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Maintain Your Trusted Expert Status – The Importance of Testing and Where to Start

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:13:00 +0000

Every single page of you website has elements in it which affect how people view your website. And each of those elements came to be there because of a decision you made.

But was it the right decision?

You’ll never know how much better you could be doing unless you test.

While it may seem like a daunting prospect with all of the potential testing situations available to you, you need to start somewhere. Any testing is better than no testing at all. But if you go off testing willy-nilly, you may be getting skewed results because of other factors that are influencing the results.

Here’s what you should be looking at when you’re starting to test, in this order:

Function – I know, duh, but you’d be surprised at how many people ignore basic functionality for testing brighter, shinier, more interesting things, and then don’t understand why they don’t see results. If half of your pages lead to nowhere, and you’ve got a ton of broken links, and your shopping carts keep emptying, or there is an error in your opt-in form, then how can you expect to see good results when you’re testing the picture on the front page?

Make sure everything works on your site first. The worst impression you can make is that your site is not properly run; it will undermine the trust level with your users so profoundly that the best content in the world will not save you.

Accessibility – The basics of accessibility is making sure that all kinds of browsers can load your website, and that it looks like it should on all of them. You can test this out at a site like http://browsershots.org/ which will test how your site looks in all the browsers you can think of, including Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

Other aspects of accessibility that you may not have considered, but are equally important are thinks like:

font size
language issues
script (java, php, asp, flash) errors
problems with things loading properly.

This is when it is very useful to have developed your buyer personas before addressing these concerns. For example, if your personas consist mainly of an older demographic, then size on font and clarity may be an important accessibility issue for you to consider.

Usability – Now that your site is functional and accessible, you have to start thinking about how people use your site. This is another opportunity for you to customize your site for your buyer personas.

What kind of font or layout to they prefer?
How do they move through the buying process?
What kind of navigation are they looking for?

It could even be something as simple as whether they prefer a blue button or a red one. A lot of the A/B tests you’ll do will have to do with usability (we’ll go through that whole process a little later – don’t worry.) There are a lot of things that you can find out about your buyers and your website through usability testing, and the improvements you can see from a few small changes is huge.

Intuition – The intuitive feel of your site is a little more subjective and can be harder to pin down. It as a lot in common with usability, but the intuitive level of your site is more about the entire user experience than about any one specific element. Through testing of intuitive elements, you can find the things that are preventing your users from completing the desired action you want from them.

These elements can include specific things like:

point-of-action assurances
customer reviews
color scheme
graphic design of the site itself.

Intuitive elements are the things that evoke a certain emotional response from our buyers. By testing these elements you can make sure that the emotional elements of your site are hitting the right notes with your buyer personas and further establishing yourself as a Trusted Expert in their eyes.

Persuasion – The persuasion elements of your site can be some of the trickiest to identify and tie down. These are the elements that actually persuade your buyers to perform the desired action. You only deal with persuasion issues after you’ve resolved all the other problems with your site.

Where to Start?

It’s important to focus your efforts on the things that will effect the most positive change with the least possible expenditure of time, effort, and money. Once you’ve addressed the basic concerns (functionality, accessibility, usability) then you can move on to the more emotional aspects (intuitive and persuasive elements). That still leaves a whole lot of testing to do.

Here’s how you can narrow those choices down:

1) Take a look at your site’s metrics.

This will tell you where you need to start testing. **Note – if you don’t have a site yet, make sure to address all of the concerns in order and build your site to meet your buyer personas needs and you’ll save yourself a lot of testing and you can go right to testing the emotional elements of your site to get a better response rate. Everybody else, keep reading.

2) Identify the following:

Pages with the highest bounce rate
Pages with the highest exit rates
Pages with the lowest time spent
The 5 most important pages on your site

3) Rank & Prioritize

Once you’ve identified these pages, you need to rank them in order of importance to you and (which really means in order of importance to your buyer personas, since it’s all about them, remember?) and where they fit along the functionality to persuasive scale, starting at the bottom.

You now have your list of things to test, and in what order to test them.

Also, in these areas, you can identify where your site has been lacking in thought leadership. Take this opportunity to change these areas so that it reinforces the idea of You the “Trusted Expert” in your niche.

Now you have a game plan to start testing with. Too bad you don’t know anything about actually running tests…

You didn’t think I’d leave you hanging, did you? That’s the next part!

