Buyer personas are outlines of the different types of customers that convert for your business. Marketers use these models of your ideal customers to build targeted strategies.

When used correctly, buyer personas can help you better understand who you are writing content for and how to develop particular campaigns. Most companies create between 3-5 buyer personas. If you have significantly more than that, see if you are being too specific and try to merge a few groups together. If you do not have enough, look carefully at your company’s pain points and motivating factors. These factors are often key to differentiating between personas.

What does a buyer persona look like?

Creating a buyer persona involves going back over your sales records to gain a clear picture of the type of person who patronizes your business. You want to answer key questions about this type of customer that can help you identify pain points and motivations that caused them to buy your company’s products.

When you understand what people are looking for when they find your business, you will be able to create more targeted marketing campaigns.

It can often be helpful to go beyond just outlining the different motivations of a persona. Brands should understand the roles that these customers have at their organizations, including their budgets and background. The more information you can fill in for your persona, the easier it will be to imagine this persona as an actual person that you are selling to, rather than just an abstract thought.

What types of questions should I be able to answer about my buyer personas?

• What is their role in their organization?
• What is their budget?
• What is the problem they are experiencing?
• What do they want to accomplish with their purchase?
• What are their pain points?
• What is motivating them?

You should be able to collect a considerable amount of this information by reviewing your past customers and market research. Many brands also find it helpful to speak directly with their past customers. Ask them what brought them to the business and learn what matters most to them in a business transaction.

How do I create buyer personas?

1. Look over your past customers and market research to learn who is most likely to target your brand.
2. Use this information to create a full profile on a specific type of customer, including their pain points and motivations.
3. Interview and survey customers to fill in any blanks to create a full picture.
4. Aim to create 3-5 personas.
5. Use these personas to guide your marketing efforts.

Buyer personas can be very helpful for brands to understand who they are marketing to and to what they will respond best. Take time to break down your customers and pinpoint the types of people you need to target to enhance your marketing efforts. Then, match your personas to their buyer’s journey to create targeted marketing campaigns.

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Why is it important for a website to be easy to navigate?

Both the search engines and your site visitors want to find a site that is easy to navigate and so they can find the information being sought. When sites are difficult to get around, Google can penalize you in the SERPs, reducing your visibility. Google knows that when sites are confusing, the user experience is negatively impacted, and they do not want to highly rank sites that do not make customers happy.

For customers themselves, most will not waste time trying to find the information they had wanted. Most instead will just click off and try another site. Not only does this detract from your bottom line itself, but when you have people regularly click off your site, you will have a bad bounce rate, which can also negatively impact you in the SERPs.

What attributes make a site easy to navigate?

Your site layout should be primarily built around the user. This means the following:

• Name pages logically so users know what they contain
• Make folders and navigational systems sensible
• Make it easy for visitors to see where they are in your site
• Include a search box to streamline the ability of customers to find what they seek
• Make contact information easy for visitors to find

How do I know if my site is user-friendly?

The best way to know if your site is user-friendly is to look at your metrics. In particularly, ask yourself these questions:

• How do people move around my site? Are they clicking quickly from page to page-- which indicates they are looking for something they cannot find?
• What is my bounce rate?
• How many return visitors compared to new visitors do I get?
• What percent of my visitors become leads? How many leads become customers?

Site usability is an important factor in creating a positive user experience. Failure to keep these ideas in mind can easily result in search engine penalties and unhappy customers. Always put the customer first when designing a website and you will be on the right track.

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International SEO is the process of optimizing your site for international search engines, so bots can more easily identify the country and languages your site is targeting.

View a list of major international search engines or read our Best Practices for International SEO.

What is a good site design strategy?

In addition to taking site usability and navigation (link to product page about navigation) into account when creating a website, there are also a few other site features that should be considered when designing a website. This includes features such as:

• Your page load time
• Your image quality
• The placement of site parts

These features also impact users and ranking. As you create an optimized website, you will need to take these parts into account to ensure that your site is ready for modern web users and the search algorithms.

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What is page load time? Why is it important?

Page load time is the time it takes for your landing page to load when someone, a consumer, clicks on a link to your website or within it. A one second delay in your page load time will result in 11 percent fewer page views and a 7 percent decrease in conversions according to the Aberdeen Group. People do not like to wait around for pages to load, no matter how well that site might seem to fit their needs. Google also penalizes sites that have slow load times because of the poor user experiences they create.

If your site is taking too long to load, you might want to look for potential problems such as:

• Using too many plugins on your site
• Having too many redirects on your site
• Having too many elements on your site
• Oversized images
• Not enabling compression for large sites

Why is image quality important?

As already discussed, large images can slow download times, which will then hurt your site performance. It is also important to make sure that images are high-quality and cropped as closely as possible. This is because over half of all searches are now performed on mobile. On the smaller screens, these images are shrunk. If they are not high-quality, then they will not show up clearly on the page and not add anything to the user experience.

