How a User Persona Shapes Digital Strategy

In the next section, we’ll fully dive into the strategy phase of successful digital marketing campaigns. By going through a solid competitive audit research exercise, the user persona will start to present itself. Let’s see how a well rounded user persona gives us a tremendous launching board for making sure our experience will resonate. Back to our Moleskine add-on product that we hope will be of interest to Chris.

We know Chris likes quality and has the income to spend on it. Our price point will be aggressive – roughly double what a Moleskine will cost or in the neighborhood of $50 at retail.So, we would want to stress that our journal add-on is made of the finest quality leather with particular detailed paid to the manufacturing methods and the design is slick and minimal. From user testing, we’ll show how every detail has been thought through for making the urban professional productive on the go. Design specs might include things like a key hook, fleece pocket for a smartphone, sleeves to hold pens and an iPad stylus, wallet or credit cards slots, and maybe even a space to hold sticky note tabs for marking important parts in the journal itself.We also know that Chris is a power user on researching customer reviews, so we would want to make sure we have a solid online public relations push behind us. Hopefully, we’ll even be able to land a few product reviews at some of his favorite websites with a link back to our website. This not only drives traffic and brand awareness but gives us credibility, which is huge for earning trust with a new brand.

We’ll also pay particular attention to any of our brand mentions online using Google Alerts and Twitter Advanced Search, as well as our competitors. We hop in on the conversation with helpful tips and honest dialogue as quickly as we can.

Finally, our search engine strategy will focus on specific keywords that relate to the tasks he’s trying to accomplish. Phrases like “productivity tools” or “Moleskine journaling tips” can be worked into content creation on our website based on the engagement we have seen from our research on these terms. We might also run a paid search search campaign and track the effectiveness of click-thrus using these terms to discover which ones convert over to sales. Using Google Analytics, we will know where users come from, where they go, where they fall out in the sales funnel, and if they complete a check-out and purchase a product.

But aside from having a good grasp at going after the technical tactics, there is another added benefit of a solid user persona. As we’ve seen, attention is the currency online. We have to build our brand experience around providing a good return on this investment for Chris.

Knowing what Chris wants in life (to start his own investment firm), our blog can focus on all sorts of tips and tricks for helping our dear customer move up in their career. We might cover the benefits of active journaling for providing insights into your professional and personal goals. We might play up the importance of always being prepared for when inspiration strikes. Or just making sure you make it to the coffee shop with pen, paper, and money for a cup of joe. We can also build content that features interviews with creative and successful people in the professional world and explore their habits for self-reflection and professional development.

All this content will resonate with Chris because we now know what he is trying to accomplish in life and what matters to him. The persona provides a glimpse into his aspirations and emotions. The site analytics, comments, and social media stream will confirm whether this resonates.

We will be creating, listening, measuring, and tweaking our content in real-time based on these results. Next, we’ll dig into how to do this detailed analysis.