(This post is a contination of the series of Becoming a Trusted Expert. You can read the previous posts at http://www.johncow.com/how-to-become-a-trusted-expert-online/)

Using Press Releases to be a Trusted Expert

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:33:32 +0000

In my previous posts in the Trusted Expert series (Starts Here), I’ve mentioned the importance of press releases and how they can help you become a Trusted Expert. Well, today I’m going to talk about them some more. That’s how important press releases are to you and your business. If you haven’t been taking advantage of them yet, you need to start. Now.

Press releases have a two-fold purpose: they give you the opportunity to reach your buyers directly with news about you and your business, and they are fantastic for improving your standing wit h the search engines.

The first thing you need to do is add a press release/latest news page to your website. This will be where you put all the press releases after you send them out. Not only does it give your customers a chance to find all the latest information about your company, but it also indexes like mad and the search engines love it. Just make sure that you keep updating it regularly – it won’t look good if the ‘latest news’ on your website is more than six months old.

A lot of people don’t send out press releases because they don’t think they have anything to write about. Here are some easy ideas that anyone can use to base their press releases on:

You’ve added a new product to your site
You’re speaking at an industry related conference
You’re sponsoring something or donating something
You’ve written some Trusted Expert content
You’ve found a new use for your product
You’re targeting a new segment.

Once you know what to write about, you need to start thinking about how you’re going to write your press release. When press releases were only written for the traditional press, all you had to worry about was making it interesting enough to be featured. Now you still have to try to please the news outlets, but you also need to make sure that your press release resonates with your buyer personas. One of the best ways to do this by including a special offer that appeals specifically to your personas and will compel them to take action, whether that’s going to your site, signing up for a newsletter, or buying a product.

So, to recap, here’s what you need to do to get started using press releases to make you a Trusted Expert:

Add a press release/latest news page to your website.
Come up with a list of reasons to write a press release.
Figure out what offer you’re going to use to compel your buyers to take action.

In the next post in the series, we’ll go over the more technical details of an online press release, like keyword targeting and density, optimizing the press release for search, and the social media release.

Being a Trusted Expert and Blogs Part 2

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:46:42 +0000

As I mentioned in the last post in the series (yes i am going back 4 weeks here), How to Use the Free Tools Available to Brand Yourself as a Trusted Expert, the next step in using blogs to become a Trusted Expert is to start your own blog.

So, how do you decide what to blog about? Well, you could blog about anything really, but since this series is about how to make your online business more successful, I would recommend that you do it about your business and your products (niche). Duh.

Exactly what about your business may be harder to decide.

Do some research (you should already know from your reading/commenting phase) and see what’s out there in your niche. Is there a gap that you could fill? Is there some information about your category that you think is important to get out there, and that will resonate with your Buyer Personas? Then that’s what your blog should be about.

Now here’s the list of things you’re going to want to know before you start your blog:

Your Domain (URL). Is it going be an extension of your existing main website, or will it have a unique name with branding and just point back to your site? Or is your blog going to be the main site? If so, you also need to decide what persona and feel you want your blog to have, which will influence the domain, tagline, and name you choose. If you are already adding your blog to your existing site, then you are somewhat limited as to choice, as it should relate back to the original site in some way. But if your blog is the whole site, then the sky and your imagination in the limit.
The tagline – remember that both the name and the tagline become searchable, so you need to pick them carefully to make sure that you’re indexing under the right keywords for your business.
The name (seems simple, but you’ll probably spend more time coming up with this than all the rest).

The reason why I’m telling you to take some time to come up with these 3 things is this: while you can change them later, as the search engines will reindex a site and you’ll maintain your rankings, but you will lose something more intangible – the branding and peronsa that you had built with that name or URL.

So, while you can go back and change it afterwards, putting a little thought and effort into it before you start will save you a headache and a bunch of rebranding after.

Here are the other things you’ll need to know when starting up your own blog:

Your design. There are a lot of software choices out there with customizable interfaces. If you’ve already got a look and feel that you like for your website, you can modify it and use it for your blog. Or, if you want something a little more stand-alone, you can just use the same colors (to connect it to your main site) but has a completely different look and feel. You can always go back and tweak it later, so don’t stress out about this one as much. Design is much more of a learning experience, and plus you’ll be testing elements to know exactly what your buyers want (and don’t worry, we’ll get to that part later, too).

