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Personas are the anchor of many digital marketing agency strategies. Understanding your client’s audience is vital to building a successful digital marketing strategy that delivers results.

The Problem with Personas

Think about it: Personas are your client’s “perception,” their audience’s “perception,” which results in your own “perception,” which ultimately becomes the “persona(s).”

It doesn’t just sound confusing; it is confusing to mix and match so many perceptions of the same reality. But it doesn’t have to be.

Apple built their entire company based on what people don’t know they want!

Aha! Moment for Building Better Personas

Every other month, we hold communication training for our team because it’s an undeniable skill present in every aspect of agency life and our personal lives. At the end of every 2-hour session, we make it a point to apply our training to real scenarios.

After nearly 10 years of bi-monthly communication training, the “aha!” moment hit me. All the things we discussed in our training were never part of persona building. Let alone any persona our client provided us, or we saw from other competing agencies.

Using Communication Laws to Build Better in Personas

There are many studies, research, and formulas that make people better communicators.

Trust us. We’ve been through them all. But they all boiled down to these primary laws, which allow you to build personas that digital marketers actually get value from.

1. Representation Style

This is how people process the world and things around them. This gives you a medium on how to best communicate to this persona, which includes:

  • Visual (see)
  • Auditory (listen, read, write)
  • Kinesthetic (touch, smell, taste)

2. Attitude

All people have 6 attitudes that perceive value to them. Everyone holds all these attitudes, but your personas will have attitudes that carry more weight than others. Using this gives you the formula to create value props for each attitude:

  • Theoretical (more facts and figures)
  • Utilitarian (wants good investment)
  • Aesthetic (needs to look good)
  • Social (what will others think of me)
  • Individualistic (how do I make product/service better)
  • Traditional (needs to fit with personal values and global outlook)

3. Language & Behavior

Like the game of telephone, everyone deletes or distorts information based on their behaviors and language. These behavioral characteristics will help identify how your persona makes a decision:

  • Motivation = Proactive vs. Reactive (avoid future trouble or is in trouble)
  • Direction = Toward vs. Away From (solutions to get closer to a goal or reasons why goal can’t be achieved)
  • Source = Internal vs. External (makes a decision on how they feel or make a decision based on validation from another)
  • Reason = Options vs. Procedures (likes control in decision making or likes clear path to decision)
  • Scope = Specific vs. Global (small details vs. lofty bigger picture)

4. Human Relations

Being able to understand people and their nature allows you to communicate with your persona skillfully, which includes:

  • How to make people feel important
  • How to set peoples’ moods
  • How to influence people
  • How to convince people

Here’s the Point …

It’s great to understand your audience’s demographics, interests, geographics, and psychographics. But it doesn’t do your digital marketing any good if you don’t know how to utilize that data to sell more products or deliver more services. Incorporating human nature laws and communication behaviors into your personas enables you to craft marketing messages that resonate with your entire audience and deliver results.

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LeadPoint Digital Welcomes Top Talent

ROANOKE, Virginia – Local Digital Marketing Agency, LeadPoint Digital, announces that seasoned marketer Carrie Cousins has joined the company as Senior Digital Marketing Strategist. Most recently the Director of Communications at Roanoke Regional Partnership, she led marketing efforts for the organization and its family of brands, including Roanoke Outside and Get2KnowNoke.

At LeadPoint Digital, Cousins applies her rich marketing strategy expertise to help local and national businesses elevate their digital marketing efforts. She brings a combination of extensive design experience, innovative content creation, and entrepreneurial leadership to her work.

“I’m thrilled to be joining some of the best in the business at LeadPoint Digital,” Cousins said. “We have immense opportunity to think creatively, tell brand stories, and strategize ways to help businesses maximize their digital marketing potential.”

Cousins is one of several new LeadPoint Digital hires in 2021. The digital marketing agency continues to enjoy rapid growth by fostering top local talent. In January, LeadPoint Digital expanded into a new office at Downtown Roanoke’s Spectrum Building and hired Rebecca Duncan as a Digital Marketing Specialist. Duncan has extensive experience working in the digital departments of Fortune 500 companies, including The Andersons and Therma-Tru Doors.

“We want to be well-known in the southeastern US for delivering lean and practical digital marketing programs that yield tangible results,” said Brad Timofeev, Managing Partner at LeadPoint Digital. “Our success starts by recruiting and hiring leaders in the Roanoke and New River Valley area. Carrie and Rebecca both bring a wealth of knowledge and experience that complement our team and client base.”

The LeadPoint Digital team is here to help you realize your marketing goals. Whether you are looking to develop a new digital strategy, optimize your existing strategy, or build a new website, they are your “lead point” for inbound marketing.

