How to create character personas for your business

How to create character personas for your business

How To Create Character Personas For Your Business

how to create and use character personas and audience research

Do you know your audience? You might think you do, but understanding your audience involves a lot more than simply knowing who might be interested in what you offer. Let’s define your character’s persona…

In marketing, it is all too easy to think of audiences as demographics or numbers, but doing so strips away the behaviours and actions of your audiences – which can greatly shape your overall strategy.

Do you know what part of your business they might be interested in? Do you know where you can find these people online? Do you know the challenges they face, that your business or service could solve?

If you can’t answer these questions, then you probably don’t know your audience as well as you should.  Don’t fret though, we’re on hand to give you the definitive guide on how to create character personas for your business.

What is a character persona?

The best way to describe a character persona is its sort of like an imaginary friend. The only difference is that you want these imaginary friends to be based on real people and research. Put simply, you want your character persona to embody the traits of real customers. Doing so will allow you to build up an image of people who might be interested in your business – which you can then use to better target them.

Why do I need character personas?

So, we hear you asking – why do I need to understand my audience in such intimate detail? Let’s take an example. Pretend you own a bakery. It’s safe to say your business is going to target people who enjoy cakes and pastries. That’s great, but nearly everyone enjoys a good cake or pain au chocolat. You instead need to start looking into who is interested in the products you offer in more detail.

Maybe a potential customer is an early morning commuter looking for a sweet snack to keep them company on their journey. Maybe they’re a mother looking for a personalised cake for their son’s upcoming birthday. Or, perhaps they’re a business looking to purchase a large number of cupcakes for all their staff to say thanks for a job well done. Whoever your potential customers are, having a deeper understanding of who they are can allow you to better tailor your content and campaigns to ensure you’re reaching the people who are interested in your business right from the word go.

Ok, so how do I find out who these people are?

You probably already have a vague idea of the types of people who would be interested in your business and this can be a great starting point for your research. If your business has a website and you have set up tracking and analytics, this can also be a great way of understanding your potential customers. Do make sure to take any analytics data with a pinch of salt though – there’s no guarantee that everyone who visits your site is interested in what you have to offer.

Outside of analytics, there are many different avenues of exploration. One way is through questionnaires. These are a great way to gather information as it allows you to go straight to your customers for feedback. There is a massive gap between what separates a good questionnaire from a bad one though. Consider what you actually want to learn from your customers and work that into your questions. Asking how good they think your service is is good, but asking how your service could be improved is even better as you will be able to gain a better understanding of what your customers want from your business.

What about social media?

Everyone is on Facebook these days, so start by looking for groups and communities based on your industry. Looking back at the bakery example, you could search Facebook for baking groups or pages where people share cooking recipes. Have a quick look at the type of people who are part of these groups and try to gain an understanding of the type of conversations they’re having by looking through the group’s post history.

However, not all social platforms may be relevant to your business’s research. LinkedIn may not be the best place to find customers for your bakery – but it might be the perfect place for your security company looking to find directors/managers that might be looking to install some new security for their own business. As a general rule of thumb, LinkedIn works well for B2B, while Facebook is more suited for B2C, but don’t be afraid to experiment during your research.

I’ve done my research, now what?

Good job, now you can start putting your character personas together! There are different ways to go about this, but the simplest way would be to put together a document or presentation for all of your personas, with each slide dedicated to each potential customer. While there isn’t a definitive number of profiles you should have, a good number to aim for is between 3-5, although this may vary depending on how much information you have collected.

Start each profile with the basics. Create a name for each person as well as their age, location, salary and any other bits of basic info that may help build up a better image. You could also include an image of what you imagine this person would look like. When it comes to digital marketing, it can also be handy to think about how often those personas are likely to interact with digital media – whether that be by reading a blog, checking out the latest news or scrolling through social media. Understanding this will give you an idea about what the best platforms are for your marketing messages, as well as how large or small your potential windows for opportunity are!

Now comes the harder bit. Using the information you have gathered try to understand what these customers want, and how you can go about giving them exactly that. Identify their goals – what exactly is this person looking for? Then explain how your products/service can help them complete their goals. This isn’t always going to be a simple process, so note down any challenges you feel your persona may encounter along the way. If you’re running a bakery, maybe this particular person wants a cake but is gluten intolerant, or perhaps they have a limited budget, so are only able to spend a certain amount. If you conducted a questionnaire, you might be able to pick some of these challenges up from some of your feedback.

Other things you may wish to include are the types of questions your customer is likely to ask during their own research. These questions will likely be linked to their own challenges, so going off the previous example, a question may be “Where can I buy gluten-free cakes?” If you know what your customers want answers to, you can then build content and campaigns based on solving their problem. In this case, the bakery could look into making a range of gluten-free cakes, which they could then promote on social media or through recipe-based content on their website.

