Creating Profiles That Are More Than Demographic Snapshots

Demographic indicators such as population growth, income levels, labor force participation, education levels, and housing types, are some of the factors considered in creating your potential buyers profile.

A summary of basic statistics of your web site visitors and understanding their surfing patterns can help you better understand their “want’s” and the “need’s”.

Appropriate measures taken by web analytics software can help you better illustrate the type of potential customers you are going to deal with.

But, demographic indicators don’t tell the whole story. Underneath all those numbers is a wide array of needs and motivations that may have little to do with a customer’s age, gender, education or income level.

The basic statistics and other information that you derive from your web analytics such as a keywords, internal search queries, click-streams, average time spent on individual pages, gives you a clearer but still partial picture of those motivations and needs.

If you are looking for an answers to the questions about where and how to advertise more effectively, you should divide your visitors by demographics and behavior segments, and then target them accordingly.

Even though your profiles go deeper by attempting to answer the questions about how to get most of your advertising media and strategies you use, there is more important question that you have to answer at first:

“Can I be more effective in persuading and predicting of the reason of why do my customers behave this way?”

If you succeeded and found an answer, and once you understand the reason to your customers’ behavior, you can figure out the message to which each segment (or profile) is most likely to respond. And that’s the right time to begin to address your message to them.

Here are the 3 Essential Questions that ultimately should frame every other question you ask about what to do on your site and underlie every decision you make when you test your persuasive system for optimal performance:

• Who I have to persuade?
• What actions I want this person to take?
• How can I most effectively persuade that person?

In my next article I’ll discuss how the answers to these questions can help guide the elements you test and the testing variations you create.

So see you next time

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