Create Or Fine Tune Customer Personas

Before you can “talk” the language of your customer through your digital marketing, you have to know who you’re talking to. Personas are a generalized representation of your ideal customer, made specific through a sketch of their fictional story.

If you already have developed buyer personas fine-tune them through new research or what you’ve collected over since the last time you gave them a fresh eye. Be sure every piece of marketing collateral you create speaks to a specific persona’s goals, behaviors, and concerns.

Flesh out each customer type’s persona by defining the following (courtesy of HubSpot):

• Persona name.
• Background: Job, career path, family.
• Demographics: Gender, age, income and location.
• Identifiers: How would you recognize this person if they were described to you, such as their demeanor or how they prefer to be communicated with?
• Goals: Their primary goal and secondary goals when engaging with your brand.
• Challenges: The primary and secondary issues they face that keep them from their goals.
• What you can do: What you do to help him or her achieve their goal and overcome their challenges.
• Real quotes: Assemble these from “real world” examples of this persona.
• Common objections: Reasons customers matched with this persona have passed on your services in the past.
• Marketing message: How you describe your solution in relation to their goals and challenges.
• Elevator pitch: The briefest possible explanation of what you can do for them.

Include these elements in your persona template, along with a photo of a real customer who fits this persona, and then fill out the template for all your common types of customers.

Establish KPIs To Track For Your Business

Key performance indicators measure the health of your business and marketing. When deciding your digital marketing KPIs, follow this five-step model designed by Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik:

1. Identify the business objectives up front. These are established by senior executives.
2. Identify crisp goals for each objective. Marketing management contributes to this conversation.
3. Identify KPIs that align with above goals. Data analysts and marketers lead this step.
4. Set targets for each KPI, setting the parameters for success.
5. Identify the segments of people, behavior, and outcomes on which success will be analyzed.

Create A Custom Dashboard In Your Analytics

Have you set up a custom dashboard in your analytics yet? As part of your digital marketing campaign template, you should consider an analytics tool, at the very least, a free one like Google Analytics.

However, out of the box, these free tools are generically set up, and should be customized to your marketing experience. With several custom dashboards to choose from, and up to 12 “widgets” on each dashboard in Google Analytics, your data dashboard can tell you the story you need to track when your visitors come to your website.

An easy-to-use widget in Google Analytics lets you place metrics, pie charts, timelines and tables within a custom dashboard. This is great if you regularly look for your top trafficked pages or check your top traffic weekly. So stop digging around Google Analytics for what you need, and put this info front and center in a dashboard. You can start with Google’s help article on how to create and customize dashboards.

Pick A Tip To Send Better Emails Every Time

If you have a customer’s email, you have the power to give them the right offer for the right product at the right time. This is not a power to be abused. Customers are quick to unsubscribe or mark as spam, which causes your brand to lose its direct line of communication in an instant.

Follow these tips from Vero to make your email marketing provide more value to its recipients; every email you send should accomplish one (or many) of the objectives on this list:

• Offer early access.
• Enter them into an exclusive club.
• Announce stuff, and give them an advantage.
• Provide social proof.
• Include a download.
• Ask them to do something “next”.
• Offer a referral code.
• Make your CTA a button.
• Say “hi” if it’s been a while.
• Jump on trends and current events.
• Piggyback off the power of your brand partners.
• Help them develop a conversion habit.
• Tell them something personal.
• Give them something to show you care.
• Give them something to make them smile.
• Gamify their interaction with you.
• Ask for feedback.

Optimize PPC With This Campaign Management Template

A PPC marketing campaign template can be devised in a spreadsheet that helps you organize your search ads for all your campaigns and ad groups. You can keep track of your Google AdWords and Bing Ads in a simple Excel spreadsheet for collaboration, recording for each:

• The target market or persona.
• The keyword.
• Ad messaging: Headline.
• Ad Messaging: Description line 1.
• Ad Messaging: Description line 2.
• The destination URL.
• What ad extensions you’ll use.
• If the landing pages have been optimized with keywords and for conversions.

Perform An SEO Audit With This Template

Start your digital marketing campaigns with a clear diagnosis of the health of your site. SEO audits come in many forms, but here’s a simple checklist you can use as a baseline.

Start by first performing a crawl of your site to collect the following data within a spreadsheet for every page on your website. Prioritize the fixes you’ll make based on the value of the pages on your site (starting with the most valuable in terms of traffic and link equity, and working down the line).

You’ll want to look at:

• The current state of your meta data and heading tags.
• Any errors, redirects, or URL issues occurring.
• The state of your robots directives and canonical tags.
• A picture of the file size and image sizes on your pages, and making sure they aren’t contributing to slow page load times.
• Identifying any duplicate content and anchor text to note.
• Understanding your backlink profile by viewing your external links and internal links, and getting a picture of your follow and nofollow directives.

Other basic SEO areas to look at:

• If you haven’t already, register your site with Bing and Google Webmaster Tools.
• Install an analytics program if you don’t have one (see the section on configuring custom dashboards above).
• Analyze the URL structure internally, like how your directories are set up and the URLs are named – is it organized?
• Every page should have unique and relevant content for your target persona, in support of the purpose of the page, including important keywords when necessary.
• On-page optimization should also take into account the appropriate use of header tags and image file names.
• Validate your page’s code with the W3C validator, a gold standard in crawlable code.
• Improve page load speed with available tools.

Design Graphics And Infographics With This Go-To Template

Visual imagery is vital to every marketing activity, from website and blog content to paid and organic social media posts. Not everyone has to be a designer, but knowing the guidelines of good design, and knowing the ideal dimensions and specs for images on every channel, you can add visual pizzazz to your content across the board.

While many social networks have set their best practices for image size, some designers have tested them out and come up with their own ideal specs. Check out these tips from designer Dustin Stout:

• Landscape images: 1280 x 720 (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn)
• Portrait images: 735 x 1102 (Pinterest, Google+)
• Square images: 900 x 900 (Instagram, Google+, Facebook)

Create Content Briefs To Manage Content Better

Keep your content organized, and create a better end product. Check out these tips via HubSpot on how to manage content creation through content briefs. Create a coversheet for the author and editor to fill out the following info for every piece of content as well:

• Title or topic of the content
• Description of details to be covered
• Keywords for the topic
• Target audience or persona
• Call to action or point in the funnel
• Author
• Due date and publish date

Publish To Social Media Efficiently With A Schedule

A templated publishing schedule is your friend in the fast-paced space of social media. If you can pre-schedule (and set to post) your content for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn ahead of time, you can get better distribution of your content at the right time.

To create a schedule for your social media publications, use an actual calendar to map out updates and posts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ by date, time, tweet copy, character count, link and media assets. You’ll also want to create and track any custom URLs for all your social media posts on your schedule.

In closing, thinking through your KPIs and audience personas at the start of a new year is a good practice to re-calibrate your message for the needs of your customers. And with a framework for organizing every channel through a digital marketing campaign template, you’ll find your efforts better focused and having greater synergy.

Happy implementing, and happy New Year!