The importance of defining a Persona

 

The main thing is to understand what a marketing plan is: how ideas como to life. Until they don’t find a place in a plane they’re idle thoughts. Write a good marketing plan is a critical skill for a marketing leader, who improves the skill by practice + strategic framework. You need time for understanding the brand, consumers, insight, strategies…

A marketing plan lays out your recommendation for a business. It is not a science. There are two reasons to write a marketing plan à COMMUNICATE A PLAN AND GET SUPPORT FOR IT.

For writing the best marketing plan we use a planning model: SOSTAC.

 

Targeting your customers means defining your clients by their characteristics, behaviours, need and wants. So that analysis must be based in demographics data and psychographics variables.

 

Once you have all this information you can define your persona. Ardath Albee describes  a marketing persona as a composite sketch of a key segment of our audience. For content marketing purposes you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.

So that persona must be defined by the information you had analysed and obtained. This persona must show all the characteristics of your strategic client.

 

HOW TO DEFINE A PERSONA?

Your persona should include not only demographics (age, gender, salary, localitation, education, family) but also his/her motivations and what is more important their values and lifestyles.

 

Where can you find all this information?

There are many sources of information on your audience, from the tiny details logged away in your site statistics to actual conversations with real-life customers. You can look for information about your customers in:

• Your web analytics

Inside your analytics, you can see where your visitors came from, what keywords they used to find you…

• Your team

All your company departments could help you to built that persona. Anyone with interactions with customers and customer data should be involved.

• Your social media

• Ask your audience

The more information you get the best will help you.

 

Here we have an example of persona:

 

How many persona should I defining?

Depending on your business or target you could have different persona, the most important thing is to have a persona for every strategic client you have in your company. You have to keep in mind that your persona will be the person on the strategy will be based in, so you will have to defining as many personas as you think you are going to focus on.

 

Why is so important?

By defining a persona you help the creators to get into character, that specific data is a good way to understand the thoughts, feelings and behaviours of your clients. Also that could help the company to find news opportunities for their products or services. But the most important thing, the defining process must help you to find the insights that make your customer keep being your customer.

 

Mónica Enériz

Glossary: segmentation

What

Market segmentation is a process where a market is divided ino potential customers/groups/segments, based on different characteristics.

The segments contain consumers who respond similarly to a marketing strategy. Therefore, the consumers in a segment have to share similar traits, interests, needs or locations.

Why

Market segmentation is very important for marketers. Because of the better understanding of a segment, marketeers can personalize their marketing campaigns.

It is also more efficient. Through segmentation, marketers can target a whole group, instead of induviduals. This saves time, money and other resources. Grouping similar consumers together allows marketers to target specific audiences in a cost effective way.

 

Segmentation can also reduce the risk of an unsuccessful marketing campaign. With the information that marketers achieve through segmentation, strategies can be formed more efficiently and there is a higher chance of succes than if it was a generic campaign that was implemented across all the segments.

Segmentations also helps marketers prioritize certain target audiences. If it shows through segmentation that some consumers would be more likely to buy a product, than marketers know where to put their attention and resources into.

How

It is not only important for companies to do market segmentation, it is also important to do it right. These four factors can affect the segmentation and are very important to check:

1. Clear identification of the segment
2. measurability of its effective size
3. accessibility through promotional efforts
4. appropriateness to the policies and resources of the company

Types

1. Demographic: very popular, mostly used to thet the right population in using their products. Takes factors such as age, gender, family size, income, occupation, religion, race and nationality into account
2. Behavioral: Divides the population on the basis of their behavior, usage and decision pattern.
3. Psychographic: This type of segmentation takes factors such as lifestyle, activities, interests and opinions into account
4. Geographic: This type of segmentation divides people on the basis of geography. People in different locations have different needs.

Sources

1. https://www.marketing91.com/4-types-market-segmentation-segment/
2. https://trackmaven.com/marketing-dictionary/market-segmentation/

Broadband

 

The broandband is the single biggest change influencing our job. It was born in the decade of 1970, and was been evolving until 2001, arriving finaly to the homes with Ethernet.

 

It has changed everything, but mostly important, the communication. Because nowadays is not just communicate to sell something in your neightbourhood, now you can do a product in China, do the comunication in Spain and sell in United States.

 

The speed of the broandband is continiusly evolving, but now the most typical speed is arround 100-300 mb/s, but Google Fiber is starting to offer 1.000 mb/s. Nowadays this kind of connexion is as much important as a law, like in México, where the goverment and the state has to ensure the broandband to all and is a right of the citizens to enjoy it.

