Maybe SEO was once a mysterious field, where no one but industry professionals knew exactly what went on, but no longer. In this day and age, every business needs to be informed and prioritizing SEO to truly thrive.
Oversimplified, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the fine-tuning of sites and pages with content and links to allow for visibility and clickability on search engine pages. But good SEO practitioners know that it’s so much more than that.
SEO marketing should be user-focused: a means of getting relevant content in front of interested people.
While most other marketing channels’ usefulness varies based on industry, it's rare indeed to find a business that wouldn’t benefit from including SEO as a key piece of their marketing strategy.
We’ve created this guide to help you understand how SEO functions in a business and how it can help drive traffic from Google to your pages and raise the bottom line of your own business.
So, how does SEO function in a business setting?
Well, first off, organic search accounts for more than half of all web traffic out there. Think of the last time you had a question about something-- chances are, you Googled it. And you’re not alone.
There are a lot of people using search engines to find the information they need online every single day, billions, in fact, but there are also a lot of sites trying to get in front of those users.
SEO in marketing is the strategy a business builds to make sure their content reaches the searchers to whom it will be most helpful and relevant.
Unlike some channels, Search Engine Optimization has the benefit of being able to meet these searches wherever they are in the marketing funnel. One big misconception about SEO is that it only focuses on top-of-funnel content, when a good SEO marketing strategy should meet the customer wherever they are in their journey.
Users often don’t follow the nice proportional funnel we’re used to talking about. Have you heard the old marketing adage that it takes encountering your brand about seven times in order to convert? The idea might be outdated, but the process of repetition certainly isn’t.
Think of your own behavior. When you made your last big purchase did you visit several different sites in your search for the most fairly priced, best quality option? Did you phrase your searches differently when you were in different stages of the funnel? Most likely your answer to these questions is a resounding yes. Most users, like you, consume what they want when they want. Their conversion journeys aren’t a straight line.
So, when they are ready to jump into research mode, for consideration or even decision stage content, you’d better hope you have pages that rank for those terms.
It’s unfortunately common to put SEO strategy in a low-priority position. Businesses might have gotten away with this ten years ago, even five years ago, but today it just won’t fly. The remarkable visibility and conversion rates possible through organic search can no longer be ignored.
Here are a few things your business can do to make SEO in marketing a higher priority today:
The first thing you can do to make SEO a priority is to decide to make it a priority. Seems simple enough, right? But it’s easier said than done. With that decision must come a commitment to see that the correct prioritization actually happens.
Vivint Solar built an enterprise by knocking doors across the US. And while they were knocking, their smaller competitors were beefing up their digital arm. Vivint Solar was losing potential customers to much smaller competitors who had a larger presence online. After recognizing the incredible potential for reaching new customers by taking advantage of high search engine traffic (specifically Google) with non-branded searches, they made the choice to prioritize SEO in marketing and began seeing immediate gains, including 6.6X increase in non-branded organic traffic.
It’s always important to have metrics, but if you aren’t choosing the right metrics to focus on, you might be overlooking significant results.
There is a mindset among marketing leaders that the proper metrics to use in measuring SEO are things like search engine traffic, links, and ranking. While there’s no question that these metrics are useful and important, you also need to track SEO in marketing with metrics like conversions and revenue that directly contribute to the bottom line and drive the business forward.
The belief that SEO can’t be measured by conversions is a misconception that needs to change.
The tactics shift with every new platform — the objective never does. This video short breaks down the game that's stayed the same since AltaVista.
Business and marketing leaders should push to keep SEOs accountable, and if that isn’t happening then SEOs should push for accountability. If the correct metrics aren’t tracked, SEOs won’t get the credit they deserve, or receive the resources they need to earn success.
In order to invest your resources efficiently, you need to know where you can make the greatest impact. That knowledge will allow you to allocate resources in a smart and successful way.
Work with the SEO specialists in your company to determine your baselines on links, content, ranking keywords, etc. and where you’re falling short of meeting your goals. Then form a strategy to tackle the places where you find your company is lacking. With this strategy in place, you will be able to make budget and hiring/vendor decisions with confidence.