Your voice. Blogs, more than any other kind of writing on the net, need to have a personality. The most successful blogs have their own unique voice that is so strong that you can almost imagine the person talking when you’re reading it. And although I’ve done posts on good grammar before, you need to walk a fine line – yes, use good grammar and spelling whenever possible, but you can also take liberties if it suits your voice. I’ve used non-good grammar thingies (see) where it’s appropriate. But if you keep to good grammar in every other way, it will be obvious that you’re doing otherwise for color and humor rather than that you don’t know any better.

Above all, keep in mind that your blog is supposed to be about you and your business. Don’t try to be something that you’re not – a big part about being a Trusted Expert is the fact that you are authentic.

Last point on this topic… just start a blog. I am serious here and I highly recommend everyone have a blog that is on a topic they are passionate about and especially if they want to be viewed as an expert in that niche.

Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert – Part 2

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:14:54 +0000

Do Your Visitors See Their Perfect Reflection In Your Website?

Continued from Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert Part 1

You need to think about the site organization – you need to make sure that there are the appropriate links that relate directly to what buyers are looking for, and that follows their thought process so that it looks logical and organic to them.

Once you’ve identified the situations that your targets are finding themselves in that causes them to seek you out, and you have the starting point for how to organize you navigation. Make your buying process follow the path of solving those problems. You then have the opportunity to communicate your expertise in solving these problems, build an empathic report with them, and move them further along to completing the buying cycle.

Who your target audience is will also influence the formats in which you talk to them. You need to think about your buyer’s preferred media and learning styles. Some groups will love to read long copy, while others prefer things short and to the point. An older target audience might not enjoy videos or podcasts as much as a younger audience. Whatever the personality of your target audience, your site also has to have its own distinct and memorable personality. And you need to make sure that, once you’ve decided on what that should be, that you stay consistent with that tone throughout all of your communications.

Price point is also important when it comes to how much sales copy to use. If you are selling a low priced offer (less then $97), you do not need 30 pages of sales copy… keep it to about 4 full page scrolls max. If you are offering a free trial (Pay $1 now and then get access for 30 days), then use even less copy. Focus on the benefits and let the free trial do the selling for you. In fact (obviously depending on the target audience), for free trials, short pages with a video and few bullet points work VERY well!

As you start to get repeat visitors, they will develop an emotional and personal relationship with you. They will expect to see and hear things in a certain way from your. To change that voice drastically without any warning will undermine the trust you’ve built with them. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be testing things (that’s a whole other series of posts) but you need to make sure you’re not making dramatic changes in the personality of your site without cause.

Don’t forget the importance of images and pictures in setting up the personality of your site. They are powerful tools that, when chosen correctly, can really resonate emotionally with your audience. When chosen incorrectly, they can be off-putting, and ruin the atmosphere that you’re trying to create. This is a good place for testing – most people focus on the hard things, like the offer, or buy-it-now buttons, but you’d be surprised at the difference an image can make in your conversion rate.

A few important things to understand about images.

“I Am Not That Old Am I?” – People want to think they are younger then they are… so if you are relating to a target audience that is 50, have pictures that have 40 year old looking people.Use common sense here… if you are targeting a teenagers, do NOT but pictures of children (I hope you realize that is obvious).
“Show Me How I Will Look After Your Product” – You want to show what the end result of what your offering will provide. This is why you don’t see weight loss supplements with only fat people on the page and dating sites with only lonely losers on the page. Show pictures of happy couples, six pack abs, laughter and other happy things. Obviously it depends on what your selling, if you are selling a product focused on potty training, a picture of a guy with six pack abs is not really a good choice… but a happy kid on the potty with happy parents, that there is a good one.
“Show Me Where to Go” – Use arrows to highlight where to take action… this has proven over and over again to increase conversions. We all hate to admit it but we all want to be told what to do… we just don’t want others to know that. Make it as brain dead simple as possible to see exactly where your customer is to go on the page, and arrows work very well.

Make sure that there’s a way for visitors to provide feedback to you. Make the ‘contact us’ information easy to find, use ‘rate this’ buttons for your products, and have either forums or comments enabled on your blog so that people can express their opinions easily. You can get valuable information about how well your site is resonating with its intended target (or not.)

