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Marketing your business: A beginner’s guide to buyer personas

You’re great at running a small business… but how about marketing it? There are so many things to think about: where to find new customers; what they like; and how to get your business out there so people can see what you do!

Say goodbye 👋  to the confusion with buyer personas! You might have heard of them before, perhaps you know what they are, or maybe you’re scratching your head. Whatever your knowledge, don’t worry – we’ve broken down:

What a buyer persona is

How to create yours

How to use buyer personas in your marketing

We’ll take you from theory to action, without breaking a sweat. The result? You can stop stressing about marketing and get back to running your business. We’ve even created a free downloadable eBook ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Buyer Personas’ for you to takeaway.

1. What are buyer personas and how can they help?

A buyer persona is a representation of your typical customer. Think of it as snapshot or collage of the kind of person that buys from you.

Buyer personas help you market more effectively. Created from your knowledge of customers, as well as a little market research, they help focus your marketing efforts. How? Clarity around who buys from you means you can serve your customers more effectively. Instead of trying to reach everyone, buyer personas focus your marketing efforts.

Our eBook, ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Buyer Personas’, aims to make knowing your customer easy. The outcome? The rest of your marketing falls into place.

2. Get to grips with the theory of buyer personas

Who to include in my buyer personas?

What information should I research?

When can I use my buyer persona?

All of these questions and more are covered in the eBook. The first section lays out the theory, to make the process as simple and transparent as possible. As with anything in life, understanding the reasons for something before doing it provides clarity and confidence. Because without a good understanding of what matters and why, it’s hard to create effective buyer personas that work for you.

3. A hands-on guide to creating your buyer personas

The second part of the eBook gives practical information about what to include in your buyer personas.

Use our hints and tips to create your own personas. You can also take a look at our example for inspiration, or make use of the template included and use your own customer data to fill in the gaps. The aim is to give you the knowledge and the tools to build up a set of buyer personas that work for you and your business.

4. Action! How to put your personas into practice

While it’s fun to get creative, the third and final section of the eBook is about action!

The best thing you can do with your buyer personas is to use them. Think of your personas like a fancy new bike. It arrives in a box, in many pieces, and you follow the instructions to slowly, slowly, build the bike. The process is challenging but fun – it’s exciting to see the bike take shape.

Here’s the thing though. If you don’t take the bike for a spin, you miss out on the benefits of cycling. Your buyer personas are no different: the best part is putting them to use in your marketing. You’ve put a lot of effort into creating them, so why not make the most of them?

5. Create your buyer personas with confidence

Knowing where to begin with marketing can be tricky, especially when you’re trying to run a business or juggle a side hustle. Defining your buyer personas is a great place to start, because you already know lots of information from serving your customers. And once your buyer personas are complete, they make the rest of your marketing much easier.

6. So why not create your buyer personas today?

Download our free eBook below👇 

Download for free

Download for free

Simply fill out the form below to receive your exclusive copy

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Which sports teams have the best marketing strategies online?

Female marketing working with a customer looking into which sports teams have the best marketing strategies online

There is no textbook definition as to what a strong marketing strategy is. However, by examining successful marketing strategies carried out by sports teams, you can build an idea as to what the techniques are best to adopt for that specific sector. If you want to grow the visibility of your sports team online and build a strong brand, you’ll need to have a strong presence online. 

Building your own website is the first step in your marketing strategy: we suggest using a website builder, as building a site from scratch can be time-consuming and expensive. Once you’ve built your site, you can start working on your marketing strategy to ensure your sports team has a powerful online image. 

Motivational message 

Conveying a motivational message which reaches out to a wide audience is a great way to market your sports team. In 2015, the English Sports Council started up the trend #ThisGirlCan, inspiring women across the country to take up sports. This marketing campaign was a success, as it reached out to ordinary women who might have hesitated to take part in sporting activities due to their appearance or fitness: the original video was viewed more than 8 million times, and the hashtag is still going strong to this day. 

Incorporate a motivational message in your marketing strategy to encourage audiences to identify your sports brand with positivity and personal growth. If you want to target a certain group of people, focusing your marketing strategy around them will show your sports team is committed to helping and inspiring this particular audience. 

Make your sports team personal 

It is easy to feel distant from even your most idolised sports star: their wealth and extravagant lifestyle often makes sports teams seem like they’re far away from your reality. However, sport plays a big role in many people’s lives, so building a relationship between your sports team and its supporters is key. 

As part of your marketing strategy, utilise social media to build a stronger relationship between your sports team and its supporters. Real Madrid launched their own SnapChat account in 2015, providing live updates to supporters all around the world. In just three months they managed to gain almost half a million subscribers – by providing their fans with match footage and information about its players, they built a successful digital relationship between their fans and their sports team. 

Stay connected with supporters

Keeping supporters in the loop with your sports team with all the latest updates around game results, membership deals, and team information is important to establish a healthy relationship between your sports team and their fans. One of the easiest ways to do this is by creating an email list – sending out weekly updates is a good way to keep your supporters up to date with the latest news surrounding your sports team, so that if they miss a match, they don’t feel as if they’ve missed out on your sports team’s latest developments. 