There’s many reasons to hire an agency, but perhaps none is more critical than this: you want accelerated and measurable growth that doesn’t tap out your internal team.
A common misconception that companies believe is that they don’t need an agency because they already have an in-house SEO. In reality, the best clients are already doing a great job at SEO marketing, but are finding that one person (or just a few people) can’t build a castle on their own.
Hiring an agency allows businesses to work with an entire team of SEO professionals without accruing the cost of hiring their own.
When vetting agencies be sure to ask them the following:
Many believe that SEO starts with keyword research. And true, keyword research is a foundational step, but before keyword research is effective, you’ll need audience insights. Marketing leaders and SEO need to know who they are trying to reach. This is where personas come in.
Collecting demographic and psychographic information is a great place to begin, but creating a concrete story for your personas is essential in getting to know who your ideal customers are and why they act the way they do.
Once you know who your customers are, you need to know where they are. Look at the assisted conversion funnel to see where your customers are landing, and analyze what you can do to elevate these pages better within the SERPs.
Now that you know who your customers are, and where they are, look at their unique needs and how your product/service solves those needs. Figure out how you can meet their needs online in a way that outshines anything your competitors currently offer.
Further optimize by examining your highest converting pages and determine how you can help those types of pages make it in front of more customers.
It’s a common misconception that SEO work can rank an entire site. Of course, well-ranking pages will organically increase user access to the rest of your site, but it is pages that rank in SERPs, not sites.
Don’t forget this when formulating your keyword-driven content strategy. Be tactical when creating or optimizing pages by pairing them to the keywords that you want to rank for. Strive to know your target keywords (and their matching personas) like the back of your hand.
Optimize your site by keeping consistency between pages, easy internal navigation, and user-friendly design. When the internal flow of a site works well, customers will have a greater ease of conversion.
Every seasoned SEO knows that link acquisition is a necessary part of any holistic SEO strategy. Many believe that link-building is only necessary for weak and non authoritative websites, but this is simply not true. I’ve worked with many large brands who erroneously believe that link-building don’t need to be included in the SEO strategy because they think that their reputation alone will carry their success. Remember what we learned above? Search engines rank pages, not entire sites. Great content, on powerful sites, may require a few extra links to get it off to a good start.
And not all links come from outside your site. Internal links are a valuable part of using your own authority to strengthen new or striking distance content. Make no mistake, link-building should be part of any SEO campaign.
Frequent SEO reporting on metrics that affect the bottom line is critical. Metrics such as ranking and search engine traffic are important too, but also be sure you can track your SEO efforts directly to conversions and revenue.
Maximize your efforts by not isolating SEO in it’s own department. Without seamless interaction between content, web development, and other marketing channels, SEO won’t be as effective. The best SEO teams and agencies integrate their departments because it can influence so many disciplines.
SEO in marketing is a vital part of any business strategy. Because SEO is so important, especially in current times, businesses would do well to respect what SEO can do. It’s time to see marketing leaders fight for SEO resources, and align their SEO metrics to hold teams accountable for driving business success, not just traffic.
MozCon 2020 is a wrap.
We heard from many speakers covering many industries, but even more compelling than the voices we heard, was the common themes between them.
I worked with my fellow attendees from 97th Floor to pull together the common themes and action items from MozCon 2020. In no particular order, here's the themes we saw, and what marketers and brands should be doing next.
As always Moz leads by example when discussing difficult, but necessary, topics. Like addressing the current economic, social, and civil situations. Sarah Bird kicked the conference off by acknowledging the current environment, and Dr. Pete gave a heartfelt opening to his address on keyword research. Immediately Dr. Pete had my heart and attention as he drew the connection between today's circumstances and how these factor into the fundamentals of SEO. Specifically topical research.
Of course today's economic climate is affecting each of the businesses we work for. Wil Reynolds closed the conference by introducing us to the new CMO, or rather, the lack thereof. We were all given stark evidence that our careers and success as marketers hinge on being able to effectively communicate in the language of the board.
The Takeaway: I think I speak for everyone when I say I’m sick of hearing “unprecedented times” in brand messaging. Let’s skip getting things back to normal and instead make things better. No doubt, the past few months have changed some foundational elements of everyone’s lives, but as marketers let’s make sure this change is for good, and is long lasting.