Here’s what you need to do:

Make sure all of the technical aspects on your site work properly – no dead links, no images that fail to load, etc.
Come up with a site navigation/site map that is designed and organized with your potential buyers in mind – not how you organize your company. Also on the main page that you actually are selling, try to have the navigation moved out of the “above the fold” area. Keep them focused on the offer.
Make as many places for a two-way conversation that you can: easy to find ‘contact us’ information, a forum, comments on your blog, customer ratings on products.
Make sure that the ‘soft’ elements, like graphics and images, match your buyer personas and are going to resonate with them and make them perceive you as a Trusted Expert.

How to Develop Buyer Personas

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:13:16 +0000

Successful communications strategies work because they identify one or more buyer personas to target. You need to make these personas part of your planning process.

Buyer profiles, or personas, will be the cornerstone of your communications strategy. They are a crucial part of your planning process, and, although it’s tempting, you shouldn’t rush through them to get on to the fun stuff.

While you may only have one persona, or you may have several, there are still things you need to know about each group:

Their goals and aspirations
Their problems (so you can solve them)
Where they go to try and solve aforementioned problems
How you can best reach them
What is important to them
What kind of language do they use
What kind of images appeal to them
What kind of multimedia do they use

By doing this kind of basic research, you can learn a lot about these groups, and apply those learnings to your communications strategy to make it even more effective.

If you’ve got more than one persona, then you will also have to segment your communications strategy in order to target each persona individually. We’re trying to get away from the one-size-fits-all mentality when it comes to communications; it won’t do you any good to go through the buyer persona process and then try to shoehorn all the personas into one communication strategy.

By doing this basic research, you can learn a lot about these groups, and apply those learnings to your communications strategy to make it even more effective. The best way to learn about these people is to interview them, although that’s not always possible.

Look for other ways to learn about their habits – how did they get to your site, where do they go afterwards. You can also ask for information from current customers when they are completing a purchase, or give away something for free in exchange for some useful (but not personal) information about them.

By using these personas, you have a chance to truly empathize with your target buyers and to understand what they need, instead of concentrating on selling your product. You can see what drives them through the decision process.

Information you should see in your persona profile includes their background, daily activities, and solutions for their problems. The more you know about your market, the easier this will be to do.

Here’s what you need to do:

Identify the possible buyer personas for your site.
Fill out as much information as you can about your target groups; make sure to develop them into a real personality (give them a name if that helps) that you can relate to, not just generalization about a group.

Tools for Becoming a Trusted Expert – Blogs

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:57:45 +0000

As mentioned before (and probably will be mentioned another few hundred times over the course of this series) the key to your communications strategy is to think from the buyers point of view (which you know because you’ve developed personas) and to establish yourself as a Trusted Expert (by providing useful and timely information.)

So, now you need to know how, where and when to speak to your buyers directly. Which of the communication outlets should you utilize, and why? Well, only you can answer that question for your business, but here are the web-based communications that you can use to reach your buyers directly, and become a Trusted Expert.

For the next few posts, we’ll be going over the tools the internet has to offer, and how you can use them to brand yourself as a Trusted Expert. Today we’ll start with blogs, as they’re the natural first step.

Blogs

What can a blog accomplish for your company? While you may, at first, think of only of having your own blog, there are actually several ways to utilize blogs to the best advantage for your company. And, in fact, having your own blog is perhaps the last step in the process.

Before you jump into the fray, you want to understand exactly what the blogging landscape is out there. If you do it right, blogs can be the best tool your company has to promote your business, whether through your own blog, or by utilizing opportunities on other people’s blogs. Whatever your level of experience and utilization, blogs are your best tool for branding yourself as a Trusted Expert.

Here are the blog basics, for those of you who have been living in a cave, or perhaps in an area that still only gets dial-up (shudder): a blog is written using software that puts the most recent post at the tops of the page, in reverse chronological order. Posts are tagged to appear in selected categories and often include identifiers about the content of the post that will enable people to easily find it, both within the blog and also through the search engines.

A blog allows you to get a large amount of ideas out there, and because there isn’t a lot of risk or any cost involved, you can try out a bunch of different ideas and see what resonates with your audience, and what generates publicity for you. Your blog can also be one of your best tools for SEO – every word of every post is indexed by Google and the other search engines, so when people are looking for the topics you’re writing about, they will find you.

A blog has greater value beyond what you can calculate for ROI – publicity, air of authority, and new contacts are all benefits that you can’t assign a strict dollar value to.

Blogs are a free resource out there for you to use. You can get instant and unsolicited information as to what people are currently thinking and saying about you and your company. It’s like having a focus group that you can use – but for free. Every organization should be monitoring blogs to find out what people are saying about them.