For a more personal way to stay connected with supporters, use live chat options on social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. This lets you directly answer questions about your sports team, and shows that you really value the supporters of your sports team. It also gives you a chance to boost your publicity: retweeting and sharing messages of support from fans evidences the successes of your sports team. With a larger base of supporters, your sports team is more likely to get more sponsors, helping to grow your sports team even further. 

Be accessible

When choosing a site builder to build your website, you’ll need to check they offer a responsive web design. In 2012, a Nielsen Report showed that 60% of mobile and tablet owners received sports related content on their devices at least once a day. Make sure your website is accessible on both desktop and mobile devices so that supporters can gather the latest information surrounding your team wherever they are in the world. 

Having a website that can only be accessed from only one type of screen may mean people become less engaged with your latest news and slowly drift away from supporting your team. To keep fans interested, build a site which is easy to use and looks great from any device. 

Although there are many site builders to choose from, we believe Go Sitebuilder is the best site builder for those who want an easy-to-use site builder which delivers premium websites at an incredibly affordable price. Our website builder offers ready to go web designs which are fully customisable, and our site can be accessed from any device.

Our 14-day free trial gives you all the time you need to discover why Go Sitebuilder is right for you and your sports team – try it today!

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How can I get my business on Google?

A woman's hand is touching screen on tablet computer iPad Pro at night for searching on Google search engine. Google is the most popular Internet search engine in the world to rank business higher.

To get your business on Google might seem like a struggle. However, there are ways to get around this difficulty: optimising your website is the best way for Google to get your online business to rank highly on its search engine results. And, the better you optimise your website, the more likely it is that your business will rank highly on Google’s search engine. 

Moz’s guide to search engine optimisation (SEO) has highlighted the importance of ranking highly on a search engine results page: page one of the results page receives 89.71% of click-through traffic, whereas the second page receives a click-through rate of only 4.37%. By making your online business visible on Google, you are much more likely to see a high traffic flow to your website, which emphasises the importance of having a strong SEO-focused strategy for your website. 

Optimise Google’s My Business option 

If you don’t know where to start with your marketing strategy, signing up to the Google My Business listing is a great way to ensure that you are visible on Google’s search engine results.  For those who are uncertain as to what Google My Business is, it is essentially a way for Google to list your business on its search engine in a concise way, including your contact details, opening hours, and Google reviews. Signing up is also pretty easy;

  • Create your account
  • Selected ‘start now’ in the top right-hand corner 
  • Enter your business name
  • Enter your business address
  • Select your business category, making it as accurate as possible
  • Add your business phone number and website

If you want more information as to how to navigate yourself around Google My Business then click here. 

By signing up to Google My Business, you are more likely to be visible on Google’s search engine results page: if, for example, a user has googled ‘restaurants near me’, Google’s site crawlers can pick up that your location is near to the user, and that you have good reviews, meaning you are more likely to rank highly as your details are a good match. 

You can also customise your Google My Business to make your online business seem more appealing, meaning that more people are likely to directly contact you from the results you have given, or click through to your website to see what else you have to offer. 

One way you can get creative is by adding emojis to the post section of your Google My Business. Although this might seem a bit unusual, Google is now starting to index (pick up on) emojis on its search engine results! If someone googles an emoji – such as a shoe – and writes ‘near me’, google can actually pick up on your website if you’re a shoe shop and include these emojis within your post. 

Use images as a tool

How do you feel when a Google business listing comes up that doesn’t have any images? It’s definitely not going to incite trust and might even put you off using that business altogether. According to Google research, businesses that do have photos get 35% more clicks, showing how important it is to include relevant, high quality images to your Google business listing. 

At the least, you should upload a cover photo, which shows up as the main image on the Google business listing, and a profile photo, which is what appears when you upload new information to your listing. Use images that show what your business looks like and accurately reflects the personality of your company. In fact, Google support has recommendations on which are the best business-specific photos to add to give you inspiration. 

Images are a useful tool on your website as well, as long as they are properly optimised. When you add a new image to your website, make sure you have a relevant file name and the alt tag (that should appear when you edit the image within your website builder). Alt tags should describe the image in less than 125 characters as if you were describing it to someone with a blindfold on. This means Google can “see” your image and check that it is relevant to your website; if it is, it will rank your site higher up in its search results. 

Upload blog posts 

Blogging is a fantastic way to rank highly on the search engine results page. Including keywords within a blog post tells Google’s site crawlers that your website is offering relevant and useful content which matches whatever has been typed into Google’s search engine. This means Google is more likely to index your site, ensuring that your business is visible.

On a more personal level, blog posts can really help you build a relationship between those who visit your site. By offering up free advice, or writing opinion pieces around an area relevant to your business, you are creating a platform of knowledge, telling visitors that you know your stuff and can therefore be trusted. This is also beneficial for SEO: once you’ve succeeded in drawing people to your site, keeping them on your online business for a longer amount of time tells Google that your content is relevant and should thus rank highly. 

Before you start all of this, it is paramount to have an attractive, easy to use website. Whilst building a website from scratch might be daunting, Go Sitebuilder is a fantastic website builder to use, as it doesn’t overcomplicate its services, making building a professional website a hassle-free process. Our 14-day free trial means you can access our website building services free of charge, giving you all the creative scope you need.