Marketing persona – what is it all about?

People talk a lot about marketing, but not everyone knows what they are. A marketing person can be defined in various ways. Simply put, this is the type / profile of the client that represents the greater part of a particular group. Persona has its own individual characteristics, behaviors, values – these are the guiding principles when choosing a product or service. The so-called. buyer persons (or marketing persons) are fictional characters but have the characteristics of real customers. Their task is to facilitate the work of marketing, communication and sales departments. Thanks to them it is possible to design a communication path for a particular group of recipients.

To speak more scientifically, “Persons are fictional characters based on customer data that represent different segments of target audiences.” However, the simplest definition of marketing person is the ideal client of a given brand / product / service.

Perfect customer – how to find him?

Creating a marketing person requires a lot of time and attention. I recommend focusing on even the smallest details, because they can later be of great importance in communication. Person can be determined based on your own imagination – this is a solution for young brands, but it is also much better to reach for analytical data on already acquired customers. When looking for the perfect customer, you need to combine both demographic and psychographic data. Remember that persona is not only a description of the ideal customer’s personality, but also a set of all factors that may affect the purchasing process. What should a good description of marketing personnel contain?

– Demographics. They answer the question of who the ideal customer is. This part of the description includes information such as age, gender, place of residence, education, role in the family.

– The financial data”. They answer the question how much an ideal customer earns. This part of the description analyzes information such as the type of work performed, position held, scope of duties, industry, size of the company, amount of earnings (in the range), how much it spends, how it pays, where it buys, what savings it has.

– Data on rituals and behaviors. They answer the question of what a typical ideal customer’s day looks like. For each brand, different rituals and behaviors will be important, but it’s worth gathering them as much as possible. In this part you can, for example, describe how persona moves to work, what she does in her free time, where she goes on vacation, what she reads, what she eats for breakfast, what time she gets up, where she goes shopping, what her interests are, or browses the Internet on a computer or mobile, at what times it is active on the network, etc. This subitem of description is one of the most important, because it allows you to immediately determine what points of contact with the brand can be and when they can occur, e.g. during a tram ride on universities.

– Data on needs. They answer the question, what is the ideal customer’s problem and how can you help him develop it? Problems may loosely relate to the services sold or be closely related to them. For example, a young mother may have a problem with lack of time for herself – the solution: she needs your time planner or e-book to organize yourself at home.

– Value data. They answer the question, what are the most important values, ambitions and goals of an ideal customer. This information is needed to determine the incentive that a marketing person will be given to make them want to buy.

– Data on concerns. They answer the question what an ideal customer is most afraid of. This type of information can also motivate the customer to act. The biggest fears are a good way to encourage action – e.g. you don’t want to have a stomach band, reach for an e-book with exercises or healthy recipes.

– Data on shopping behavior. They answer the question of how a perfect customer buys. This part of the description should contain information whether the client is susceptible to expert words, whether he pays attention to promotions, whether he values ​​the recommendations of friends / family / influencers, whether he checks price comparisons, whether he focuses on quantity or quality.

Based on all this information, a description is created of the marketing person to whom the name is given and the photo is added. This allows you to better image the perfect customer. Good advice: it is best to add the photo at the very end (so as not to succumb to stereotypes based on the appearance), and also put on the most natural image possible.

When creating a marketing persona, it’s always worth reaching for professional tools. Thanks to them, it will be easier to obtain quantitative data and will not be a divination from coffee grounds. It is good to combine data with observations, as well as customer interviews (if any).

Client or clients – how many marketing persons should a brand have?

Hardly any company has only one marketing person. Typically, brands make up to 3 to 5 people. This is considered a minimum. However, you must remember not to force a dozen or so perfect clients. Creating a person is not about describing every possible customer on the market, but the one who can actually be the perfect brand. Another thing to remember is that each persona created should represent a different audience segment. Perfect customers cannot be almost identical and differ from each other only, e.g. by age.

It should also be mentioned here that marketing persona is not only a B2C business tool. Companies operating in the B2B sector should also take care of their creation.