In most product categories, early bloggers develop a reputation as being innovative. Once you’re comfortable with reading and commenting on other people’s blogs, it’s time to start doing it yourself. Later in this series we’ll get into how exactly you do that.

Even More About Testing (Because the Last Post was Getting Long)

Jason Katzenback — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 02:30:06 +0000

Continued from the previous post Continually Improving Your Communications

At the highest level of testing, you will need to test all the persuasive elements in your site so you can create the best system for closing the sale possible. And don’t underestimate the importance of any element on your site; something that seems unimportant to you could make all the difference to your users. Every element on your website is meant to persuade users to take a certain action; therefore, every element needs to be tested in some way. Luckily, on the internet, testing is easy and inexpensive (well, it can get expensive if you want it to, but it can just as easily be done cheaply.)

Don’t rely on what you would want, or what you think your users want; not everyone wants the same thing you want, or wants to be treated the way you want to be treated. That’s why testing is so important – so you give your users what they’re looking for, not what you think they’re looking for, or what you want to give them. You can apply all the research and knowledge that you’ve gained in your niche that you want, try to adhere all the marketing rules that you can find, but you will never know exactly what your users really want until you start testing.

Essentially, through testing, you will be letting your buyer personas design your site for you. You start out with a plan and a best guess, but be prepared to make changes and let go of your favorite design elements if they prove to not be what your users want. Ignore the ‘rules’ of online marketing. If the internet has taught us one thing, it’s that marketing rules were made to be broken. If the internet or online marketing never changed, then rules would be ok. But it is a fluid, constantly changing thing, and while there are some guidelines you could keep in mind, don’t be married to any one strategy if is stops producing results for you.

Through testing, you are empowering your users to decide what works best, and since they’re the ones paying the bills, it’s best to listen to them. Using Google’s Website Optimizer, you don’t have to guess what they want, the report results will quickly tell you what they like, what they don’t like, and most importantly, what will make them buy and what makes them not.

Remember – it’s about what your customers want, not what you like!

Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert

Jason Katzenback — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:08:24 +0000

To best leverage the power of that great, targeted, persona-driven, Trusted Expert-making content that you’re coming up with, you need to make sure that it is easy for visitors to find what they need on your site. And you do that through…

Smart Design

Let’s start with the (very) basics.

All of the technical aspects of your site must work properly. You can’t have any dead links, no images that fail to load, etc. You can single-handedly ruin any thought leadership that you’ve built through your communications strategy by pointing people towards a site full of broken links.

You also need to have a site navigation that is designed and organized with your potential buyers in mind. I mentioned this before, but let me repeat that again, as most people fail to do this with their websites: design the navigation of your site to reflect the potential buyer’s process, not how you have things organized for yourself.

Because really, your buyers really don’t care how you organize things in your business; they want to see navigation laid out in a way that will give them what they are looking for in the easiest way possible. What’s In It For Me rears its ugly (well, not ugly, since it’s a necessary part of understand buying motivations) head again.

To design your site properly (i.e. to get the most conversions) you need to learn as much as possible about the buying process for your product. You need to know how people find your site, and the length of time in a typical buying cycle (i.e. small purchases, short buying cycle, medium purchases, longer buying cycle, large purchases such as cars or homes – much longer buying cycle.)

The first thing a buyer wants to see when entering your site is something they can relate to; the site has to resonate with them. If they can see something of themselves in the site, they will inherently trust it more. You need to think about the site organization – you need to make sure that there are the appropriate links that relate directly to what buyers are looking for, and that follows their thought process so that it looks logical and organic to them. You want to move them off the home page (generic) to product and category (more specific, aimed at them) pages as soon as possible.

Whatever the personality of your target audience, your site also has to have its own distinct and memorable personality. And you need to make sure that, once you’ve decided on what that should be, that you stay consistent with that tone throughout all of your communications.

As you start to get repeat visitors, they will develop and emotional and personal relationship with you. They will expect to see and hear things in a certain way from you. To change that voice drastically without any warning will undermine the trust you’ve built with them. That’s not to say you shouldn’t be testing things (more on that later) but you need to make sure you’re not making dramatic changes in the personality of your site without cause.

Last but certainly not least, make sure that there’s a way for visitors to provide feedback to you. Make the contact us information easy to find, use rate this buttons for your products, and have either forums or comments enabled on your blog so that people can express their opinions easily. You can get valuable information about how well your site is resonating with its intended target (or not).

