Increase Your Prospect’s Engagement to Your Website

[fill in your company service or product here]?” You would most likely have people walking away from you and making sure they don’t come across you in the future. But if you took that bullhorn to a specific target market or industry event and asked the same question, you would have better success gaining people’s interest. By tailoring your website content to be more specific, you will get better business development results.

Your website is the perfect platform to easily communicate and market to your prospects. If you write your content with a scattershot approach, you will not be able to capture the attention of your target audience. But if you are able to define who your specific target is and then write website content specifically for them, you will increase your prospect engagement levels.

Creating a Persona
A persona is a sketch of the type of customer or prospect you serve. By understanding who your audience is and what interests or obstacles they face, and then tailoring your content with valuable insights to that, you will have the right people engaged with your website and your company. By providing valuable and consistent content tailored to their wants and desires, it will make people eager to come back to your website to consume more.

Here are 6 ways to better define a persona:

• Who is the Decision Maker? – Your website content might be heavily read by the individuals who want to buy from you, but it could be their boss who makes the decisions to go with you. Understand who the decision maker is for each persona.
• Define the industry they are in – By tailoring your content to a specific industry, you will be able to better resonate your solution to specific interests of problems that their industry faces.
• What are their interests? – Create a list of topics that this persona would be interested in. By working with your business development team or marketing team, you can quickly understand what topics are being brought up the most.
  Also, by reading industry blogs and attending industry events, you will begin to see trends in your persona’s interest.
• What is their job title or function – Your list of potential job titles for this persona could get quite large. Make sure you narrow it down to a few specific job titles. I read a stat that 64% of people read content that is specific to their job title.
• Company Size – Is the company large or small? Try to be specific here. A company with 450 employees may be considered large to one person, but small to another. So try to make the company size more specific by documenting the annual revenue or employee number of the company this persona works in.
• Where are they located? – Define the geography of this persona. They can be in a specific city or region. By defining the location of your persona, you will have much better success with laser-focusing your content.

What Does Your Persona Want to Read?
Now that you know who your persona is, you want to understand what information they want to retain from you. Look closely at your persona and you will be able to easily identify what keeps them up at night or what information they are looking for. Now you will be able to write your content specifically for these items and how your company’s solutions can help the persona.

Here are 3 ways to help you know what to write about:

• What are their problems? – Create a list of the problems or challenges your persona faces.
• What are your solutions? – Match your solution to each problem.
• Are they familiar with my topic? – On a scale of 1 to 10, determine how simple or complex your content should be.

By creating personas and understanding what they want to read about, you will be able to narrowly focus your website content for better success. You have ultimately reduced the amount of variables while increasing the visitor retention to your website, and ultimately created a stronger and more trustworthy relationship. There is not a limit to the amount of personas your company can focus on, so create as many as necessary. Also, as an idea, at Galvin we use a spreadsheet to document our personas, which gets tailored often. It’s a simple spreadsheet with a row along the top that lists the persona’s attributes and interests; on the left, there is a column that lists each persona we want to target. Make sure you visit this spreadsheet often and keep it updated.