Driving Traffic by Targeting Personas
Driving Traffic by Targeting Personas
When we talk about driving website traffic, we mean attracting relevant visitors to our site, with the aim of capturing their information.
Ideally, the goal is to convert the visitor to a known lead before they leave. Generally, increased traffic is achieved through a combination of advertising and content creation. By applying personas -fictional people, created to illustrate the ideal customer for our business – to different parts of the demand and lead generation processes, we can optimize the process and connect with ideal clients, as we’ll discuss below.
Creating personas is a data-driven creative process that involves looking at both where your business is, and where you would like to take it. You look at the demographic information of your clientele and extrapolate what you know to create three-dimensional characters with goals, fears, priorities, and desires. Each company should have at least one fully fleshed-out persona for each vertical, allowing them to better imagine what their potential clients will respond to. We discuss the process more in-depth, HERE.
How Will Persona-Based Content Drive Traffic?
Getting in the mindset of our persona allows us to be specific about the questions they have. By focusing on the pain points of particular personas, we can develop content – both gated and otherwise – that answers their questions, addresses relevant concerns, and targets the right people. This will, in turn, increase the number of organic visitors through SEO and increase the percentage of interested visitors. We can leverage website content on social media to drive even more visitors from our social platforms.
5 Ways to Drive Traffic With Personas
1. Create Pillar Pages & Gated Content Based on Their Concerns
Pillar pages are pages on your website that are designed to provide a comprehensive overview of a topic relevant to an industry and audience. Other pages and blog articles with more specific focus can link to and from a pillar page, creating more traffic throughout your website. Gated-content (whether a white paper, a slide deck, or any other media) can serve a similar purpose, while simultaneously collecting contact information from those who want access. These days, people are learning to get specific in their search queries. By identifying and writing for a particular concern, we increase the chance that our page will stand out in their search.
2. Identify the Best Platforms for Advertisement
Understanding your audience means knowing where they spend their time, and what means of advertising they’re most likely to trust. Having identified this information while building your personas, you know where to reach your ideal customers, and what messaging to use. For example, we know that Youtube is the most-used social media platform in the USA and that people engage more with video content, but if we are targeting audiences over the age of 65, we might be better off using Facebook.
For more on social media, check out these resources:
The Rise of Social Media – Our World in Data
Share of U.S. adults using social media, including Facebook, is mostly unchanged since 2018 – Pew Research Center
3. Tailor Blog Content Toward Specific Pain-Points
When it comes down to it, people visit a business’s website for one of two reasons: to make a purchase or to answer a question. This makes the point of blog content to provide answers and context. The reasoning is similar to that of pillar pages, except where a pillar page is meant to be a one-size-fits-all overview, we can create a dozen blog articles, each delving into specialized topics for different audiences.
4. Educate At Their Expertise Level
There is no point in talking to our audience if they can’t understand us. That’s why we must understand where our audience is coming from. Are they new to the industry or old hands? Are they interested in the nitty-gritty details, or do they just need a password reset? Expertise-level will determine how you answer the questions your audience is asking; you can even provide different content for the same question, each focusing on a different persona.
5. Use A Headline to Its Fullest
Target your personas in the title. To connect with the right people you need to be putting out the right signs, whether that’s highlighting a specific pain point, or directly naming the people you’re talking to. For example, if you are targeting parents, you can put that right in the title. “3 Multitasking Tips for New Moms” as opposed to “Tips for Multitasking”. Even better if you tie-in pain points, “3 Multitasking Tips for Busy Moms.”
For more on headlines and titles: Americans read headlines. And not much else. – The Washington Post
Increasing traffic to your website is not an overnight process. Like anything else in business, it takes time and dedication to create a steady pipeline of site visitors. To this end, it is vital to keep your audience at the forefront of your mind and your processes. People won’t visit your website because you want them to, they will visit because they feel like you can help them.
Put the method on paper: the Tactical Marketing Workbook.
The full methodology converted into working sessions - eight phases of fill-in worksheets, exit checklists, and one-week action steps. Print it, work one vertical at a time, and turn the framework into decisions your team has actually made.
Philip Easley-Bosley is the founder of Tactical Marketing and a thirty-year expert marketing consultant. His path to founding the firm ran through sales and marketing leadership, years inside Act-On Software consulting with thousands of clients as Lead Marketing Automation Strategist, and a consistent priority on training and team building that a linear career could not have produced. He sets strategy, owns the architectural calls on every engagement, and writes about marketing operations, automation, and the discipline of building systems that hold up on Monday morning.