Writing For Your Buyers – From a Trusted Expert Perspective

Jason Katzenback — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:25:14 +0000

Now that you know who you should be talking to and what you need to be saying to them (I talk about this in my previous post How You Become a Trusted Expert), you need to know how to talk to them.

Your buyers are motivated by an oldie but a goodie (there’s a reason why we still use this):

What’s In It For Me?

Your buyers want to know what specific problems you can solve for them, and they want proof that it works (and no, you telling them won’t be enough.) They need to know why they should think of you as a Trusted Expert.

Poor writing usually happens because most marketers are only thinking about what they want – to sell product – rather than about what their customers want. You need to identify the situations that your buyers find themselves in, that could potentially provoke a need for what you’re providing.

What are their problems?
Their business issues?
Their needs?

Then you come up with solutions for those problems, and not by promoting your product. Remember, all of your content is meant to drive action (whatever action that you desire) and promoting a product does not drive action, providing solutions does.

The great thing about the internet is that it connects you to your buying audience right at the precise moment that they are in the market for what you are providing. They are looking for you, and you have the opportunity to give them the information they need to make their decision, and establish yourself as a Trusted Expert in their eyes. By establishing yourself as a provider of information, not a hard-sales person, you establish yourself as an authority in your category, and people will turn to you for advice. Once trust is established (before a purchase) you have the potential to develop a long-term relationship with the buyer that will be very profitable to you.

Every single part of your communications strategy is an opportunity to communicate with your buyers and convince them that you are a thought leader. The web is the first place that people go to do initial research on a purchase. The question you need to ask yourself is whether your content and communications strategy will draw them into the buying process with you, or will they not find what they need and move onto one of your competitors.

So, now I have a question for you… when you are writing content to sell to others, do you ever ask the question “what’s in it for them?” or do you just try to jam it down their throats?

How You Become a Trusted Expert

Jason Katzenback — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:06:43 +0000

As mentioned in the previous post about “Buyer Persona’s & Your Website“, once you know who you want to talk to by developing the buyer persona’s, you then need to make them believe that you are the authority in your market, the one they should turn to when they need information, and, ultimately, product or service. And how you do that is through thought leadership, which is how you become a Trusted Expert.

The term ‘thought leadership’ was coined by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of Strategy in Business magazine in 1994. The term was used to designate interview subjects for that magazine who had contributed new thoughts to business. For you, and in this example of running a business online, it means educating your potential customers on how to solve their problems; providing true and sound information without a sell at the end of it.

This is the crux of it: you are just trying to further the information about your industry out there; you’re trying to provide a service to your buyer persona’s that will make their life easier. You are not trying to sell them anything. You are, however, establishing yourself as an authority in your niche, or, as I like to call it, a Trusted Expert.

‘How can this help my business?’ you ask, ‘How can it make me money if I’m giving away things for free?”

The answer is this: you give information freely (and you put effort into making sure that it’s useful information); this establishes you as an authority in your niche (Trusted Expert!), and when it comes time for purchase, who do you think buyers would prefer to buy from? The guy who has done nothing but try to sell them things, or you, Trusted Expert, the guy who genuinely was trying to help them with their problems. The added benefit of being a Trusted Expert is that it also sets up a relationship that is conducive to additional purchases after the initial conversion; people will keep going back to people they trust.

The web offers you an easy way to spread your ideas to potentially millions of people. If you offer communications that are thoughtful and useful, you have the potential to influence many thousands of your buyers in a way that you would never be able to do by targeting them with traditional marketing and advertising.

This is why you need to start thinking differently; the power of the web requires a different kind of thinking to truly reach people. They’ve been so inundated with advertising from all sources online, you need to do something to differentiate yourself; you need to provide value, for free, before you even begin to try and sell them anything. Become that Trusted Expert your buyers are looking for.

So stop advertising!

Instead, get your ideas out there in a way that is useful, and understand what your buyers want and tell them the stories that they want to hear, that are the answer to their problems. Communications implies that it is two-way, traditional advertising is one-way. You need to start having conversations with your prospects. By engaging their attention with two-way communications, you won’t have to shout at them to get their attention over everyone else. They’ll already be listening to you.

Remember, being a Trusted Expert in all your communications with your buyer persona’s will brand you as someone that people want to do business with.

