User Personas and Search Marketing

There is a great thread on cre8asite forums about creating user personas.

The discussion focuses on how to create a better website by thinking about the types of people who might visit the site. The technique is to invent a fictional person or persona for each type and then analyse how that person might interact with the site. The more real or fleshed out the persona, the better able you are to gain insights into what their experience might be on your site. You then use that information to improve the site and better cater for users’ needs.

That’s a quick summary and there are some good explanations and links to other resources in the thread.

Search marketers could benefit from applying this technique. Here are 10 thoughts.

1. People are at different stages in the buying cycle.
2. Each person will probably be doing multiple searches to find what they want. With each search they may learn something that has an influence on the next search.
3. People notice brand names familiar to them.
4. Some people are looking for aggregators first to make their task easier.
5. Often people get the comparison information they want from the aggregators and then seek more information from individual suppliers.
6. Some people ignore anything that they recognise as an ad.
7. Some people go straight to the ads particularly if they have previously found them more relevant to their needs than the organic results.
8. People trust authoritative sounding sites.
9. Some people will select video or images over text.
10. Some people are looking for free information and have no intention to buy.