Why is it worth to meet an ideal customer?

Marketing persona is primarily to improve the activities of marketing and sales departments. Creating them makes communication more effective, and so-called budget burnout smaller. Other benefits of meeting an ideal customer include:

– Defining the target group of the project, e.g. introducing new phone models to the store,
– Understanding the needs of customers, their goals and motivation, which allows, among others determine whether the introduction of a new service / product makes sense,
– Adjusting brand communication (of all teams and departments) to the language spoken by the customer, which will eliminate errors and allow you to reach him and sell the product faster,
– Identifying the “places” where customers are most often and conducting the most intensive marketing activities there.

The role of marketing persona in the purchasing process

Marketing persona can play many roles in the purchasing process. Moreover, it will not always be involved in the transaction. It is therefore important to know the role of the person. They are divided according to the tasks they play.

The first role a persona can play is the buyer. He purchases the product. Persona can also be an initiator, i.e. subject to the idea of buying a service or product. The next roles are advisory, user, decision maker. Understanding these roles allows you to assign them to specific people. It should be noted that decision-makers are not always reached. Many brands in their person grid will have primarily advisors and initiators, this is not a bad thing, but you need to adapt the content to their needs and decision-making possibilities.

Is marketing persona needed in SEO?

Marketing persona are usually used by marketing and communication departments. Persons are also important for the sales department. However, little is said about the importance of marketing persona in the context of SEO. However, they are inseparably connected. The created personas facilitate the optimization of the website and its positioning in the search engine. A brand that has created people knows what products they are looking for, their priorities and how it works on the web. Thanks to this SEO activities are more targeted. They allow, for example, to choose a set of keywords for a given person and carry it through the entire purchasing process.

Marketing persona also help in working on Customer Journey Map. CJM is a customer journey map from the first contact with the brand / product to purchase. Knowing your persona, you can significantly reduce the route of travel, prevent chaos, maximize positive experiences. Thanks to this, the company does not burn the budget and runs tailored SEO campaigns.

Let us also remember that marketing persona are increasingly important for the website’s UX and its readability and functionality. As every SEO knows well, this translates into search engine results. Many companies decide to create websites, or landing page dedicated to specific people. Their appearance is tailored to the needs, preferences and expectations of the perfect customer.

Marketing persona are one of the most important elements of each brand’s advertising and content strategy. They can also help in SEO. Thanks to her, one knows how, to whom and what to talk about. The process of creating persona is not a day or two. You have to get to know your perfect customer. Determining your age, gender and place of residence will not make him your friend. And he should be. The better and more accurately you meet the marketing person, the more useful it will be in building communication, marketing and SEO strategies.

Target group in SEO according to GSC

If you look at GSC (Google Search Console) then you won’t find information about target groups there, which you can specify by e.g. age but you can read a lot from the keywords that appear there: – price cuts – this is already a clue that you can use to expand the site with additional subpages or content. The target group determined by the prism of price shapes your pricing policy and also indicates whether a given group of words will benefit you or not (because you may not sell this assortment up to $ 20 but you will still start). At the same time, on this basis, you can specify the target group in terms of income (or at least try).
– questions – they prove the nature of the information sought and constitute the basis for building answers. For example, if someone types in “how to examine the competition’s keywords,” we can assume that it is either a seo or the owner of a new business. So why not answer this question with a solution scheme and an additional incentive to buy my service?
– “how to teach a dog to bark” – here you can also do a lot in terms of building content and handling specific target groups
– it may happen, however, that the target group is not the same as the typed phrase – for example, “online printing house”. If the customer is indeed a printing house but only supports the B2B market, then it is worth clearly saying to such a customer that yes, he has a lot of traffic, but there are no customers there, because this is the B2C market and in organic results this group of customers is the overwhelming majority. That is why it is worth considering whether we really want to push ourselves – our customer.
– devices – in GSC we have the ability to verify group traffic according to the type of device used. Thanks to this, we know whether the target group are passionate computer players or mobile people (e.g. tourists).