Look at your current marketing efforts and ask, "Are we trying to get back to "normal"? Or are we using this as an opportunity to get better?
I think I speak for all the attendees when I say that day 2 of MozCon 2020 was filled with equal parts intrigue and trepidation. Of course we've all known for a long time 97th Floor has already believed in the power of unconventional data sets for practical SEO use. (We're so close to launching something big around this, stay tuned!)
I think most SEOs understand and respect the different methods of deep technical SEO, but many don't know what's possible, or how to begin. Enter Moz's Senior SEO Scientist Britney Muller, who walk gave every attendee the chance to dip their toes into machine learning and automaton.
Britney continued on with examples and uses cases, but perhaps none was more interesting than entities from Google. Essentially it's a score that indicates Google's topical associations with a given URL. I'm excited to dig deeper into this later.
Of course every attendee this year remembers Michael King's one of a kind theatrical experience showcasing the many use cases of data scraping, machine learning, big data crunching, and artificial intelligence.
This address was maybe the heaviest conference address I've ever heard, but the format of a ~30 minute film and story made it actually digestible. In the traditional setting, my eyes may have glazed, but today, they were glued. Today, we witnessed a new medium for virtual conference addresses. Well done Michael!
The Takeaway: The technical inspiration shared today could come across as fiercely intimidating. But you can take it for a fact that these advanced scripts, and machine learning setups aren't conceived out of nothing (even for the pros). If you are enthralled by the idea to get busy with scripts, machine learning, and automations start slow and be patient with yourself. It's a brave new world! Also rewatch those sessions when the recordings come out.
Stay glued to the 97th Floor social accounts and newsletter to be of the first to know when we drop our own software that accomplishes a lot of the technical crunching we've seen seen at MozCon.
How can you get customers if you don't know them? Even before Coronavirus, the industry has been seeing subtle shifts to growth-driven marketing. Or in other words, measurable marketing.
Quickly Wil Reynolds had the audience's attention with the line, "The less you understand your customer, the more you spend to acquire them."
If we really care about bottom line budgets, we should start acting like it. Wil went on to call out mistakes he's seen of advertisers spending inefficiently because they didn't have their customer map dialed in. He made the case that saving money comes when you understand the customer journey and all marketing facets work in unison to perfect the customer journey experience.
Branding expert Flavilla Fongang uncovered timeless branding expertise with many notable tactics like:
But perhaps none was more resounding to me than her declaration that customer engagement is a company-wide effort. Innovation must be built into the company culture to retain and delight customers.
The Takeaway: The customer journey is not only knowing your audience, it's anticipating their next move. The customer journey is crucial to bottom-line success. There are too many options in your space for you to just meet needs, we need to exceed customer expectations. And that only comes when we know our audience.
Invest in a real customer journey map (not just audience insights), paired with your published content. Hopefully you find gaps in the journey, filling those gaps with customer-focused content is your next homework assignment.
A great place to start on this a guide we put together on building a bullet-proof buyer persona.
I love transparency, but even more I love the vulnerability that took place at MozCon 2020. Speakers were eager to share what didn’t work for them. Phil Nottingham shared a story of setting three different budgets for a set video ads, $1,000, $10,000, and $100,000.
Obviously this would mean huge differences in the production value of these campaigns, and you might think that a better video ad would lead to better traffic.
Crazy right?
But we learned that spending more doesn’t mean it’ll produce proportionally more results.
Shannon McGuirk also spared no punches in reviewing her past work in link acquisition. I love this honesty, because this is how we (as a community) go further. Link acquisition is something that most are shy to share, so I was especially glad to see Shannon’s blunt honesty about what didn’t work (and what did).
The above graphic from Shannon shows what our marketing efforts tend to look like. You can see that majority of the activity is bringing in steady results. We can all see this is a healthy balance of activity, yet too often marketers only focus on the "huge wins" and consider everything else a fail. Embrace the steady performing campaigns and learn from your fails.