Glossary – Conversion Funnel

The conversion funnel is a term used in marketing scope to describe the steps or the procedure our website’s potential customers have to go through to reach conversion. The funnel is used as a metaphore to represent the way our potential customers leave from our website without converting, being a big amount of people who get into our website but being only a few who really gets up to the last step and converts.

Each step added interferes with users in different ways making them leave at certain points or keep on moving towards conversion. For example: website navigation ease, product descriptions, images, the user’s cart, shipping rates and information about it, payment gateway or just the buy button are some of the items on our website we should take into account when working on converting our users or potential clients. Each step towards the conversion reduces the number of visitors and therefore the number of conversions or potential conversions.

 

Conversion Funnel Example

So let’s analyze this conversion funnel example (it could be different depending on thewebsite, but this are the basics to get started) to make things clear. They are 5 steps to reach conversion: the homepage, the product/service page, contact page, the enquiry and finally the conversion takes place. In between this steps, different issues make users leave.

Homepage has to be attractive to users, especially with our user target. If not, users could leave easily without showing signs of interest. This single page viewed user that leaves is known as bounce rate. Bounce rate is bad for us as our objective is to get users to convert. Also poor content, bad website usability, poor calls to action and a weak enquiry process lead to users leaving, meaning that all this items need to be taken care of and optimised as much as possible in order to make users reach our objective: converting.

 

 

 

Glossary – share of voice

SHARE OF VOICE

Share of voice (SOV or Voice participation) it’s a level of participation about a company, user or Brand in a specific channel versus our competitors.

“It is how much your company is noticed, how visible or notorious it is, how much it is made to hear (or see)”.

The definition has recently been extended to include visibility in general, incorporating organic searches, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and social networks because in marketing Online

It’s very important to know what is the impact (repercussion) of our actions because we’ll obtain the information about:

• If users mention us
• how they do it and how often
• how many times
• When they speak about us it’s in a positively or negative way?

 

THE MOST IMPORTANT METRICS TO MEASSURE THE RESULTS

We have to know that the most important part it’s choose the right metrics to measure our actions and it’ll be the base of our success. The most common are:

1. Feedback: Number of users they clicked “Me gusta” in our publications
2. Number of followers in each social network
3. Number of times people share our brand
4. Number of mentions: number of times my brand ins named in different social network (tool: Social mention)
5. Value of our post (tool: PostRank Analytics)

 

WE HAVE 3 OPTIONS TO MEASURE OUR SOV (SHARE OF VOICE)

 

1. SHARE OF VOICE BY ORGANIC SEARCHES (eseOese example)

If you do not have enough budget to calculate the (SOV) with the necessary tools, it can also be done manually.

1. Choose your keyword

First of all, decide what keywords you want to calculate your share of voice for. I’m going to use my brand “EseOese” as an example.

• Fashion clothes
• Casual fashion
• feminine fashion
• Bohemian clothes
• Clothing online

2. Choose our competitors (Competitors of eseOese)

It’s important to know the URLs for the online properties of all of your competitors; a competitor might have more than one domain, or might use sub-domains.

• Brownie: http://www.browniespain.com
• Brandy Melville: brandymelville.com
• Double agent: http://www.doubleagentusa.com
• Noon: noonspain.com
• Renatta&go: http://www.renattandgo.com 

 

3. Record the ranking for each keyword

 For each of the keywords you selected in step one, you need to record whether you rank for them, and if you do, in what position.

4. Calculate share of voice for each keyword

Now, is better to use a tool to automate the process because the last step is a large process if we use many keywords.

“We are goint to calculate the rate of clicks (CTR) that corresponds to each keyword”.

It’s important to know that the different positions of keywords receive different numbers of clicks. I.e:  If we have 3 keywords in the top 5 and so did our competitor that doesn’t mean your share of voices are the same – it all depends on the rank

For this reason, we will calculate share of voice using average click through rates (CTRs) for each keyword with the tool https://my.webposition.com

5. Finally, the result 

we’ll get something like that to make conclusions.

 

2. SECOND WAY TO MEASURE THE SHARE OF VOICE 

To measure “the level of participation that a user has in a specific channel” in a general way we can use the following formula:

 

3. THIRD WAY TO MEASSURE OUR SOV: PRINCIPAL TOOLS

 

We can also use these tools to measure the number of conversations about us versus our competitors

• Social Mention
• Google Alerts
• Rankur
• SamePoint
• Xopie

 

EXAMPLE ABOUT SHARE OF VOICE

If during December on Instagram the “hashtags” about “bohemian clothes” has been about 8.000 and our brand has been in 4.000 of them it means that we have a 50% percent of share of voice in Instagram.