At Paraphrase Online, we support over 500 online stores, so it’s not the time to flirt with modesty. We just know what works in a given industry and at a given scale of activity. Google Analytics does not lie. That is why in this post we will focus on what to focus on in online store marketing.

Online store marketing – what budget?

What budget will be ideal to launch effective online store marketing? I probably won’t be surprised by giving a Solomon answer that … it depends.

We have clients who have invested several dozen or even several hundred thousand dollars in their own online stores, but have forgotten that they still need to inform customers and at the beginning they had $ 3,000 or $ 4,000 for advertising. An in-depth investment in the website itself makes sense if it takes into account, for example, the delivery of interesting content at the entrance or seo optimization. However, if the technology and graphics and programming games cost us a lot, and at the same time we have not secured funds for marketing, then we may have a problem with getting the right traffic to even the most beautiful store under the sun.

Many customers are wary of online advertising because awareness of how different advertising systems work is simply low. The most important points that reinforce the belief that this is a real investment, not just an expense, are:

– by advertising your online store, we can accurately measure the effectiveness of each campaign or advertising channel,
– you can choose any time you want to broadcast your ads in response to market changes or specific events,
– you can flexibly manage your budget and seeing that it “works”, spend more money on advertising,
– you can and even need to test new solutions that have sales potential,
– you can easily determine how much it costs you to acquire a customer and optimize the campaign in this respect. Anyway, this is the most interesting piece of the puzzle – many entrepreneurs who apply to Paraphrase Online do not know how much they can actually spend to acquire one customer. For some products it will be hundreds of dollars, and for others it will be cents.

Considering the above, one conclusion emerges immediately. Too small a budget at the beginning will make the test less reliable and you can alienate yourself with a given advertising tool. Let’s say you have an online store with a lot of competition that spends $ 10,000 on advertising only in Google Ads. However, you have $ 500 a month for this environment. This amount will result in insufficient traffic in a given category. Because what if basically acquiring a client in this category costs e.g. $ 250? Too small a sample will make you randomly burn $ 500 at random.

In order to draw the appropriate conclusions, it is necessary to determine at the beginning – preferably in consultation with a specialist in a given field – how much it must be spent for the “trial” to give us the actual size of the potential profit.

When advertising on the internet, the matter is simple – too small a budget for a given area will be a simple waste of money that we still don’t have. Is there such a thing as too big an advertising budget? Yes! At a certain level, with a given targeting of advertisements, it may turn out that we can not spend more on advertising indefinitely because the converting traffic will remain at the current level and the expenses will increase. This will make getting customers just more expensive.

That is why it is so important to balance the investment in advertising and its supervision over the timeline.

Well, what if you have $ 3,000 for advertising, but you know that there are companies in your industry that spend $ 20,000? Then the most reasonable solution is to focus on the advertising channel that best converts for the industry. Sometimes it will be Google Ads text ads, sometimes cooperation with micro influencers or affiliation, and sometimes relying on YT advertising video views. It all depends on the store, target group and your goals as well as several other factors.

So, if you have a limited budget, my advice would be to consult the topic with a specialist or even in a public forum (e.g. groups on Facebook) and find out where to invest in the first place to obtain resources to expand advertising activities.

The more you have an advertising budget, the more holistic advertising you can take and give you the comfort of looking at your business in the long term and, for example, investing in online store positioning (if it makes sense in your industry).

Below are the basic forms of advertising for online stores that work.

Online store positioning

I start from the end. Positioning an online store will bring benefits – depending on the industry in which you operate – after a long time, and therefore many entrepreneurs do not pay attention to the first thing, because they want to quickly monetize their fresh store. Positioning, however, is worth considering because you do not want to operate on the market for 3 or 6 months, but many years. That is why it is worth knowing that positioning an online store is the cheapest method of acquiring potential customers in the long run. So if you have an extra budget for this type of investment, it’s definitely worth it.