The Takeaway: None of us have ever marketed through a global pandemic before (unless someone at MozCon 2020 was marketing during the Spanish Flu 100 years ago). Let’s grant ourselves a little leeway and break a few eggs while we make a marketing omelet in this new world.
So don't shy away from getting after something our of your comfort zone. Whether you win or lose, the world keeps spinning. So get after that crazy idea you've been pushing off.
You know that building and selling to an audience isn’t cheap. You didn’t need to pay for a MozCon ticket to hear that, but it’s important to be reminded that people aren’t waiting around online for a brand to win their loyalty. Phil Nottingham encapsulated this feeling when he said, “The number of impressions is not the number of people impressed.”
A number of speakers today expressed renewed focus on audience building, especially through the lens of the unique health, economic, social, and civil circumstances everyone is facing today.
The Takeaway: Be empathetic and understanding with your audience. Rerun your keyword research because volumes and interests have changed dramatically in the past few months. Being quick on an SEO/paid media/content strategy for up and coming keywords in your space will be rewarded with more traffic. Now comes the fun part of turning that traffic into an audience, which was discussed today by many presenters.
Get fresh keyword and audience data, then restructure your traffic and audience source.
This isn’t a new topic for MozCon, or any digital conference for that matter, but today it matters more than it did in the past. Just within the past several months, spending and consuming habits have changed dramatically. If SEOs are working purely off keyword data that is 6-12 months old, they are missing out on huge opportunities.
Utilizing Google Trends at this time is a great place to start, and Dr. Pete took us on a journey of just how to grab that data. Who else was excited to learn about Pinterest Trends?
Many others at MozCon shared truly cool ways to collect and crunch data that give you deep and actionable understanding your audience, for example...
And don't write off knowing your own business. Heather Physioc laid down the foundational truth that before any significant marketing can be conducted, we need to understand the brand we are marketing for. Including our values and competitive edge. A good tip for defining your competitive edge is finding the collection of words that describe your businesses that end in "est" (i.e. quickest, cheapest, etc.).
The Takeaway: Your audience, along with their wants and needs, has likely drastically shifted over the last six months. If you aren't on top of those new insights, you are bleeding money. Lucky for you, there’s data out there to inform your audience strategy. Of course there’s some readily available data sources from traditional tools, but through custom scrapers and unique data pulls/crunches you can get clean data that actually informs strategy.
Make every effort to obtain audience data, build real personas, and then use those personas throughout your marketing team.
Another way to say this is to invest in your brand.
This is another trend that isn’t exclusive to this MozCon, but we’ve been saying the same thing for years. However, I think most brands are feeling this exaggerated effect given the economic hardships associated with the Coronavirus pandemic.
It was mentioned multiple times by many speakers; Capture and delight your audience, and then nurture them on your own platforms. Be it your copy, website, videos, or email.
Phil Nottingham gave a great example of this such as Uber creating Uber Presents, or Mailchimp creating Mailchimp Presents, or Wistia creating Brandwagon, a late night style talk show for marketers.
All of these projects are great examples of companies creating content for their audience. They become the media their users seek, rather than spending a ton of money to annoy users on other media platforms.
When Brian Dean started by dropping some Star Wars themed slides, he had me. But the data kept me! For example he confirmed what many have already assumed, but not with the hard data behind it. Your email subscribers are more likely to get to your content than your social followers.
Not to mention Brian's presentation also discussed specifics of how to invest in your brand. He asserts (and I agree) that marketers need to spend more time on the promotion of their content, especially when compared to how much time we spend creating it. He called for an end to the "
Generic ad copy and keyword-stuffed blog posts won’t get you far. The key to effective marketing is intentionality. Every piece of your holistic marketing strategy should be fine-tuned to target the niche of people who are most likely to convert and provide business value. A holistic marketing strategy optimized with detail is marketing worth investing in.
So what does intentionality in a holistic marketing strategy mean?
Be specific about the goals, knowledgeable about the audience, and create every bit of content with the audience and specific goals in mind.
Algorithmia provides a machine learning infrastructure that allows enterprises to be more successful in their machine learning efforts. They came to us because they are in a competitive market, up against companies like Amazon and Microsoft in both SEO and digital advertising. As a relatively young company, they knew they would need to be intentional in their strategy in order to succeed in that competitive space.