 

By: Isabella Plasencia

Brand: eseOese –> www.eseoese.com

Glossary – SOSTAC

The SOSTAC is a marketing model, a way to set up a digital marketing strategy. It was created by PR. Smith in 1990 and formalized in 2004 with  his book “Strategic Marketing Communications”.

It stands for: Situation analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactis, Actions and Control.

SOSTAC is an extension of the SWOT analysis. The main difference is that SOSTAC is more focused in the implementation stages of the process and on marketing communications.

The six steps inside SOSTAC are:

1. Situation analysis: asses were a business is precently. It is an analysis about the customer (their characteristics, behaviors, needs, wants, personality, values, attitudes, interests, hobbies, lifestyle, etc.), the market, competitors (benchmark), intermediaries, influencers, potencial partners, wider macro enviroment (PESTEL) OVP (online value proposition) and a SWOT analysis.
2. Objectives: sets the mission or goals for the business. What do we want? (sell, serve, talk, save and impact) and goals (they have to be SMART: specific, mesurable, achivable, realistic and in time. And they have to RACE: rech, act, converse and engage).
3. Strategy: is an overview of how to achive the objectives. It neds a segmentation of the audience, positioning comparing to the competitors, do a brand strategy and create a digital stratgey (with a digital channel and the companies social media platforms) to reach to the audience, make them act, convert them to the brand and engage them.
4. Tactics: are the detailed approach of how to achieve the business goal, how to get to that goal. We can get there by marketing mix, including the communications mix and social networking.
5. Actions: are used to determinate who does what and when. They are the details og tactics. Is important to determinate which actions are we going to take making the difference between the internal and the external ones. And it has to be followed by systems and processes made to do corretly the actions.
6. Control: establishes how the process is monitored. It consists on, for example, tracking the visits on the website, to know where are they from. The website can be motorized by web analytics, with KPI (keep performance indicator), customer satisfaction surveys, frequency of reporting, usability testing and mystery shopping.

Glossary: OVP (Online Value Proposition)

Definition of the term

The online value proposition (OVP) could be described as the addition of online value that a web offers to its customers or potential clients to differentiate itself from other competitors. In a more colloquial way, we could define it as the online USP (unique selling proposition), or what you can give people so that they will choose your website out from the rest.

Every brand’s goal is to establish a durable relationship with their clients in order to have regular purchases of their products/services and, consequently, guarantee the success of the company. But to obtain this engagement with potential clients, it is necessary to define the main objectives and values of the brand. The core intention of the OVP is telling people everything they need to know about it: who they are, what do they offer, who is their main audience, what makes them different… so that the clients or potential clients know who they are dealing with.

Creating our own OVP

It’s not an easy task to come up with a brand’s OVP, since there are a lot of elements to take into account. These are the steps that must be taken to figure that out:

1. Determining the target our brand’s addressed to, so that we can adapt our message to them.
2. Benchmarking OVPs, so that we can know what others have done and how to succeed in doing so.
3. Defining our message and communicate it (knowing how to communicate it well is the key to achieve our objectives).
4. Analysing the results, and keep improving our site.

The costumer value proposition

We need to take into account that the most important agent in the creation of the OVP is our client. Our final objective will always be to create engagement with the costumers, so that there is a conversion. To do so, we need to base our OVP strategy on what Kaplan and Norton state on their book Strategy Maps: a solid costumer value proposition.

The customer value proposition would be defined as the benefits that the visitor will get from our brand’s website, and how those will be associated with the brand’s values. Dave Chaffey states that here are 6 dimensions of possible value proposition in the digital world, and we need to keep them in mind all the time:

Digital Marketing

Lastly, the main element that we need to take into account to communicate our OVP in an effective way would be digital marketing. The brand needs to have not only a nice web design and a good SEO, but it also has to be efficient and easy to use by the visitors so that they will have a pleasant time and they will want to come back. It is recommended to use a title and a little description of the site on the homepage, linked information in case people need help to get where they want and a tab where the OVP is explained, just as the following image:

To sum up, the OVP is a fundamental element for enterprises to communicate their values and objectives, and to make people know what the brand can do for them. An example of it, would be the following video:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glossary – Transmedia Storytelling

We are at a time when even advertising students are surrounded by the most effective tools to block any type of ad that may appear on our screens.

We are at the time that advertising saturation is large and traditional methods they do not work. We are tired of brands giving us their ears with the benefits of their products and we are not willing to look at any type of spot.

