer Brewer” and “Tyson, the Reluctant Millennial Entrepreneur.”

Customer avatars allow you to create a baseline persona of who you’re trying to appeal to. Depending on the complexities of your business or your audience, you may have several avatars that correspond to different customer segments. The process of building your avatars can give you a systematic way to glean insights about your customers, while the avatars themselves can provide a focal point for your marketing team’s efforts.

The Information You Need and Where to Find It

Embarking on the process of building a customer avatar can be challenging. There are a number of templates available that can guide you. There are three fundamental approaches to gathering more data about your customers or prospects. Most audience profiles are created using some combination of these difference sources, rather than a single point of data.

Existing customer information: You may already have a wide variety of information available on your customers and targets, from demographics and buying details to previous research and website analytics. Start your process by gathering as much information as you have on hand and sorting through it. This will give you a valuable starting point, and also help you identify knowledge gaps and lines for further inquiry.

Extended research: The Web provides a wide range of sources where you can learn more about your targets, from observing them on social media to reading the publications that they read. Observation and data gathering is an important step to fleshing out some of the less tangible details of how your audience structures conversations, discusses their most pressing issues, and the language and vocabulary that resonates.

Conversations with customers: If you have a question that is critical and you can’t find the answer, ask. Customer interviews, focus groups, surveys, and informal one to one chats with customers and prospects can yield critical insights that let you solve a key problem or have a major breakthrough in terms of how to serve your audience.

For more information on how to create effective profiles, see 7 Ways to See What Your Target Audience Wants and Create Epic Content.

Audience Profiles and the Three Pillars

Another way to think about audience profiles is through the lens of the Three Pillars of SEO. If you’re struggling to see the relevance of avatars to your business, let’s take a look at how they can inform your efforts in each of the key areas. You could also consider these conversely: if you’re struggling in any or each of these areas, an avatar could give you a different perspective and a starting point for content creation and engagement.

Content: Content is only effective if it speaks to the reader. Your customer profiles will help clarify who you’re writing for, what topics to focus on, the language, positioning, and calls to action that are effective, and where you should publish to make sure your materials are seen.

Social media marketing: Social media is a broad space, from the major networks to niche sites. Understanding your audience will help you choose the right networks to be active on, what tone to take, and how to create content that connects and fosters the right level of engagement.

Links: Audience profiles can help you create a simple learning loop that informs your link efforts. Understanding your audience will help you target your content and outreach efforts to the sites and publications that they’ll care about and are most likely to read and trust. A secondary effect of this is that you’re also going to choose authority publications that are truly and meaningfully linked to the topic you’re establishing yourself in. This has positive implications for both search engines and audience building.

Audience Profiles & Keyword Searches

There’s an important connection between really understanding your audience and finding the keywords that provide the right foundation for your marketing and SEO. Keyword searches are highly individual, reflecting a user’s vocabulary and intentions. Sometimes the relationship is as simple as understanding how two prospects talk about the same product, e.g. spaghetti and pasta. Both terms refer to the same thing, potentially, but if you don’t know which one your audience uses you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. This is about more than generating a huge list of keyword possibilities; it’s about having the data to filter and prioritize those possibilities in a way that meaningfully connects to your audience.

Understanding your audience can also help you filter buying intent. There are two primary types of keywords, informational keywords and intentional keywords. Informational keywords are simple and tie to a desire to learn more about a specific topic, e.g. “What is SEO?” Other keywords indicate that a searcher has a clear intention to buy, or to move along with a specific process. Consider for example, “Best SEO Agency in Boston.” This searcher is likely looking to speak to someone and learn more, probably with the intent to hire. A closer look at your customer’s buying journey will give you insights into each step of the process, and let you tie that back to your keyword searches in a meaningful way.

Customer Profile Breakdowns

One last note on customer profiles. You often hear about organizations that go through the process of creating audience profiles, only to see them sitting on a shelf gathering dust. Like any tool, audience profiles are only useful if they’re created well and put to use. Here’s a closer look at some of the reasons why avatars don’t make an impact on the business:

1. They lack a foundation in data: Customer profiles need to be based on real data. It doesn’t matter how creative and engaging your descriptions are if they don’t offer deep, actionable insights into the mindset and behaviors of your audience. Build strong profiles based on customer data, in-depth research, and interviews and surveys.
2. They’re not well-rounded: There are a number of different sources that you can gather customer data. If you base your profiles on limited sources, you may not get the insights that really bring your customers to life. Consider profile written by a sales person with anecdotal experience of customers. How much richer will that profile be if it integrates website analytics, market research report data, and focus group input?
3. They’re all data and no soul: You can also fall into the problem where your profiles are simply a list of data. “Male, 18-25, lives on the West Coast, income under $50,000 per year”, yet it fails to really capture the insights that your team needs to make a sale. If your profiles don’t push for a more meaningful analysis into context and motivation, that’s going to limit how useful they are.
4. They’re not valued: Finally, some companies simply don’t create a culture where avatars are shared and valued. This starts with education. Ensure that everyone on your team understands how customer profiles are created, how they’re used, and has access to the data. Treat them as a valuable starting point, and they’ll add depth and value to your market efforts.

A solid understanding of your customer base informs everything you do, from linking efforts to content marketing and social media. With this in mind, we’ll take a closer look at how linking practices take shape in 2014 and what you need to know to create an effective link-focused SEO strategy.