With their goals for organic traffic and leads in mind, we performed thorough site, keyword, and content audits in order to better understand where Algorithmia’s SEO stood. They had been producing content, but not at scale, and were missing the opportunity to increase their domain authority by targeting top-of-funnel keywords with new and optimized articles.
This kind of content shows potential customers and Google that Algorithmia is an authority on all things machine learning.
We also conducted audits of their previous ad strategies and took a deep dive into our target audiences to determine the best way to get the right people to convert on our ads.
After gathering data on their audience and previous marketing strategies, we put a strategy into action. While we did add new top-of-funnel content to the SEO strategy, we didn’t forget about users further down the funnel. We continued to create content that serves the needs of more qualified audiences as well. A holistic approach is key to intentional marketing.
As for digital advertising, we honed in on very specific job titles, such as VP of Engineering, Senior Data Engineers, etc. We did days of research to truly understand who our audience personas are on a human level. This research included spending time on sites and social media pages that our audience spends time on and gaining a thorough understanding of their roles, responsibilities, pain points, and sense of humor. This information allows us to truly connect with users by mentioning familiar problems they face and other aspects of their daily lives, making our ads feel less like ads. Once we understood those target customers better, we created ad copy messaging and design that was tailored just for them.
We chose LinkedIn as our main ad platform, since it is where those ideal customers were most likely to be found and easiest to target. LinkedIn’s Lead Gen Forms allow users to convert directly on LinkedIn, which provides a more direct path to conversion and simplifies the user experience. We knew that our audiences were marketing-averse and sensitive to user experience, so we were pleased to see this ad feature more than double our conversion rate.
Tracking the right metrics is just as important as selecting the right strategy. For Algorithmia’s SEO, we created a dashboard of every piece of content published, and tracked performance metrics on a micro scale. Because Algorithmia’s goals were tied to the success of the content we were creating, it was important that their teams could see the results of each piece of content in real-time.
The content we produced for Algorithmia has proved itself to be an evergreen source of organic traffic to the site. We spent the first 4 months creating content, and an additional 4 months building links, and within that time our content earned over 10,000 organic visits from Google.
For digital advertising, understanding the quality of each lead, rather than just the quantity, was critical to understanding the ROI. So, we made a point to personally document the quality of every single lead that came in. We made sure we knew where the greatest number of high-quality leads were coming from, so that we could fine-tune our strategy even more as we got more performance data.
When we implemented the highly detailed ad targeting for our personas, we achieved a 48% increase in qualified leads month-over-month and a 187% increase in weekly percentage of quality leads over 9 weeks.
The final step in an intentional strategy is to consistently follow through. In marketing, you can’t just set it and forget it. You have to continually watch for changes in performance and reevaluate results.
We continuously track and monitor keyword rankings to keep up with Google’s ever-changing SERPs and continually optimize our ad targeting, always looking for new ways to connect with our audience. Another thing to keep in mind is that digital advertising audiences get fatigued quickly, requiring ad copy and creative to be refreshed often. This also allows for testing and refining the messaging and tone of the ads.
Holistic marketing strategy should have a singular goal, serving the customer. Staying on top of changes in performance will allow you to help your company shift and change with the tides of digital marketing and bring in the best results over time.
Every business serves real people, not algorithms. And people want to feel understood.
Sure, you could employ a cookie-cutter digital marketing strategy that works for a few months, call it a success, and move on. But cookie-cutter strategies won’t get you results. Stay customer focused, stay holistic, stay intentional.
One of the not-so-secret secrets to successful marketing is knowing your audience. Arguably the best way to do this is to create buyer personas.
When we onboard new clients at 97th Floor we always ask for their existing personas, and they often shrug their shoulders and rifle aimlessly through some papers. “I think we had some made about a year or two ago,” they say. But in this age of smart digital marketing, that just won’t fly. The world needs more personas-- and better personas. We at 97th Floor have the expertise, and we’re here to make the internet a better place. So we put this guide together to help you build personas for your business that will bring in consumer insights that will elevate all of your marketing efforts and increase your revenue.