Conducting research and building character persona’s may feel like a long process, but it’s worth it. If you can understand who your audience is and what they want, you can ensure they come to you looking for a solution – and not someone else.

 

Do you create character personas for your business? Will you be after reading this guide? Drop us a message on Twitter if you have questions.

Now you’ve got a character persona, it’s time to work out your tone of voice – not sure what that is? Read this blog for some guidance.

Liz Quinn

Liz Quinn

Digital Creative

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!
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Getting to know YouTube Analytics

Getting to know YouTube Analytics

Getting To Know YouTube Analytics

measuring what’s working and what isn’t within YouTubes analytics

As the second largest search engine, YouTube is a platform that can offer great success to brands, businesses and individuals – that is, if you know what your’e doing with it.

While it may seem like the past few years have seen more and more people start creating content on the video platform, it’s not quite as simple as making a catchy, cool video and uploading it – only for it to instantly go viral and take over the world. As nice as that would be. Instead, for those who truly want to see success on YouTube, getting to know YouTube’s analytics capabilities is crucial.

Analytics gives you the opportunity to measure what’s working and what isn’t – meaning you can then use this information to do more, or less, of that kind of activity. This allows you to zero in on what your audience actually likes, and do more of it – keeping people engaged.

Once you start delving into the world of YouTube Analytics it can be easy to get distracted by all of the shiny charts and graphs you come across en route. That’s why we’ve broken out the need-to-know info you should look at in order to use this data to your advantage.

Wait, how do you find this stuff?

Let’s start at the beginning. If you want to start understanding YouTube Analytics then you need to know how to find it.

To get there, all you have to do is head to the Creator Studio tab of your account, and hit the Analytics drop down. This will open up a dashboard with lots of different report options, including: Overview, Real Time, Earnings, Watch Time and Engagement. That’s where the fun starts.

The need-to-knows

Now that you have access to this wealth of information, working out what bits actually impact you can be a task. That’s where we can help.

To start, the Overview Report is a top-level summary of your content’s most recent performance – a bit like the Google Analytics homepage. If you’re putting out videos, this report can give you a quick look at whether things are going well or not, as well as offering demographic data for your audience.

The Real Time Report is a great way to get a feel for how your videos are performing early on, as the graphs show how many people are watching your channel in, you guessed it, real time. You can see the views on the top few videos, with estimated real-time views across two graphs – one showing hour-by-hour, and the other minute-by-minute.

If you’re sharing ad-friendly content as a business, then the Earnings Report lets you keep an eye on your earnings. YouTube does, however, remind people that the estimated revenue seen here may not be identical to actual payments, due to final adjustments made during the payout period.

Watch Time Reports are one of the most relevant sections to get familiar with in YouTube Analytics, as they show you how long people are staying on your videos. These can help you fine-tune your content; for example, if you notice that a lot of people are dropping off at 20 seconds, what happens at that point? What can you do to fix it?

Finally, the Interaction Report deep dives into another key area of video performance – engagement. Views aren’t the be-all-and-end-all and can be seen as a vanity metric, so you want to encourage people to like, comment, subscribe, or share your content – and that’s what this report can help you track.

Top Tip: One specific metric to keep an eye out for is Average View Duration. You can get this by dividing your Watch Time by Total Views. This shows you how long, on average, your audience stay watching your videos. A high Average View Duration means YouTube’s clever little algorithm will realise you’re creating epic, engaging content that keeps people interested, and will give you a boost in the search pages. The higher the retention rates, the better you’ll rank. Simple.

Knowledge is power

When it comes to analytics, there are tons of different possibilities and routes you can explore – which is all part of the fun. That’s why you can never stop learning. YouTube offers free online courses and lessons through its Creator Academy, where you can learn how to make better videos, earn revenue, or track how your channel is doing through using analytics.

If you’d like to learn more about making the most out of your YouTube channel, have a read of our blog all about optimising your video content to be found:

Liz Quinn

Liz Quinn

Digital Creative Manager

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!
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Errors in Search

Errors in Search

Spelling & Grammatical Errors In Search

making the most of human error 101

Depending on the facts and figures you look at, there are around 10 million misspelt search queries every single day.

This accounts for 10 to 15% of search queries being misspelt – which is a fairly significant number when you break it down (and enough to make 10 to 15% of the population’s English teachers shake their heads disapprovingly).

Once you get over the fact that apparently many of us struggle to spell, it opens up a new thought process – what can we do about this, and can we, as online whizz-kids, use it to our advantage?

