This is not another rant about a silly laptop!
(I promise)
So… I wrote this post about the newest apple product – the macbookpro
(no, they don’t deserve the capitalization).
Heck, I even created a hashtag in the hopes of rallying the public.
As always I tend to think about all things and how they apply to business.
You can read all about my personal bitch session if you like but I’ll give you the down and dirty.
Apple had a laptop, it was called the macbook. It was good but as more and more photographers, creatives, and coders gravitated to it they did a really cool thing. They made the macbook pro – the ‘pro’ part was a direct nod to that segment of their fanbase that could really use the additional horsepower and tools. With this newest version of laptops, they’ve dropped that core group of fanatics in favor for the mundane Pumpkin Spice Latte sipping public. Not that there’s anything wrong with that demographic, it’s just not who the ‘pro’ was originally built for.
There. I’m done with that.
Here’s how all of that relates to business and in particular – your business!
PERSONAS
How would you like for your blog posts and your website to attract the perfect clients for you again and again? That would be pretty cool, right? I’m going to show you how to do that.
In the marketing world, no agency ever created a campaign without first identifying and understanding who it is that they want to target. The same should go for you.
They develop what is called an ideal ‘persona’. Actually they develop quite a few different ‘personas’ and when creating anything new they look at how their ‘personas’ would react to it.
Think of a ‘persona’ as an actual person. In this case it’s a visualization of your exact perfect client.
I’ve always said, “Sit down, close your eyes and picture your perfect client“.
Now ask yourself a few questions about this person.
Who is he/she? What is it that they are looking for?
What do they know and what don’t they know?
How do they want to receive information?
Are they visual? Are they audio
I was reading a great article by Jennifer Bourne HERE. She has a much more comprehensive list of items that you should be visualizing.
When defining your ideal client and creating your client persona, you want as much detail as possible. Look at characteristics like:
- Type of career or business
- Education, expertise, or experience level
- Values
- Desires and dreams
- Goals
- Frustrations
- Beliefs
- Income and success level
- Demographics
- Clubs, organizations, groups
- Home/Family life
- Mindset
- Influencers and information hubs
- Media preferences
- What’s in their purse/what they carry with them
- Priorities
- Restaurants they like
- Work ethic
- Cars they drive
- Hobbies and interests
- Past experience
- Secrets hopes and dreams
- Personality traits
So here’s the magic part. Once you have that persona figured out, that’s exactly who you should be writing to. Over and over again.
I’ve had clients who have told me they love working with 1st time home buyers and yet they don’t write helpful articles that the 1st timer would like to read. Conversely, I had a client who didn’t like working with overly analytical types. ‘Engineers’ she called them. Looking at her website almost all her posts were ‘Market Data Reports”. Go figure, right?
The successful ones (organic SEO wise) know their target audience and write specifically to them.
CIRCLING BACK AROUND
Not that it matters – the important stuff was all in the middle – but how I got here was this.
The success of the ‘mbp’ was a direct result of apple’s marketing department developing an accurate persona and then building a product specifically for them. It was the right product for the right people.
Your website and it’s content is your product. Is it the right product for your ideal client? If not, you know what to change. 🙂
He's an avid hockey fan, rides a mountain bike, sometimes rides a road bike, has a few motorcycles (he had a really fast one, bought a cool orange one, rode a really slow one, and now,a perfect "BDR Weapon"). If that isn't enough, he makes cheese and sourdough bread, loves strong beer and good red wine, and poorly plays the Mandolin.
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