Having a good buyer persona is like having your ideal customer sit next to you while you planned their content campaign. They could remind you of what’s going on in their lives and how that might affect their connection with your ads, blog posts, social media efforts, and emails.
A buyer persona is a fictional depiction of an ideal, individual customer. Creating and applying a buyer persona helps marketers craft campaigns that feel more true and have more impact. A good buyer persona can turbocharge the understanding of your customers, leading to more traffic, higher conversions, and eventually, bigger revenue figures. Who doesn’t want that? So here’s how to make it happen.
The ingredients are simple, and the process is not rocket science. Like baking bread, you already own most ingredients—flour, water, yeast, salt—and the things you don’t already have in your cupboard are easily accessible.
Begin with a little market research. What data do you already have about your customers? What are their current job titles, responsibilities, interests? If you can, use a tool like SparkToro to find out more about what your customers care about. Ask: why would they benefit from your brand? What are their pain points and how does your offer solve them? The more research you can do, the better.
Then add a little speculation. If your persona loves running, you can assume they’ll care about running form or proper running shoes. If they’re a busy mom, you can assume they’re looking for ways to relax and save time. Some assumptions are okay, and even needed, but be sure you don’t get off track.
Once you flesh out your customer with a few assumptions, mix your research and speculation together with a knowledge of the user journey for your product or service. For instance, how do they come in contact with your brand? Will they be eager to buy or will they need a little persuasion? What appeals to them on your site?
Finally, sprinkle a little creativity on top. This is the fun part: make it a story. Be as specific as you possibly can. What is their name? What do they look like? How does an average day in their life flow? Don’t be shy, write it out. Use your imagination. The end result should be fun, spunky, realistic, and easy to remember.
In baking bread, you simply put the dough in an oven. For personas, however, you need something much more rare: objectivity. A good persona requires you to set aside what you think you know about your customers and to see what the data tells you. This is very, very difficult for most businesses, which is why it makes sense to ask someone else to do it for you. When it comes to paying someone to create a customer persona for you, the greater the objectivity, the more you will pay. Spend less, and you will have a few assumptions mixed in with your objective assessments.
However, assumptions, especially when used in the less-critical and less-controversial parts of the buyer persona, are likely a good trade off for many businesses. Not everyone needs to spend $50,000 to get something truly useful.
The personas that we build for our clients at 97th Floor are a mix of strategic assumption and objective research. We are intentional in our approach choosing where we can assume and where to use data. It might not be the right approach for every business, but it’s appropriate for most businesses most of the time.
There are three major parts to buyer personas:
As you might presume, demographic information tells us the external details about the persona. This describes the age, gender, racial identity, socio-economic details, family status, occupation, and such. We glean it from a number of sources: existing customer profiles, analytics data, competitive analyses, etc. We use whatever we can get our hands on.
When we build our personas we use a balance of assumption and evidence. Our stance is that in this area, the information that we infer is good enough for the purpose and the potential mistakes are low-impact ones. But don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t go wild with assumptions here.
There isn’t much value in knowing that your average age customer is 37 rather than 39 or 40. But there is a significant difference in an average age of 30 instead of 45. Be careful that you have enough evidence for the correct ballpark. But don’t waste resources digging into teeny specifics if they aren’t likely to be impactful.
Remember that a buyer persona is different from a target audience. This is not a broad composite, but a fictionalized specific individual. There is value in having a target audience in mind--in knowing a range that describes the whole of your customers--but the value of a buyer persona is to clearly envision one perfect client.
The demographic information describes the external details of the individual, while the psychographic information describes her internal life. We want to know what she likes and dislikes, what makes her excited or nervous, what she reads and who she follows. This is the information that a savvy marketer will prize.
We obtain this through research into tens of thousands of individuals’ web habits. With this information, we can better predict the specific behaviors and biases of a likely customer, but also general principles that describe a lot of people. There are tools out there that will help you to accomplish this task with some confidence--just don’t forget the critical role of objectivity here. We’ve seen clients with personas that only really describe the client themselves. It’s an awkward conversation, “Since you’re just launching Bob’s Widgets, is it realistic that your persona is already a member of the Bob’s Widgets Fan Club?”