Stay tuned in for the next post: Writing For Your Buyers – From a Trusted Expert Perspective.

Got any thoughts or comments to add? Any examples of where you have seen this in action (hint hint… free ebook)?

Buyer Personas and Your Website

Jason Katzenback — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:03:53 +0000

Continued from Buyer Personas – Who, Besides Your Mom Is Your Audience

Websites also fall victim to the one-size-fits-all problem (remember, all your communications with your personas are related, and your website is the biggest piece of communication you have). Most web content is written generically, without buyer personas in mind, even if there has been an attempt to do so with the advertising campaign.

It feels natural to organize your website the way that you think about it. Everything is organized by the products or services, or by how you have things organized for yourself. This is a mistake. You need to structure your site according to your buyer personas; that way, when they come to your site looking for a solution to a problem, they can see an easy path to that solution. You need to concentrate on telling them what they want to hear, not on what you want to say.

This is perhaps the hardest part of an effective communications strategy: stepping away from what you already know about the product, and to learn how to couch it in terms that your buyer personas that will understand, that is categorized according to how they think or behave.

Your typical communications strategy is built on what the company wants to say about itself, not what the buyer is looking for or wants to hear. Communications strategies that work the best (and achieve their goals) are ironically, not actually about the company or its goals. They are about the customer and their problems, and how you are the solution to their problems.

A key part of this is to figure out what you want your buyer personas to believe about you.

Take careful notice about the word I used there: “believe”

It’s a very different thing than ‘think’. ‘Believe’ taps in to the emotional part of the buying cycle, the part that makes the actual decision.

Decide wisely what you want people to believe about you; it may make the biggest difference in whether they choose you to solve their problem or one of your competitors.

Buyer Personas – Who, Besides Your Mom, is Your Audience?

Jason Katzenback — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:53:31 +0000

Continued from previous post Why You Need To Become a Trusted Expert in Your Field

In this next step to becoming a Trusted Expert, you need to develop buyer profiles, which we should actually call buyer personas, because they should be well-rounded enough that they seem like a real person. Only then can you get real insights on what problems these people have that you can solve, and how to reach them with that information.

You may have several buyer profiles for your site, or you may have only one. However many you do have, you will need to figure out the best way to communicate with and serve the needs of that group.

A buyer persona is a fictional person that you have made up who is representative of as type of buyer that you have identified as having a specific interest (a problem you can solve) in your company. Once you’ve developed them, all communications are then targeted towards them. You use the language they use, you advertise in the places that they like to go. You just need to know who they are

By using these personas to develop unique, personalized communications strategies that target each segment specifically, you have a chance to send out a message that truly resonates with your intended target. Because of the two-way nature of web communications, each time you speak with them you have the opportunity to gain even more knowledge about the group, and apply those learnings to you next communications with them.

And to know what problems they have, you need to understand who your buyers are. You need to know who they are, why they need your products, and what problems your products can solve for them. And then, once you know who they are, you can concentrate on creating authentic, compelling web content that will reach them and effectively communicate how you can make their lives easier.

So how do you learn about them? The best possible way would be to interview them; but, as we all know, this isn’t always possible with an online interaction. A survey is also a good way to find information, but again there can be problems. Most people don’t want to take surveys so it’s not a true picture of your audience, and if you offer an incentive, then you get people who aren’t really your target market, but are taking the survey to get the incentive, and skew the results.

The best way to start is to use the information that you already have at your fingertips: analytics.

How did people get to your site?
Where did they go afterwards?
How many visits did it take them to convert into a sale?
What was their average time spent on each page?

You can also gain valuable information about your site and how well it’s working with these questions, but that’s another chapter.

But information from your site is not the only information you should use when determining your buyer personas.

The danger there lies in this…

What if your true targets haven’t been visiting your site?

What if they’re still out there, looking for a solution to their problems, not finding your, or worse, finding one of your competitors instead.

So what you need to do is first figure out what problems your site solves. Then, you figure out who has those problems. Everything else comes out of that. You need to also know what else is out there in your market, and how your competitors are solving problems themselves. Perhaps there is a niche that you’ve identified that no one in your market has identified yet.

When you truly understand what your buyers are looking for and what problems they want you to solve, you can eliminate the guesswork in your communications strategy, and you’ll know where, when, and how to target them.

Stay tuned for next post where i talk about How to Become a trusted Expert!

So whats your thoughts and comments?