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Buy Personas

In class this week, we wee introduced the buyer persona and we completed an activity by creating someone’s profile. After going home and reading a few articles and watching Youtube videos to better understand the importance of “buyers persona” I concluded that marketing is COMPLETELY about KNOWING who  you’re targeting… literally. Marketing is friendly.

A buyer persona an “assumed” representation of your ideal customers but is based on real data. They help you determine the goals the buyers are trying to accomplish. Buy personas help you connect with your customers and target audience.  In order to plan your online and offline marketing strategy, you must research the buyers.

The first step to creating a buyer persona is by knowing demographics information. This includes if they are male or female, age, relationship status, job titles, roles, responsibilities, and income of the buyer.Researching your consumers will provide you what it is that influences consumers to buy your products and/or services.

When researching your buyers, here are some questions to ask:

What are the goals that drive the behavior of your buyers? Why do they make their decisions? What is their area of focus? What are their key initiatives? What is the reason the consumer is interested in your products/services? What is influencing your buyers? Where are your buyers going for information? What is the buy persona expect to happen when they are buying your services? What will be the results and benefits from buying your product/service?    

By knowing and having an understanding of all of this information, marketers are able to produce content that is of relevance. When content is relevant to buyers, they become more engaged and are more likely to share the content, creating a viral effect.

To further research to learn who your buyers are, it is also important to see who’s buying from competitors. The importance of buyer personas is so that marketers can base their content off of the people they are trying to attract. For instance, someone who is a college student whose responsibilities are to go to class, to go to their part time job on campus, keep up with latest trends, and the festivities they partake in during the weekends influence their spending, marketers would already have an idea of the content they would use to target these college students selling something such as a selfie sticks.

http://www.buyerpersona.com/example-buyer-persona http://tonyzambito.com/buyer-persona-original-definition-matters/

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3 Most Important Web Metrics?

Website statistics, which are known as “web metrics”, measures different type of data on your website. I read two different articles on website metrics and compared them, and after learning about what the terms meant, I decided which metrics I thought were the most important. If I had to choose only 3 website metrics to analyze my own website, these are the three that I’d pick:

-       Referrals

-       Unique Visitors

-       Conversation Rate

These three metrics were the common metrics that were mentioned in the articles as the most essential to measuring how well your business/website is doing. I believe as well that referrals matter because you find out where your traffic is coming from, unique visitors tells you how many people are viewing your page, and conversation rate lets to you if you are completing your goals.

     In the article, “The 6 Most Important Web Metrics To Track for Your Business Website”, Noah Parsons explains that a referral is tracking users as they click on different links to reach your page (search engines, blogs, etc.). Referrals basically will tell you where your visitors are coming from. How will a business know if their marketing tactics are paying off if they aren’t able to see where their traffic is coming from? Think about when you walk into a store and they ask you “How did you hear about us?” Just like how you may hear about a business through a commercial, a friend, billboard, or a newspaper, referrals work in the same way. When businesses ask you this question, they are trying to figure how what is working for them. Referrals let you know which sites, bloggers, and companies are getting you the visitors and these should ultimately be whom you want to build relationships with.

A unique visitor is the number of people who actually visited your site during a time period, whether it’s yesterday, over a month, or last week. This a little different from page views because page views measures how many times your site gets clicked on. Although these metrics go hand and hand, the difference is that the unique visitors counts every person that visits your page, and can even tell you your amount of repeated visitors. Therefore, it is easy to determine how many new people are visiting your page, and how many people are finding your page useful and are coming back. This metric is one of the most important because you know how small or large your audience is. You will also know if your marketing is effective or if you are wasting your time and money.

Lastly, conversation rate, the most important metric, because this will determine whether or not you are reaching your goals. It will tell you the percentage of people who are making purchases, subscribing, viewing a certain page on your sight, or any other goal it is that you want them to achieve. Conversation rate is important because it shows the ultimate success of your website.

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2.17 Reflection

           This week I chose to read the article “5 Ways to Develop a Social Media Strategy” hoping to get a better idea on how companies use social media to make a brand for themselves and attract customers, considering that social media is constantly changing. As I was reading the article, I kept in mind how MAC Cosmetics continues to brand themselves through social media. It was really interesting to read that companies actually are competition with their own consumers through social media. It is something people really don’t think about, but it is very true.

 The first step to developing a social media strategy is to do a social media audit, meaning to review all of your posts over the months and determine which posts got the most traffic. I would guess that this refers to the amount of retweets, comments, subscriptions, etc. that generated by your audience, and the engagement you received from your posts. After completing the first step of social media audit, you will then be able to bring new energy and strength to your brand.

 Step number two involves a reliable reach, which is the ability to send a message to a person who has requested to hear from you. The issue companies face with social media is that there is no reliable reach. An e-mail list is an example of reliable reach where consumers are asking to be sent information about a business and products/services being offered to them. Receiving telephone calls or texts messages is reliable reach. You know that whether or not the customer even opens up the link or not, that the information is still being delivered to them.