About LeadPoint Digital

LeadPoint Digital is an inbound marketing agency specializing in digital marketing and website design. Through a deep understanding of user behavior, it develops and executes practical inbound strategies that drive results. With more than 50 years of experience serving national and local brands, LeadPoint Digital is designed to meet any challenge.

Whether your business is new to digital marketing or looking to improve your inbound efforts, they are your lead point for strategy and execution.

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One of the most common dilemmas in search engine marketing is whether to advertise for your brand name or keywords your company is already ranking for at the top of the search engine ranking pages (SERPs).

Here are a few strategies we’ve used in the past that have proved successful.

Branded Search Engine Strategy

The branded search engine strategy revolves around generating as much top-of-page search share as possible. This strategy focuses on targeting keywords you’re already ranking in the top 5 listings.

Why? Depending on the search query, there could be as many as 4-5 paid advertisements above the first organic search listing. Even if your business is ranking within the top 3 listings, you still have potentially 5-7 competitors ranking above your listing. That’s approximately a 14% chance of someone clicking on your organic listing. If you have a paid ad, the chance of someone clicking on your listings jumps to 28%.

This strategy will displace your percentage of organic search traffic as paid traffic in Google Analytics. However, in most situations, combined visitors, user engagement, and conversions increase.

Teeter-Totter Search Engine Strategy

The teeter-totter search engine strategy is all about capitalizing on search queries that your business is missing out on today while you let your SEO strategy work. This strategy starts with a large advertising budget bidding on keywords you’re trying to rank organically through an aggressive SEO plan.

As your SEO plan starts ranking keywords in the top-5 listings, the advertising budget reduces, so you eventually only have an SEO expense. This strategy is ideal for businesses that don’t have organic visibility in the search engines but need to boost revenue fast while improving organic visibility.

Coverage Search Engine Strategy

The coverage search engine strategy generates as much search exposure as possible, both organically and paid. This strategy avoids targeting keywords that your website is already ranking for organically and focuses solely on keywords that your website will less likely rank for.

Often, the advertising budget never reduces and is a static part of a digital marketing plan.

This is an ideal strategy for businesses that have plateaued in SEO and still have opportunities with search queries that are a little outside of the website’s intent.

Here’s the Point …

These search engine strategies have a place in any digital marketing plan but aren’t made for every business. The ideal search engine strategy is a comprehensive strategy that mixes coverage and branded models. These two strategies combined ensure you are reaching your targeted audience and increasing SERP share.

Find out what search engine strategy is best for you by scheduling a free consultation with one of our experts.

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We’re Growing in Roanoke!

We are excited to announce that LeadPoint Digital is growing into new office space in Downtown Roanoke on December 1, 2020.

In a year like no other, we are fortunate to have doubled the size of our talented team, requiring us to relocate to a more accommodating corporate office.

With assistance from our partners at Barrows and Spectrum Design, the office is designed to maximize creativity and communication with our team and clients, both, virtually and in-person. The floor plan features an open concept with state-of-the-art furniture from Steelcase and is equipped with technology to influence productivity and comfort. Construction and furniture installation are to be completed in early 2021.

Our new office is located above Century Plaza at:

10 Church Avee, SE, Suite 300
Roanoke, VA 24011

When health regulations allow, we look forward to hosting you. Until then, we invite you to take a sneak peak at the renderings.

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YouTube’s Pros and Cons

We sat down with Marko Zlatic, founder of Whiteboard Finance, social media influencer and friend of LeadPoint Digital to discuss his ranking success on YouTube and how much time you should invest in YouTube versus your own website.

“When you’re creating content for YouTube and generating ad dollars, you’re playing on rented property.” Marko continues to explain that “…if you’re relying on income from being a YouTube influencer, the amount you earn can change at any time. In personal finance, the best investment is property you own and that goes for the web as well.”

However, YouTube is a great place to get started because it’s a Google-owned property and the 2nd largest search engine. Although ranking YouTube videos is still a long game, it tends to rank faster than a new blog or website would rank because of YouTube’s domain value and engagement.

Here are a few things you can do to start earning more views on YouTube:

Topic Selection

Like search engine optimization, success on YouTube begins with in-depth topic research. Strive to find a topic that has a bubble with high-search volume and subpar content ranking towards the top of YouTube and Google. You’ll need to be confident in the fact that you can create better content than what’s already ranking.

Titles

There is a balance and art to writing effective video titles that get found by YouTube, and also interest a viewer enough to watch your video. Your title should be highly relevant to the topic research you performed that ultimately influenced you to settle on it.