What does it mean to position an online store? In the simplest terms, it will make sure that the user searching for a given phrase in the search engine first hits your site. In practice, this means that you must be on the first page of search results and as high as possible. Of course, the trick is to position yourself on phrases that convert, i.e. in the case of an online store they just sell. There is a higher probability that the user who specifies his query – e.g. product – is closer to purchase than the one who enters a search query with a high degree of generality. It is also worth knowing that often attractive phrases are occupied by strong brands and competitors, which means that it is often worth considering long tail positioning, i.e. key words and phrases that are less frequently searched, but at the same time – on an appropriate scale – will bring caloric movement .

Organic results – that is, those that “naturally” shows Google in the search engine, are characterized by a high degree of credibility with potential customers. A positioned phrase will work for you in the long term, and keeping it in a given position will require care, but not as much as just “pulling” it to the first page of search results.

Google Ads for online store

Google Ads – once Google AdWords – is the Google advertising system and currently the most widely used tool for internet marketing. Many channels, many targeting options, lots of advertising formats and amazing measurability. First of all, it is on Ads that you should direct your attention if you want to start earning quickly.

You can do a lot with Google Ads, so I will discuss areas that will be particularly valuable “at the entrance” and worth exploring.

Google product ads

Online store marketing is in many cases based on Google product ads, i.e. Google Shopping. Enter any product query in Google – e.g. men’s watch – and you will receive on the top or right side photos of product data that are advertised by given online stores and matched to your query and whether you are in a given interest group.

This type of advertising is very effective for three reasons. First of all, we buy often through the eyes. Secondly, we immediately get the price of the product. Thirdly, however, such advertising – if it is well optimized – is well suited to my intentions, i.e. it responds to my needs.

It is difficult to imagine a better product presentation, already at the stage of browsing the search engine by a given user.

Text Ads

Google text ads usually appear above organic results. Since they do not differ from “natural” results in anything but the small inscription “advertisement”, many Google users simply treat them as the result given by the search engine. Behind the text ad – there is also an advertiser. A properly optimized advertisement will download caloric traffic to your website, which will eventually turn into real buyers. Text advertising is usually the best associated tool in the Google Ads family (previously it was even synonymous with the Google AdWords brand). There are also various other names, such as sponsored links.

Youtube

You know YouTube, and this already means something, and even if you treat it purely entertaining, this platform has many more uses. Youtube is the world’s second internet search engine, which serves us not only as a music player, but also to help in many matters – from searching for recipes for cooking, and ending with reviews of cars or paints for painting. Of course, it is also a place where companies build their own content and decide to cooperate with creators. Video advertising works on many senses, but also has the chance to engage the recipient on a completely different emotional level. All this means that ads on Youtube are more and more often used by advertisers and of various scale of operation – starting from millions of budgets and ending with limited campaigns for several thousand dollars.

For reasonable money, you can build a really good reach and number of views of your videos, thus resonating in the perception of potential customers.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a way to reach people who have already been to your online store’s website. The system collects a list of such people, which you can later use in various ways. For example, you can reach people who have abandoned the cart with already added products or dropped off at the payment stage. Proposing a small discount or a reminder of a sad, abandoned basket can make them return to unfinished shopping. You can also apply remarketing extensively – to everyone who just visited your store and at a different time horizon. You can target remarketing banners to people who were 500 days ago, as well as to those who left it yesterday or a few minutes ago.

Remarketing is widely used not only in the Google Ads system but also in social media. In today’s world something is still chasing us and we have a lot of distractions around. We also add products or watch on smartphones, and then forget about them because just … our bus stop has fallen out and must go on. Hundreds of situations distract us from finalizing purchases. Remarketing cleverly and relatively cheaply reminds you of your store and therefore nicely supports online store marketing.

Social Media and online store marketing

Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn, Snapchat or TikTok – all social media platforms are pretty good, and sometimes even the first choice for online store marketing. Each of these portals requires a different approach. However, due to the “proximity” of potential content recipients and the possibility of interacting with them, social media is a valued marketing channel.