That is why an alternative to this conventional way of advertising and winning sales has been sought. It has found a way to reach the heart of the viewer, to touch the feelings and that the child is interested in looking for a specific content without having to pursue it. And all this has been achieved by telling stories. Stories that engage him and that awaken emotions in him creating a very special bond between this viewer and the brand

And this is how the art of Storytelling appears. The art of telling stories to our clients and potential clients. Stories that awaken something inside you and that, incidentally and without any effort, awaken a feeling towards the brand. And from the most versatile branch of Storytelling, Transmedia Storytelling appears, which consists of displaying all these narrative experience. It’s a kind of story where the story unfolds through multiple media and communication platforms. What is new about this concept, and although it should not always be strictly so, is that the viewer can also become a narrator by intervening actively in the sequence of the story

Transmedia Storytelling allows a movie to continue to have life outside the cinema in the form of a comic, doll or video game. And not only that, it even allows it to continue to grow by offering exclusive content to viewers through other platforms.

That’s right, the Transmedia has come to stay because it gives a lot of play and makes the products can have life in different supports. And it’s not about telling a different story in each of the media, but that each of the stories complement each other, that one can not live without the other, and that in this way we have the viewers looking for our brand by all parties because they want to know more.

It is about focusing on the viewer. This must be the center of communication. We have to think about what he wants and needs and we can offer that to him through a story that will create a link to the brand.

Glossary- PESTEL

What is PEST analysis?

The PEST or PESTEL (PESTLE) analysis is an instrument that makes easier the research and helps companies define their environment. For this, it analyses the following factors:

Political: There are lots of things but it depends on the industry we focus on. Examples of topics that we study:

• Laws
• Government Stability
• Import restriction
• Taxes
• Burocracy: Making things difficult
• Corruption level
• Environmental law

Economic:

• Unemployment
• Growth rates
• Inflation rates
• Exchange rates
• Interest rates

Social:

• Education
• Trends
• Traditions
• Sex
• Religion and beliefs
• Race
• Location
• Health-consciousness
• Emphasis on safety

Technological:

• Innovation
• Basic infrastructure level
• Rate of technological change
• R&D  Research & Development
• Legislation regarding technology
• Technology level in your industry
• Communication infrastructure
• Access to newest technology
• Internet infrastructure and penetration

 

Sometimes, you can add two more factors which are Ecological and Legal.

Due to the type of information it provides and how practical it is, this study model is one of the most used business tools in all types of organizations. This tool is one of the many that is used to perform an external analysis of the company. It helps to understand the growth or decline of the market, the difficulties and challenges that may appear, it also serves to guide with the direction and position of the business in a simple way.

Advantages of the PEST analysis

• Adaptable: It adapts to each case.
• Decisive: Helps to make decisions.
• Predictable: It has a proactive approach, which means, it allows anticipating problems or future needs.
• Applicable. It is of broad application.

 

 

 

More information: http://pestleanalysis.com/what-is-pestle-analysis/

 

GLOSSARY – Insight

Insight in the advertising field

The Insight concept is also applicable in other areas such as psychology. That would mean the perception, the internal understanding that realizes the subject of itself. But I will focus on an Advertising ambit.

In the Collins English Dictionary we can found the definition of insight as:’’A penetrating and often sudden understanding, as of a complex situation or problem’’, but what does it mean? This English term literally means “flash of consciousness”, more defined as: “A penetrating and often sudden understanding of a complex situation or problem.”  But for me, this concept is the star tool that is used in advertising to be closer to the customer. ¿Why I think that?

Well, this term is the power or act of seeing into a situation, that is, penetration. The main purpose of an insight is to understand why the consumer cares for the brand. Its purpose is to get to know the motivations, desires, aspirations or moods that trigger the consumer actions.

¿Why has this concept emerged?

The communication has changed. There’s not enough with traditional ways because nowadays there are many ways to communicate and people are saturated with information. At this point we have been forced to innovate. We must reach the customer and offer solutions to their needs. How? Entertaining and catching their attention. We need to get closer to our audience and with a good Insight it is much easier because we get to the heart of the client. So working with insights, the consumer doesn’t feel anymore like a typical consumer but he starts to feel like he has been invited into the room in which decisions are being made.

It’s very important for brands now to take into account consumer insights in order to work with effective strategies. This involves the way of presenting a product to the buying public but also its development and every step of the process.

We need to know what the consumers want and what they are asking for, in order to get them. So that, consumer insights provide understanding that leads to marketing on a more direct and personal level. They can help finding a problem that the company can solve. Once a brand knows why customers do certain things in a certain way, it will be much easier to establish and build long-term relationships with them.