“Marketing is telling the world you’re a rock star.
Content marketing is showing the world you are one.”
– Robert Rose, content marketing guru, and author
A more accurately descriptive name for the Planet Earth we find ourselves inhabiting today would surely be “Planet Google.” So endemically ingrained now in our daily existence, this importance placed on the digital world, and our increasing reliance upon living our lives in such a way, has never been greater, and that’s not going to change any time soon.
Let me give you an example. A rather jaw-dropping one at that. Back in 2014, according to eMarketer, your typical U.S. citizen interacted with some form of media for a total of around 12¼ hours every day. Now read that again… Yes, the average U.S. citizen. 12¼ hours. Every single day.
If the average person sleeps 8 hours a night, that means over 75% of their waking hours are spent in the marketplace. Our culture of consumerism, certainly ever-present on dear old Planet Google, clearly now has the largest marketplace. In the world: Ever. Now pick your jaw up.
Yes, Planet Google – a marketer’s dream. Each day, and every day. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
My name is Andy Macia, and I’m a continually successful digital marketing entrepreneur. So surely, you ask, being successful when you have such an amazingly large captive audience is a given, no? Hmmm… No. Slight problem – you’re not alone. Every other marketer on the planet has the same, identical captive audience. So how can you be truly successful in the digital marketplace?
Put simply, the successful are the ones who know who they’re speaking to. Are they speaking to Tom, self-employed plumber and NFL fanatic from Dogtown, Alabama, or Vanessa, a highly respected, highly successful neurosurgeon from LA? Yes, successful marketers know who Tom and Vanessa are, but, more importantly, they know what differentiates them.
Influencer Personas & Buyer Personas
The secret is this – personas. Open your dictionary (and I know you won’t do that – you’ll type the word in a search engine, followed by “def”), and you’ll see this definition of the word persona:
“The aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others.”
In other words, know the people in the marketplace, and know their personas. Some of the personas that exist in the digital world actually influence the purchasing decisions of others, while some are happy just to spend, spend, and spend again. People who influence – influencer personas, and people who buy – buyer personas, living together in relative, consumer-driven harmony on Planet Google.
Now, let’s introduce the subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which just happens to be my chosen field in the world of entrepreneurship. As a successful digital marketing entrepreneur, the complexities of SEO, and creating strategies that utilize SEO to the max, are my bread and butter, so to speak.
This is fundamentally why:
Every specifically-tailored search engine optimization strategy needs to begin by establishing the type of influencer personas and the buyer personas you wish to reach; those who influence the buying decision, and those who will invariably buy the product. It’s the basic first step; if this step isn’t taken, you are throwing your marketing campaign budget to the wind. And it will always blow away. It always does.
Identifying such personas determines who exactly your content creation and backlink generation is going to be targeting. It dictates the type, tone and language of the content, and how that content is best distributed, and through which channels.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Let’s look first at buyer personas, the people who are actually going to part with their hard-earned dollars, and invest in your product or service. The buyer p…