You also want to give the viewer a concise insight into what they can expect if they decide to watch. For example, if you create a video on “How to tie a tie?”, an ideal title would be “How to tie a tie? (8 Easy Steps)”.

Thumbnails

We bet a part of you clicked on this article because of the customized hero photo for this article. Here’s the point, YouTube wants more viewers to sell more advertising, a great way of getting more views is to stand out from the competition in the search results by making a customized thumbnail that is enticing and topical enough for the viewer to watch the video.

Engagement

Topic, titles, and thumbnails are all aimed at driving engagement. This is the big factor that ranks your video on YouTube and keeps you at the top. An ideal click rate for a YouTube video is 6-10%, which means every time your video appears in the search results, for every 100 people, 6-10 of them need to click and watch your video.

The same goes for view rates, the longer a viewer watches your video, the better. In addition, you want to earn social approval from your visitors to encourage them to interact by sharing, liking, subscribing, or commenting on your video/channel.

Consistency

YouTube has a real-time analytical dashboard so you can see how many people are watching your videos at different times of the day. Marko has identified that YouTube viewers have similar habits as primetime television (between 4 PM and 10 PM). He recommends creating and publishing videos regularly and posting them around the same time of day.

Video + Audio Quality

Invest in your equipment! The clearer you sound and the higher your video resolution, the better. This is important for multiple reasons outside of looking professional. With advanced technology, YouTube may actually be able to understand what you’re saying in the video which helps them index your video.

In addition, home streaming is becoming more popular with cord-cutters, so more viewers are turning to their HD televisions to browse YouTube and consumer content.

Descriptions, Captions, and Tagging

When it comes to writing descriptions, captions, and tagging your videos – relevancy is the most important takeaway. Don’t dilute the content in your video by listing a bunch of keywords or topics that are related to your video, but not the main topic. All you’re doing is confusing YouTube and the viewer. For captioning, better audio equipment will save you a ton of time because YouTube’s advanced closed captioning is highly accurate.

Here’s the Point

If you follow these best practices you are well on your way to increasing views on YouTube, but Marko emphasized that it’s all about your personality and believability “…you have to practice what you preach. Without that, your content can’t fill the gap that you found. Viewers want someone they can trust and relate to. Just be yourself but be self-aware.”

If you want to learn more about creating a successful YouTube Channel, add yourself to the waiting list for Marko’s YouTube Influencer Course, where Marko will go into detail on how to become a successful YouTuber. You can also follow Marko on his blog, Twitter, and Instagram.

You can see more tips about growing your YouTube channel with this video from Brian Dean on How to Start (And Grow) a YouTube Channel.

If you’re an influencer that’s looking to get off “rented property” and transition your audience to a digital asset you own and control, call us at 540.566.4886 or email us at sales@leadpointdigital.com.

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Knowing Your Audience to Improve Brand Awareness

Learn from large audio and video streaming services to curate your email marketing and website for a more personalized experience.

I’m a huge music fan so one app I can’t get enough of is Spotify. On top of streaming any song in the known universe, Spotify curates incredibly genre-specific playlists just for you every week. My music taste exists on a spectrum of classic rock, EDM, and indie pop. Somehow Spotify manages to encapsulate my unique taste and spices up my music palette with new songs and artists I’ve yet to discover – every single week!

As of 2019, Spotify had 271 million users in 79 countries – they are the leading driver of revenue to the music business today. This got me thinking about all the different people who use Spotify around the world, and how they curate unique playlists for each of its users. Spotify knows its people, they know music lovers across the globe, and exactly what they want, when they want it. Ever heard of New Music Friday? A playlist of new songs from music’s top artists every Friday… yes, please!

Here’s the Point …

Think of your email marketing programs. We analyze our results and brainstorm ways to increase engagement with new subject lines and more calls-to-action with a basic knowledge of the audiences we’re targeting. You may feel you’re just shooting in the dark, hoping at least a handful of your contacts are interested in your emails.

Spotify doesn’t just hope I’m going to like the playlists it sends me every week; they know because they know me. Segmenting your email lists is a great place to start discovering who your contacts are so you can deliver communications tailored to their needs and wants. Start segmenting with the information you already have for your contacts – email engagement.

You know who opened your emails and clicked on them, and what they clicked on! Use this data to create an email campaign targeted at these people who showed some interest in your sale, event, resource, etc. Do you have any demographic or geographic data on these contacts? Look for commonalities and think of how you can segment the list even more to deliver hyper-focused messaging. Email engagement is one of the many ways you can segment your email lists.

After you’ve mastered email marketing – inbound marketing is the next step to customize a complete digital experience to strengthen your audience’s relationship with your brand.