Facebook offers the widest group of users and also the best-designed for targeting. As an agency, we have defended ourselves for a long time against the introduction of this type of service, but ultimately customers forced us to do so. And very well. We see that the combined campaigns in the Google and Facebook environment intertwine wonderfully and we have also gained a broad picture of where and how to invest funds for given industries. For example, it may turn out that Facebook remarketing works better for a given store, and Gmail ads work well again for another one. We have on board a team of specialists who have recently been certified in the Facebook Blueprint program, which guarantees our clients top-class care.

Facebook offers various advertising goals as well as formats tailored to your specific needs. Thanks to the installation of Facebook Pixel, there is also an option to measure the effectiveness of our campaigns to the penny and to approach the marketing of the online store on Facebook flexibly in time and budget.

Summary

Consider the examples above and choose which method will be best for you.

The Google Ads panel in conjunction with Google Analytics and YouTube Analytics gives you wide possibilities of measuring campaign data. When running a video campaign on YouTube, the advertiser can monitor, among others:

– number of views,
– average cost of watching the advertisement,
– daily (or generated in another, selected time period) advertising cost,
– the number and type of conversions,
– cost of conversion,
– video playback percentage,
– activity earned, i.e. likes, shares, subscriptions, etc.

In the case of television, viewership is determined by telemetry. Telemetry surveys are statistical surveys carried out on the basis of a panel, i.e. a group of recipients representing e.g. the entire population of a given country. In order for the panel to be reliable, it must properly reflect the structure of the society it presents, and must also have the appropriate amount of data. According to Paraphrase-Online.com, telemetry tests in the world are carried out on a group of 2,000-10,000 households.

A tycoon on the television research market on its website informs that it is able to obtain data on viewers, the channels they watch, as well as on the time of watching television. As part of the available viewing rates, it provides information on:

– television audience behavior,
– demographic characteristics of recipients,
– programs watched by individual members of the household,
– programs watched jointly by all family members,
– family attributes, e.g. possession of pets, income, education and their correlation with television preferences.

Certainly, telemetry data are a very valuable source of knowledge about recipients of TV programs and commercials. However, they are statistical data, obtained on the basis of a small group of recipients, and in addition they do not present such specific details that can be obtained from online advertising. For TV ads, it’s difficult to get data on the cost of a single interaction or the number of conversions that an ad generated. By promoting their products or services on YouTube, advertisers, however, have significantly more access to data on the effectiveness of promo videos and the behavior of viewers watching videos.

Advertising on television – costs

Online advertising fees are usually based on views (CPV) or per thousand impressions (CPM), not on broadcast time (as with TV advertising). The unit costs of online advertising usually range from a few to several cents per interaction, thanks to which, even with a very limited budget, the advertiser can display their promotional video on the web.

With a limited budget, the additional advantage is the ability to target specific, small audiences and the fact that you can choose specific periods of video display.

In the case of online advertising, the viewing rates are not so dependent on the duration of the spots, and even if they increased at a certain point in time, the advertiser always has access to such data. Thanks to statistics, the advertiser has full control over the daily budget of the campaign, which allows him to decide how much exactly he wants to invest in the promotion. Additionally, it can track expenses on an ongoing basis and decide at any time whether to continue or suspend the display of its campaign.

Targeting TV and Youtube ads

Google Ads offers many types of ad targeting. Audience groups can be created based on:
– demographics
– interests,
– life plans and events,
– destinations visited by internet users,
– topics of pages, channels, mobile applications,
– keywords related to the content of pages, channels and mobile applications,
– devices used by network users.

and combine the above mentioned options.

Television advertising – due to the fact that it is tested telemetrically based on a specific panel of recipients – will never be as well tailored to a specific recipient as online advertising. Unfortunately, television does not allow to narrow down the target audience as precisely as Google Ads allows. Equally important, the television does not have the remarketing option – therefore, it will not be possible to return there with a re-advertising message only to those recipients who were thinking about buying, but resigned from it at the last moment (e.g. they left the shopping cart).

