The title of the video becomes the title tag, the description becomes the meta description tag, and the YouTube tags become the meta keywords tag (never mind that this tag is ignored by most search engines).

Therefore, writing a good title can vastly affect your video’s click-through from both YouTube and from non-video SERPs.

http://selnd.com/aTh91v

If you’re only focused on designing your marketing content to make an isolated connection with a specific persona, you’re not stretching your content strategy far enough.

http://bit.ly/9pueHj

Breaking it down to basics, you’ll realize customers are looking for:

. The product/service they want,

. with the right performance/quality,

. in an environment they expect,

. in a convenient location,

. supported with the right level of service, and

. with good value for the money.

http://bit.ly/cziDO2

This is a must see video:

One thing that struck me was that a holiday planning post should probably proceed the holiday by a least a month or more, which makes this post late too. But there are some last minute take-aways you may be able to use and some lessons to be learned.

Expanding upon Kristen’s 10 questions, I think it is important to note that 4 of the questions are related to better targeting and list segmentation.

1. What did you do last year that worked and is worth repeating? What failed?

Although this is a broad question, I think a serious review of your email results during the period is crucial. This is why I stress the importance of capturing the Three Core Lists (TCL) for each of your campaign emails and storing them for future use.

2. When/how often do you plan on sending your emails?

Part of Kristen’s answer includes better targeting. This is basic list segmentation. But savvy marketers go beyond simple demographics like age, gender and zip code into persona types. Persona marketing is about truly understanding the targets perspectives and influences.

5. What different angles/navigation paths can you use to highlight gifts and make decisions easier,  such as featuring gifts by recipient type…

This question also speaks to the importance of persona marketing. Organizing, segmenting and maintaining your lists is important for future campaigns. With practice you can combine a multitude of lists for specific personas and customize emails for these groups within a single campaign.

6. Can you send some targeted promotions based on past purchases?

Great idea! Be sure to capture the Three Core Lists (see above) so you can create promotions targeted for people that like jellybeans and popcorn but don’t like peanut brittle. This is just another example of leveraging your email lists.

Ultimately I think Kristen’s post is worth reviewing before every email campaign. They’re great tips to keep in mind.

My perspective is that there is so much more that can be done to better target our customers. Email list management is too important to be left to simple spreadsheets or email service providers. Your lists are one of your company’s greatest assets. Shouldn’t you treat them that way?

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Demographics like industry, location, job position, etc. have always been used to define our customer profiles. However, today’s customers are educating themselves with information on the internet. This freely accessible information is framing their purchasing decisions.

Smart marketers are using niches and personas to tailor their message to the specific needs of customers through relevant conversations. Personas extend beyond demographics. They define the characteristics, current conditions and influencers of your audience. Ultimately personas give us a way to recognize and talk the “language” of the many types of people that our products or services can help.

Thinking about these facts I realized it was time to really define our company niches and personas. I’ve always had them “in mind” but it wasn’t until I actually wrote them down that I started to understand the benefits the process can bring.

Creating Our Company’s Personas

The first thing I did was to open my trusty spreadsheet and define our niches. Niches are different from personas and are a subset of your customers providing a narrow focus for better content targeting. There can be many personas in a niche.

Once I defined some of my top niches I moved on to define the personas for our Email Marketing niche. Right here is where I had my “duh!” moment. I realized that what I was trying to create in my spreadsheet was an outline with deeper and deeper levels of detail that defined my personas.

My “duh!” was that calc{list}’s outline lists are perfect for this. Just like everyone else my natural reaction is to put everything in a spreadsheet. Using calc{list} makes defining personas much easier and can be later used for organizing campaigns themselves.

Create Niches & Personas

In calc{list} I created the {Marketing Niches} list and entered persona types for each niche. For brevity we’ll focus on our “Email Marketing” niche. Its five personas are the types of professionals that would be directly interested in our product for that niche.

Create B2B Persona Categories

Ardath Albee’s new book “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale” is a complete guide to creating content that captures your audience’s attention and moves them through the sales process. She has a great chapter on persona building that I highly recommend.

In her book she explains how B2B personas are different from consumer personas. She says; “Personal characteristics are important, but B2B personas must recognize that the prospect’s professional standing and priorities will hold additional sway over what catches his attention when it comes time to solve a business issue.”

She continues to expand upon her B2B persona definition which I used as the framework for six personas categories. I will later expand upon each category with reference to our product. A quick synopsis of the six:

• Problems Needing to be Solved: These are problems that tend to remain on the forefront of their mind and possible pain points.
• Current Environment: Are there any obstacles to taking action on purchasing our product? These may include political conditions, lack of consensus on how to fix a problem, budgetary constraints, etc.
• Strategic Business and Career Goals: Are there viable business outcomes that achieve company goals? Also, will it help personal career advancement?
• Preferences and Aversions: What is their predisposition or perspective to solving the problem? Do they favor opportunities or risk mitigation?
• Competitive Considerations: Does our product help them differentiate their company from the competition? Does the solution create an advantage or make them equal to competitors?
• Influencers: Who can influence the buying process? Colleagues, stakeholders, users, champions, consultants, external peers.

I created my six standard persona categories for each persona type. These categories help me develop a more complete persona definition.

Create Persona Details

Now remember each node in our {Marketing Niches} list is also a list. This means that we can simply double-click any node to open up that particular list. Below you will see that I have opened the {Small Business Owner} and {Marketing Professional} lists.

Notice that my {Small Business Owner} list’s description area holds a short story about the Owner which is used to further focus our persona details.

Next I filled out the final details of my personas. When comparing them side by side you can easily see that my “Small Business Owner”, who manages the company’s marketing activities, has a much different perspective than my “Marketing Professional” persona.

As you work through all the categories you’ll see your personas come alive as real people with specific needs. Be sure to approach them from the perspective of your customer. It’s really kind of exciting.

Persona Grata

Persona Grata: Fully acceptable or welcome. Defining niches and their personas will indeed be a welcome new tool to help your marketing content reflect the interests of your customers. This will go a long way to moving your buyers further down the sales cycle. I know personas have really given our campaigns a boost.

Remember we’ve created these personas to use as a guide to create marketing content that will be more engaging and relevant to our customers. Revisit your personas often and don’t be afraid to change and refine them as time goes by.

Much More…

As you know, calc{list} is much more than a way to create outlines. In fact, one way I’m going to use our new {Marketing Niches} list is to actually store and organize contact results from campaigns. This will take another post to fully explain but in effect I’ll be able to review and compare my personas to our marketing results.

A hint for you calc{list} experts: I can simply drop any list that our campaigns produce wherever it is relevant in the {Marketing Niches} list. Example: Place our {Email #1} list into both the {Lead Generation} and {IT Department} detail lists because this email addresses both of these persona issues.

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