Bad spelling vs good SEO

In the world of digital marketing, understanding the terms and phrases people use when they search is big business. From semantic keyword understanding to using tools like Answer the Public, digital professionals are always looking to understand what real people are saying – and how they’re saying it. But what if the words and phrases they’re using aren’t spelt correctly?

This is where you can make your mark. Tweaking your SEO efforts to allow for errors in search terms may offer new possibilities for those looking to rank for relevant terms – particularly in competitive industries, where competition for main keywords is fierce. Take those same main keywords, and spell them wrong, and you’ve got your in.

One thing to remember is that this tactic doesn’t work for everything. No one’s saying you should start randomly misspelling all of your keywords in a bid to hit the top of the SERPs (Search-engine result page). One, Google will spot that a mile off, and two, if no one else is spelling them like that, then you’re going to look a bit silly. Well, really silly.

The key here is to target strategic misspellings. These are the words that people commonly get wrong, such as ‘jewelery’, or ‘buisness’, or ‘accomodate’. Here, we share our top tips on how you can find these, and then use them to your advantage:

Do your research

You know your industry, so it might be that you can identify popular misspellings fairly quickly. If you need a hand, look in blogs and forums, or use Google searches to help you find out what terms other people are using – and then think about all the ways you could get them wrong. Tools like Answer the Public are another great way to find out what questions and phrases people are using, based on the keyword that you enter; they often throw out some interesting spellings, too.

You can also find tons of keyword typo generators online if you need a helping hand. You simply tap in some of your main keywords, and it gives you a list of possible misspellings. Genius (oh, the irony).

A great example of this is Giphy, the home of quality giffage. Their website isn’t spelt in the way most expect, and you’ll find that they’ve covered themselves for this. Type in ‘Giffy’ incorrectly to Google and you’ll still see Giphy sitting at the top of the SERP. Similarly, if you use voice search and ask for it to open ‘jiffy’, you’ll still get Giphy. Clever, right?

Check the volumes

The key to making the most out of these misspellings is that they’re spelt in a way that people actually use. If you’re just spelling things wrong for the sake of it, you’re not going to get very far. You can use the Keyword Planner in Google Adwords to get search volume data and trends around a range of keywords, including misspelt words, which will help you narrow your list down to the most popular mistaken terms.

Don’t overdo it

One thing to be aware of is not going too far with the errors. Sure, some nifty little uses of super common misspellings in title tags and headers can be a clever way to get ahead, and give you an edge over the competition. But that edge starts to soften fast if you go OTT, and start sprinkling your site content with every slang term nd txt tlk typo under the sun. Not only does it look a bit naff, but it could cost you in terms of credibility and authority in the eyes of potential customers.

The idea of targeting misspelled keywords isn’t a new tactic. In fact, some major players have been making waves in the world of shoddy spelling for years. Snickers are one of them, thanks to their 2013 “You are Not You When You’re Hungry” campaign, where they created a list of the top 500 search terms. Then, according to Search Engine Watch, they used an algorithm to spin through common misspellings of those words until they had generated a list of 25,381 different misspellings. In just over two days, Snickers managed to get 558,589 ad impressions on those misspellings. Big numbers, based on little mistakes.

The misspelt keywords that brought the most traffic through the Snickers campaign were: wether, amazin, definately, wierd, and facw. Now, it may not be that you can use these in your campaign, but if you come across your own list of words or phrases that your customers struggle with, history shows you may be onto a winner.

how to spell gud
Head back through the Giant Campus archives to read one of our previous blogs on the importance of good spelling online – and whether it has an impact on how people feel about you and your brand.

Liz Quinn

Liz Quinn

Digital Creative Manager

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!
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The Metrics – What to look at in Google Analytics

The Metrics – What to look at in Google Analytics

The Metrics – What To Look At In Google Analytics?

what to do/look at/click on/not touch in Google Analytics

What metrics should you be looking at in Google Analytics?

If you’re a fully-functioning member of the digital business world then you’ve probably got a website. Having a website is an awesome way to get your message out there to a huge array of people, with platforms like social media able to boost your reach even further. But how do you know if anyone’s actually visiting your website? What metrics should you look at? 

This is where Google Analytics can help. GA is your personal investigative genius, on hand to help you keep track of your business activities, understand what’s working and what isn’t, and learn more about the people that matter most to your success – your customers. Put simply, it’s free online software that gives you data about the people who use your website.

Data might seem daunting but with it you can really push the performance of your site and therefore your profit.

Now that we’ve clarified that Google Analytics is your business’s best friend, it’s time to talk about how to get the most out of it.  There are tons (some might say a metric ton)  of different thing you can look at in GA, and it’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of metrics and graphs, only to resurface three hours later and wonder what happened. Did you take the red or the blue pill?