Building engagement & impact on recipients

Online advertising allows Internet users to easily and quickly interact when they are interested in a product or service being promoted. When watching an advertising spot on the web, an Internet user has several different options at their disposal:

– watching the entire advertising film,
– clicking on the call to action to go to the advertiser’s website and get more information or to convert directly,
– movie likes
– entering the advertiser’s channel and watching other available materials,
– subscribing to the advertiser’s channel,
– making the advertising film available to other people,
– temporarily pausing the ad,
– as a last resort and if you are not interested in advertising – skip it.

In the vast majority of cases, interaction with online advertising does not require the use of a device other than that on which the ad is played. Thanks to this option, at the moment of interest in a given product or service, an Internet user can immediately explore the secrets of the offer without wasting neither time nor enthusiasm to reach for a computer or telephone, turn it on and look for the page or name of the product, which in the meantime may have unintentionally disappeared from memory.

In the case of TV ads, it is not possible to interact directly on the advertising medium. To learn more, you need to use a laptop or telephone. Many of you will say that during ads they grab the phone, and therefore at any time can tap the name of the thing that he saw on the glass screen. Truth. But…

According to research carried out by Paraphrase-Online.com during television advertising blocks, 33% of people using smartphones browse social networking applications, 21% of these consumers play games, 8% of people use messengers or have traditional telephone conversations, while 6% use them from online shopping applications.

In the case of TV commercials, it is common to distract the viewer and draw his eyes away from the TV screen. Social networking, phone calls and games often win with a glass screen.

Equally important, TV commercials – in view of the fact that they are most often displayed in the form of blocks of several or several minutes, and appear in between programs or during the break of the series – often serve as a moment to move away from the receiver. I guess each of us has happened to wait for an advertisement to brew tea, quickly prepare a sandwich or go to the toilet and not lose a fragment of an interesting film.

And how many of us at the time of the advertising break “jumps” on other channels and checks whether something interesting is going on there, or what is the result of the match that did not interest us enough to watch it in its entirety?

Simple configuration and optimization

Online advertising campaigns can be built and run by virtually any user who has access to the Internet and has created free Google Ads and YouTube accounts. In addition, there are a lot of guides on the network on how to create and optimize campaigns. The surest source of knowledge, i.e. Google support is in itself a mine of knowledge, good practices and news in the field of online campaigns.

An advertiser wanting to work on his campaign is not dependent on external viewership data providers (as in the case of TV). At any time, he can log into the advertising account and check the effects of the campaign and make necessary changes to it. All statistics are visible in the account, so if there were any anomalies, it can easily catch them.

In addition, all you need to create an online video campaign is a good-quality video on your YouTube channel. In the era of such intense technological development, an advertising spot can be recorded even with a smartphone. Once you have your video ready, simply paste it into the previously created ad group and add the destination URL or ad headline and description depending on the campaign type you choose.

In the case of television advertising, only a professional film is involved, recorded at a significantly higher cost and using a film crew or computer graphic designer. The advertiser cannot optimize the advertising campaign alone, as he has no access to any tools or current data.

Ad Reach

Only a few years ago television was the leading carrier of video materials. Due to the intensive development of the Internet and YouTube, the ways of consuming all kinds of film materials are changing rapidly.

According to YouTube analyzes, the viewership of video posted online has been growing not only on mobile devices, but also TV sets. According to statistics, YouTube has a wider range among young users than traditional television. The overall reach of Google’s video service is constantly growing, and the number of website and application users is increasing from year to year. Same as watching time of available materials. Equally important, many lovers of the glass screen are moving to the online world, because there they can watch programs of their interest at the time they choose, and not when ordered by the schedule.

Accordingly, the online advertising market itself is growing at the expense of the press and television. According to analysts, in 2019 television advertising expenditure was to increase by only 0.6 percent compared to 2018, while expenditure on online advertising was to increase by as much as 11.8 percent (mainly due to the development of video advertising). What’s more, in 2020 the share of television in the global advertising market is to reach 32.6%, which means that the highest place on the podium in this field will fall to the web and its 41.8%. So, does television advertising have a future? Certainly yes, but it appears in increasingly darker colors.