With social media, there is only “potential” reach. In the video that the article mentions, Jay Baer says that social media is not communication that is one to many, but it is one to one, or one to few. Social media allows for everyone to be a publisher, therefore companies are on the same timelines and newsfeeds as their consumers, and their aunts, cousins, best friends, and co-workers. Businesses are constantly competing for attention, not just with other business, but also with everyone. It is so important for companies to be unique and to know how to differentiate themselves from the rest to draw the attention from others that pop up on feeds. This would be considered the “rifle approach.” Creating quality content in order to attract and build a larger fan base. I believe that MAC Cosmetics masters the rifle approach by not only using just make-up in their content, but also by providing their audience with tutorials, and blogging behind the scenes of fashion shows all around the world.

 The third step to developing a social media strategy is to analyze your competitors. Companies should figure out what is working for their competitors and try to make those improvements based off of their own social media strategy. There are six steps mentioned in the article when completing an analysis on a companies:

1.     Visit the websites and take notes on both good and bad features

2.     Analyze their source of traffic. (Direct, organic, referral, etc.)

3.     Look for what is broken and what is fixable.

4.     See if their content marketing is producing results

5.     Guess whether their marketing budget is effective and where they are advertising

6.     Check to determine if unknown variables for working with or against business goals

After completing this analysis, you will gain a better understanding and be able to incorporate some of the same practices for your strategy.

 It is important to know who your audience is, or what people you are trying to attract for the fourth step in developing a social media strategy. The content you produce must include your whole audience. Audience Strategy is “figuring out which people could be your customers based on what they believe, value, think and feel—and why they would be.” The question to ask in this step is why is your product important and why do your customers thinks the product is important.

 Lastly the final step in this process is analyzing your mobile options.  People consume most of their information through mobile devices and apps. To improve your strategy, mobile channels are essential. The first thing people see is the header, so as a company, this first impression is everything. Keeping this type of content visual is also a key element.

 The reason I think MAC cosmetics have built such a strong brand for themselves social media wise is because they’ve teamed up with so many social media celebrities who are able to market their product for them. Also, for years, MAC has stayed consistent with how they are presented; their content is of quality and is authentic. Although social media strategies vary for every company, MAC has kept a loyal fan base by connecting with the fans of other people and piggybacking off them.

  http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/brands-using-facebook-status-updates/

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Week 2 Article Reflection

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#TheSecret #Manifestation #LawofAttraction 

Thanking my mother for introducing this philosophy to me at a young age. 

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Week 1 Article Reflection

For 2015, I told myself I wanted to start blogging again, in hopes of making it an everyday (healthy) habit. In the previous years, I’ve neglected my blog and barely updated or made any posts. The new semester has started and it was such a coincidence that my Internet Marketing instructor told us that every week he wanted us to post a blog reflecting on an article of our choice. So now, I have no choice but to complete this goal, plus, this should be fun!

This week, I chose to do my reflection on the article, “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did” http://www.forbes.com/sites/kas hmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-fi gured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant -before-her-father-did/ .

The title totally caught me off guard, so I had to see what this was all about…

After reading the article, it was not much of a shocker to hear that Target and other companies keep tabs on each of their customer’s transactions to figure out their likes and needs, but what I did NOT expect was for these companies to take this to such extremes such as predicting pregnancy!  I agree that this collection of data is somewhat creepy and I can only imagine the drama that went on in that household when the father had to find out through TARGET that his teen daughter was pregnant. That is a pretty sticky situation, and obviously, Target didn’t think this strategy through if you ask me.

  Now, although knowing this type of information about customers is borderline stalking, I still think this is very clever. There needs to be a happy medium between companies doing what they can to attract customers and make money, and respecting people’s PRIVACY!

  The reason why I can’t completely knock down the fact companies are collecting data on their customers is because it has made me a happy customer on certain occasions.

  Just how Target knew that the teen girl was pregnant and sent advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture, etc., I am quite sure they knew when I graduated high school and was getting ready to go off to college. I can still remember three years ago when all I was getting in the mail was coupons and ads for dorm furniture, school supplies, and college textbooks. Of course the ads were super exciting to me because I was so stoked for college, but also, I knew exactly where I wanted to do my college shopping at.

  Also, I online shop very frequently, and I search for sites that sell going out/party clothes. Lately, I’ve noticed that whenever I log onto my Facebook, I no longer have to search for these websites, because somehow, the advertisers have found me and have made their way into my newsfeed! I even discover new shopping sites that I never knew of, and that’s because it is right in front of me, and I actually love it.

   Technology today is like a fly on the wall; secretly watching, but no ones noticing. Advertisers and big companies such as Target have taken this and are using it to their full advantage. Privacy means everything now days, and knowing customers personal situations is taking it too far. All in all, the collection on customer data doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as long as companies remain ethical in their research strategies.