That’s why we’ve rounded up the key metrics you should start with on your foray into analytics:

1. New/unique visitor conversion

Depending on whether it’s their first time on your site or not, online visitors can behave differently. Understanding how new visitors behave can help you to break down your conversion rates and understand what people are driven to do when they visit your website for the first time. Online users like an easy life; prioritise usability and make your calls to action (CTAs) such as ‘Improve your life today, click here’ as clear as possible.

2. Incoming traffic sources

Understanding where your web traffic comes from can help you determine where to focus your digital marketing efforts for maximum effect. You may find that different types of traffic are more likely to convert, so you can plan how to make the most of this. When it comes to traffic, look for three different types:

  • Direct visitors – these people typed your URL into the search bar.
  • Search visitors – these people clicked on your site based on a search query they entered.
  • Referral visitors – these people came from a different website that had linked to you, such as a blog.
3. Bounce rate

Bounce rate tracks how many people hit your site and then leave straight away, without interacting or exploring any further. As a simplified overview – high bounce rate (close to 100%)  = bad.

A high bounce rate can mean that your landing pages aren’t optimised for conversion, are difficult to navigate, or that visitors aren’t getting the information they were expecting. If your web pages have a high bounce rate, then it can point you in the direction of things to improve.

4. Average session duration

This metric tells you the average length of time someone spends on your website, which can indicate whether or not your site is providing useful, relevant information. The more relevant the content, the more time someone will spend reading in enjoying it – and the longer the session will be.

Look at the correlation between session time and conversions – if people are spending a long time on a page but then not interacting, it may be that the content is confusing, or the next step isn’t clear. Optimise your CTAs and see how it affects your average session duration.  

5. Page views

Page views are defined as the number of pages people view on your website. As a rule, more is better. After all, you probably want people to explore as many pages of your website as possible to find all of your awesome content. If the amount of page views per session is low, look to optimise your CTAs and review your meta data for keyword relevancy.

 

Google Analytics offers a ton of information to business owners looking to understand more about their online presence, and these are just a few of the metrics you can explore.

Want to know more? Well, you’re in luck. Our Intro to Google Analytics course gives you the lowdown on the tools and techniques you need to use GA to your advantage – whether it’s understanding how your customers interact with you or finding out if you’re hitting your goals.  

Remember, all I’m offering you is the truth”

Liz Quinn

Liz Quinn

Digital Creative Manager

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!
How To Add Pixels To Your Website (Facebook, LinkedIn & Google)

How To Add Pixels To Your Website (Facebook, LinkedIn & Google)

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Have smartphones changed the way we learn?

Have smartphones changed the way we learn?

Have Smartphones Changed The Way We Learn?

looking into the rise of the smartphone and its effect on our education

A few years ago, getting your phone out in class would have ended with a stern word from your teacher or worse… getting your massive brick of a mobile confiscated.

These days it is rare for students not to take their mobile phones to class and some are even giving out phones to students, instead of taking them away!

 

Inside and outside of formal academic studies, smartphones have had a radical shift in the way that we learn. Having easy access to the internet and countless resources at your fingertips means that curiosity no longer needs to be satisfied by the limited knowledge of people in our immediate day-to-day life, instead with a few simple clicks and wifi signal you can find out from a source from a different continent that yes, the sum of all the numbers on a roulette wheel is 666.

 

Though many sticklers will pertain that smartphones are a distraction from education, and though this may be true in some sense; smartphones have opened up many more doors to access to information and connectivity that far outway the negatives.

 

It is only a matter of time before smartphones and other smart devices become a staple of academic education and already a number of schools around the world are starting to set the trends.

 

For people who have long since left the life of formal academia behind, smartphones mean that the learning never really stops and that we, as individuals are more responsible for our own learning than ever before. Whether your interests are cooking, astrophysics or reading up on Game of Thrones fan theories, you can learn about it from almost anywhere. This of course calls into question the relevance of higher education, especially when it comes accompanied with such high costs.

 

The real argument against mobile phones is one of structure. With limitless subjects, sources and mediums of information available, it becomes easy for general users to learn sporadically, unsupported with deeper knowledge or a curve of learning. This is something formal education is good at.

 

Though the argument for and against using smartphones as a focal point of learning is ongoing, the real successes seem to be with the schools and companies which blur the lines between online and offline learning.

 

Structured courses, incorporating aspects of online learning seems to be not only the most understandable path for education, but the most beneficial to the learner. Educators have a great opportunity to help bridge the gap between exciting and informative study and smartphones are one of the best tools to help do that.

Liz Quinn

Liz Quinn

Digital Creative

Follow us on social media for blog updates and more kick-ass learning content to grow your digital skills!

How To Add Pixels To Your Website (Facebook, LinkedIn & Google)

How To Add Pixels To Your Website (Facebook, LinkedIn & Google)

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