Why is site placement important?

Site users expect certain site features to be at particular parts of the page. For example, they want to see navigation either at the top or on the left of the page.

It is also generally recommended to keep your site design very clean, meaning plenty of white space so that people can easily see what your site has to offer. Sites that are too crowded with elements and colors tend to become distracting.

Creating an outstanding site requires you to think about all the elements that might impact your visitors. Not only must the site be easy to navigate, but it also must load quickly and offer quality design for customers to appreciate it.

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What is a silo?

When people speak about silos in a marketing organization, they are referring to heavily departmentalized teams. You have a group that cares exclusively about paid search, another that does organic search and still another that does social media. Each of your teams work on their own, focusing on goals within their own area, often even competing against other teams within the marketing department.

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What are silos used for?

The Internet has definitevely moved from being an nice extra in the marketing world to being the focal point. An estimated 67 percent of the buyer journey now takes place digitally and about 94 percent of B2B customers will conduct research online before making a purchase. Customers now are online, and marketing needs to reflect that.

What is most significant about these developments, however is that a growing number of customers are channel agnostic. They do not have just one means of communicating with brands. They might do searches on Google, read articles their friends posted on social media or click on a few paid ads as they try to determine the brand and products that best fit their needs.

These online customers, however, expect to see the same messaging and branding from a company no matter where they interact with them. If you have a strong organic SEO presence but do not have anything to offer them on social media, they might just move on to a competitor who is better at meeting them where they are.

Marketing silos prevent the different parts of your marketing team from working together. They hinder progress and joint goal setting, which leads to disjointed user experiences. For marketing teams to be successful moving forward, they need to learn to form coherent groups with common goals and understand how to use all their methodologies to accomplish their objectives.

How do I do silo management?

1. Encourage your different teams to develop documents defining common language. When everyone can communicate with the same words, it will be easier to understand each other’s perspective.
2. Develop projects for the teams to work on together. This will help the different teams get to know each other and their respective objectives and methodologies.
3. Offer workshops for members of different teams to get to know the basics of other types of marketing.
4. Have the teams set common goals for new marketing campaigns and articulate how their specific group will work towards those goals.

Marketing silos are quickly becoming a hinderance in a successful marketing operation. Brands need to focus on bringing their different teams together so that they can work towards common goals and present a unified brand image no matter where customers might encounter them.

What is hybrid marketing?

A hybrid marketer is one that is not hindered by a specific marketing specialty, but rather knows how to use a variety of skills and techniques to run campaigns using a more integrated marketing approach. For example, as a social media marketer, you might also understand how to do content marketing and analytics. If you are a content marketer, you might also be familiar with PPC and email.

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What are the benefits of hybrid marketing?

A hybrid strategy makes it easier for brands to build a marketing department that is not dependent on silos. By cultivating talent that reaches across the artificial boundaries that divide different marketing teams, brands can create fully integrated marketing campaigns that have common goals and create a common customer experience, regardless of where people interact with the brand.

By creating a department with these diverse talents, the brand positions itself to grow with the latest marketing developments and take advantage of best practices.

How does having a hybrid strategy help your career?

It has become increasingly apparent that there are talent gaps in the marketing world. According to the Online Marketing Institute’s State of Digital Marketing Talent, there is a 29 percent talent gap in mobile marketing and a 37 percent talent gap in analytics. Companies are having trouble finding the professionals that can help build organizations.

By expanding your skills beyond your initial marketing specialty, you will become more marketable to other organizations and more valuable to your existing organization. You can also play a key role in helping your brand break down the unnecessary silos, propelling your marketing abilities forward.

How do you do hybrid marketing?

1. Find some related marketing fields that would be a good match for your skills and goals. Remember that mobile marketing and analytics are becoming increasingly important in the marketing world.
2. Look into potential trainings run by your business or speak with members of those specialty teams. You might find some like-minded people who are interested in learning more about your skill set.
3. Find online classes-- there are a variety of free tutorials-- that will help you start to dive into your new subject area, so take advantage of them as well.

As the marketing world matures, the hybrid marketer, who is not limited in their abilities when it comes to promoting a brand, will come to dominate. To make sure you remain relevant in the field, cultivate your own skills and stay on top of the latest advancements.

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Google makes hundreds of updates each year to the underlying algorithm it uses to generate search results. Updates include minor (frequent) updates and major updates (infrequent) and are designed primarily to improve the quality of search results. Most changes have little visible impact, but occasionally, updates can significantly reorder results.

Websites and brands that value the organic search channel should regularly monitor their search results for changes, and follow any provided guidance from Google on pending or recently completed updates.

Read more about the latest updates.