We all have one thing in common, our differences! People’s uniqueness provides amazing opportunities to discover the different backgrounds, interests, and motives of your customers and communicate in a way that truly matters to each person.

What segmenting strategies have you found to be successful?

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Crisis Leads to Adversity

Local broadcasters, professionals, and residents of Southwest Virginia created a 24/7 local information and call-in radio station covering COVID-19 – focused on educating the public and the impact local businesses are having nationally and locally. Completely volunteer-based, COVID Virginia airs on local radio station 102.5 FM WBZS.

On April 9, the Managing Partner of LeadPoint Digital, Brad Timofeev, was invited on the show to discuss how businesses can adapt and innovate their digital operations to survive during these times. Since the start of the pandemic, LeadPoint has been faced with an influx of requests for coordinating communications, website additions, updating business hours, and overall generating solutions for our clients to adapt their businesses and stay strong in the face of adversity.

Brad spoke with John Phillips, President at Roanoke – Blacksburg Technology Council, and commented on the challenges our clients are currently facing.

“You have two options: to move towards adversity or away from it. If you avoid adversity, then you play the waiting game and give up your control in this situation. If you rise to the challenge, you must innovate new ways to earn. Businesses are being forced to adapt to stay alive, therefore innovation and technology are evolving. That’s the positive in all this and what I truly look forward to working on.”

Many of our clients have moved towards adversity, they have collaborated with their teams and ours to invent new ways of operating their businesses. We are proud to help establish totally new business offerings like virtual programming and online classes, remarket products for the healthcare industry like Telehealth, and produce websites for companies innovating PPE products for our nation’s nurses and doctors.

What are Some Ways to Improve Marketing for Your Business?

Brad shed some much-needed light on marketing your business right now with these 4 tips:

  1. The most important thing is to communicate your new business operations: hours, new services, new digital offerings, company policies, etc.
  2. Make it easy for your audience to adapt – this is where innovation comes up to bat. How can you create new solutions for your customers to engage with you? Think eCommerce, online education, video chats, updating digital assets, etc.
  3. Don’t exploit the crisis because it can be detrimental to your brand.
  4. Help your community, your industry, and the world. How can you give back to others during this time?

“This is the time we’re rising from the ashes; we’re reinventing our ‘new normal’. The American market will become stable again, but it will be evolved for the better.”

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Working with What You Have

I’ve always enjoyed business signage that takes a risk of not generating tangible returns for the business. Recently I drove by a sign for a small farm that read “Bloom Where You Are Planted”.

At that moment, the message resonated with me because I have one tulip that blooms in the middle of my yard every year. The soil in my yard is infertile, covered in shade and my landscaping company even said: “…nothing will grow here”.

So I have this tulip in my yard that defies all odds and I have these questions that run through my mind every year. Was it planted there by a person? Did it get there naturally by storm water run-off? Does it get more nutrients because it’s the only living thing in my yard?

This flower was a living example of the statement on the farm sign.

Here’s the Point …

As marketers or business owners, it feels like we always have a small or less-than-ideal budget for marketing and business development.

Rather than finding excuses why marketing isn’t performing, or sales aren’t increasing we should make the most of what we’re given. Instead of spreading our budget thin, maybe we should put a majority or all of our budget where it will return the most.

Typically, digital marketing is the best place to optimize a small marketing/business development budget because it’s highly measurable. Start off by building an email list of all your contacts that include family, friends, clients, partners, vendors, and prospects that you’ve connected with. Depending on your target audience, you may also want to boost or start a search engine advertising program through Google AdWords, Microsoft Ad Center, Yelp, or other equivalents.

Let digital marketing help your budget bloom.

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What is Luck?

Luck happens by chance. I used to buy into this idea because it seemed like everyone else had more luck than me – until my luck began to change for the better, both personally and professionally.

I remember specifically sitting in one of our monthly business development meetings and sharing a client success story that I couldn’t really speak to because I felt it all happened by chance. I’ll never forget the next thing that was said: “Luck is a result of preparation and persistence”.

It didn’t resonate with me until I began to think about it deeply over the next few weeks. It became an obsession where I rehashed every instance leading up to many of my “lucky” scenarios – trying to identify where persistence and preparation assisted in my “luck”.

To my shock, I was able to tie behaviors that I was consciously trying to improve upon, to behaviors that ultimately became part of my subconscious mind – creating what most of us would call “luck”.

Here’s the Point …

Ranking in the top positions of the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) doesn’t happen by chance. It is the preparation and persistence offline and online that gets you to the top of the SERPs.

You may not get the results you desire as fast as you like, but with a plan and persistence, your key performance indicators will increase exponentially over the years.

Can you identify a situation where preparation and persistence yielded positive results for you?

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