Web personas offer a glimpse inside the minds of your target audience. It helps you guide your target audience in engaging with your website, landing pages, apps, and other online tools.
Creating web personas is like delving into your target audience’s behaviors, so you can effectively curate your products and services for them in the most efficient way. Your web persona deals with your target audience’s motivations, ideal experiences dealing with a product or service, goals, frustrations, and even technical know-how.
It’s also an excellent tool for website personalization, allowing your audience to truly engage with your brand. A report from Gleansight mentioned that most companies doing B2B campaigns are increasingly investing in technologies and other capabilities to efficiently personalize their web content.
In curating a unique persona for your website, you need to focus on your target audience’s specific goals and behavior patterns. This can be done via thorough observations of real people and from in-depth research.
But how do you effectively create an efficient, relatable, and engaging web persona? As an employer or hiring manager, how do you ensure that your website communicates information that your clients and job candidates can easily relate to?
Here are five handles you should remember when rethinking your web persona for your staffing website.
1. Your Web Persona Should Primarily Target Your High-Value Customers.
High-value customers refer to your most profitable and most loyal customers. They also tend to have a lower attrition rate, low cost of acquisition, and a very high lifetime value as they stay with you much longer. You would want your web persona to primarily engage these customers.
Gleanster, a market research company, said in a study that the longer an individual or organization spends on a company website with engaging and relevant content, the higher the chance it will result in a sale.
Keep in mind that one size does not fit all in creating a web persona. Focus then on high-value customers.
2. Maximize Your Company’s Internal Capabilities.
Ensure that your staffing firm has the corresponding tech stack and personnel, including a list of systems, knowledge, experience, and manpower to engage your customers. It’s crucial because even the best web personas may not become viable opportunities for your company when your internal capabilities are limited or inefficient.
This also means, at the very onset, your web persona should be complemented by buoyant marketing operations, a streamlined and functional sales team, and personnel who fully understand their responsibilities and the competencies of your services. That being said, regular alignment with your product and sales teams is critical.
Essentially, your web persona should only be an extension of your firm’s internal strengths and capabilities. This is also how your clients will know you are walking the talk.
3. Get Your Marketing Data Right.
No shortcuts. You must dive deep into your market research data to create a compelling persona for your website.
Revisit your contacts database to spot trends in how your leads and current clients find and consume your web content. Also, consider interviewing customers and prospects to find out what they specifically like about your products and services.
Another good strategy to consider is enlisting your sales team’s and recruiters’ feedback. For example, who are the leads, and what clients are they interacting with the most? Are they able to spot trends and generalizations on the types of clients and customers that your company tends to serve best? Which customer group and leads profile is your team most successful at handling and converting?
Another approach is to create forms on your website that you can use to capture pertinent information from your audience. You can use all your gathered data to curate and sharpen your web persona.
4. Listen First, Create Last.
You cannot say something meaningful to your target audience if you cannot specifically identify what is meaningful for them in the first place. This is why active listening is more important than speaking.
A recent survey revealed that 68 percent of successful marketers and salespeople said that the audience’s informational needs take precedence over the company’s sales message in their web content marketing.
Active listening involves focusing on what someone is saying, responding to it, and remembering it. Conversely, this is also an essential attribute that hiring managers and marketers ought to possess.
When you curate a web persona, you are trying to personalize your web content for your target audience. However, remember that personalization and active listening are not the same. In your web content, consider tackling views, opinions, and needs first without the pressure of offering a product or service as a solution. There is wisdom in talking about the times and trends and letting your audience engage with your content.
Allowing time for your audience to engage and digest your content without pressuring them to buy from you has real long-term value. Soon, your web persona can be viewed as that of an expert or an influencer and not just sales or marketing. Your customers will engage with you and avail of your services because they believe in and trust you. It opens the door toward making them high-value customers.
5. Define the Role of Your Target Audience in the Business Buying Cycle.
In carving a web content persona, consider the role of your target audience in the conversion cycle. For your leads, are you targeting active job candidates or passive ones? Do you have the same messaging for both or different content targeting each type of target audience?
Who else might influence the decision-making process of your target audience? Are there internal and external forces that come into play? How far along are they from conversion? How do they view you as a staffing firm?
What questions does your web persona need to answer? What rebuttals can you expect from the content your target audience can see on your website?
Furthermore, what words would they most likely use to find answers to their needs online? Is your web content figuring prominently in their search?
Establishing an effective web persona for your staffing firm takes a lot of research and teamwork to create a persona that truly resonates with your target audience. The answer lies in how well you manage the information around you and how well you know your current and prospective customers.
CREATE A STRONG WEB PERSONA WITH ALLIED INSIGHT.
Now that recruiters are marketers, it is wise to partner with marketing agencies to further bring out your staffing firm’s competitive advantage and sharpen your company’s persona online.
Consider partnering with Allied Insight, a full-stack marketing agency specializing in purposeful, productive, and beneficial partnerships with staffing firms to help you recruit top talent in this challenging labor market. Give your web persona that much-needed boost now! Contact Allied Insight today to know more.
