It's not all about you.

We’ve all been there. You’re part of a great presentation or meeting among your peers or clients; great discussion ensues; wonderful, meaningful questions that apply to the whole group are being presented and answered and commented on; and then it happens. One person asks a question that pulls the focus away from the tremendous momentum that has been occurring and focuses on his or her specific issue. It sucks the energy from the room. Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s frustrating, discourteous and ultimately disheartening. Even masterful facilitators can find it difficult to get back on track. And that is a great reminder for those charged with developing website strategy and content. It’s not always all about you.

As I was putting together a design and content brief for an advisory firm client’s website this past week, this scenario came to mind. As much as organizations want to talk about — and should somewhere on their site emphasize — what they do, who they help and how they are different; their website, content and marketing strategies need to focus on their customers. The customer’s story, needs, challenges, insights and questions should be top of mind in all content development, which brings us to the question, how does one do this? This is where personas come in to play.

Personas

Persona development — identifying who we are trying to reach, what their issues are and how to attract them to the website — ensures that we focus on content strategy and keywords that might be used in search, while we’re building the site. Knowing more about the customer and how they will likely find and interact with the website is vital to the process.

Personas are realistic personality profiles that represent a significant group of your users. We focus on personas, because it’s important to remember that our websites exist to serve our users, and WE, by definition, are not our users.

There are some great books that focus specifically on persona identification and development. One of our favorites is Mark O’Brien’s A Website That Works, where he devotes a section on persona development. And a more in-depth read is The User is Always Right, by Steve Mulder.

Spending time asking questions to help define user personas will ultimately help you better relate to and understand them, and allow you to develop a site appropriately. You can probably answer these questions from existing client information, but we would encourage your team to make some interview calls. Many clients and prospects are happy to share information and feel honored to have their viewpoints heard. A conversation with follow up questions will often reveal more than you may have anticipated.

I would encourage you to consider talking to an array of clients and prospects in various buying stages: those who may already be considering hiring you, existing clients (who may also refer you to others) and some fairly new prospects.

Questions you’ll want to get answers to (some of this you will already know) are demographics:

• Are they male or female? What’s their age? Where do they live/operate?
• What is their job (title/description) and level of seniority? Are you dealing with true decision makers? What information are they looking for? How are they likely to go about finding it?
• What does a typical day look like for them?
• What are their pain points? are they looking for information or advice? What can you provide that would help alleviate the pain?
• Where do they go for their information? How often are they on the internet?
• What are their goals, attitudes and (online) behaviors?
• What is their perception of your company? Do they have one (or if they have been clients, how did they hear of you?)?

Ideally, we recommend identifying three to five “persona types.” Each persona should represent a conglomerate of interviews or sample clients that have commonalities. Give the persona a fictitious name, title, business name, location, age (maybe even believable photo) and write a short professional personality profile to describe her. Define who they are, how their problems relate to your services, how they found your site, or heard of you, what calls to action may interest them, and how they would be involved in hiring or referring your firm.

Your personas should represent different categories of prospects, for example:

• The quick surveyor: these are the folks who are busy, not looking for great detail, but want the basics. They are looking for legitimacy, and answer to a specific question, a location or name.
• The investigator. This person is doing research, might sign up for a newsletter or engage in a call to action on the site (maybe a seminar you decide to hold).
• The decision-maker. They’ve already done their research and know what they want. They might fill out a request for more information form or place a call.

The idea is to come up with your own segmentation that is unique but feels like real people. They might, in fact, be a real person who represents lots of clients’ behavior. Do they feel real? Do they cover all your user types? Is it clear how these segments can affect decision making?

In order to be relevant, your website and content need to address these personas and then continue to be SEO-worthy. Once a site is developed, companies need to continue to provide good content — whether it be providing news, blogging, sending newsletters, answering questions, providing entertainment — fresh content that helps keep your audience engaged. . . .and your company found.

— Wendy Baird, principal and president

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