When you get the psychographic profile right, it’s almost magic. For example, our research might uncover that people who like your brand also are fans of the Chicago Bulls or the Los Angeles Dodgers. It is probably too specific to know which particular team that they root for, but it is useful to know that your audience are sports fans (as opposed to, say, fans of quilting or politics or tattoos).
Many clients we onboard don’t have personas (or have only target audience information). Others have spent tens of thousands of dollars from specialists to get personas built. These expensive ones are often very slick, visually stunning, but a little impractical. While there is a lot of good stuff in these large personas, the mental strain to use them—and to tell what is most important—is too much. So we developed a convenient method that uses our inherent human neurological strengths to make it memorable.
We tell a story.
Maybe our stories aren’t on par with Shakespeare, but we are not doing this to scratch a creative itch. We are doing this because as humans we remember stories. We also remember songs, but that seemed like a little too much. So we’ve chosen to always tell a story about our persona.
There is no new information in the story. All the data we use for the story is already covered in the demographic and psychographic sections. But when we craft it into a couple of clear, easy-to-read paragraphs to describe the character succinctly, suddenly she is easier to understand and easier to remember. Because of that memorable image, it is easier to keep clearly in mind, and thus easier to create campaigns just for her.
Critically, when we tell a story we have more of the facts in easily accessible memory. Without personas, marketers will create campaigns crafted for one or two of the most obvious customer characteristics, and they generally fall pretty flat. They’re not much better than target audience descriptions. But a good story to anchor our memory allows us to retain a fuller picture of the individual. In turn, our campaigns therefore have more depth, fullness, and richness.They are, simply, more effective campaigns.
Perhaps an illustration would be useful here. Below is a story from a buyer persona that 97th Floor made for a fitness company with unique offering for choosing your goal weight:
Sharon just had her 45th birthday and it wasn’t the happiest day. She felt like everyone there was staring at her thinking of how much weight she’d gained since her second baby was born ten years ago.
She tried to diet and exercise, but her goal seemed so distant. Plus, was it even realistic for her to lose 50 pounds when she barely had time to pee alone before one of her hungry kids found her? She wanted more direction, maybe from a personal trainer or dietician, about what her goal weight should be. But they were so expensive.
She’d tried doing her own research about her BMI and ideal weight. But those gave her wide ranges or goal weights that seemed impossible.
Do you see how this little clip from Sharon’s life makes her a tangible woman? We feel her discomfort at the party. We understand why she is the perfect customer for this fitness company. We even get excited to find marketing strategies that will help Sharon find our client’s company and feel empowered on her next birthday.
Personas that hang around in a company’s back pocket unused aren’t doing anyone any good. A successful buyer persona is one that gets frequently referenced and utilized. The team has read it, talked about it, and knows it. They know that fictionalized individual as well as they know each other. She feels real to them.
Not only should these personas feel real to your team. You should lean on them during planning and writing content. For instance, as you're sitting down to plan out Q2’s content, turn to your personas. Mention, “Taylor (your persona) has young children. During Q2 those children will start summer break. How might that affect the kind of content she wants to access during that time? How might it affect how much time she has to engage?” Use the persona’s name. There’s power in shared vocabulary. Of course “Taylor” won't mean much to those outside this team, but your marketing team should be using your persona’s names. Use the personas to tap into the daily life of your content consumers, and they will feel a more realistic connection to your company.
All of this work might seem like the buyer persona is creating extra work: compressing data into a single point, and then it has to be expanded again when doing the actual marketing. The magic of the buyer persona is that it enables, and even encourages, the marketer to work at an individual level but to have that function at a broad scope. The compress-decompress that the buyer persona facilitates will hone the edge of the campaign. In practice, if it’s done right, it can feel like a superpower.
We create personas for clients as a service, or we upgrade existing ones, but personas are only the launching pad into the deep pool of consumer-facing work. Here are a few examples of great client work powered by a marketing team that understands its audience using the processes we describe above.
eFileCabinet came to us with a goal of increasing their brand visibility. In a fairly stagnant industry, their cutting-edge technology had a hard time gaining the excitement it deserved. Our team came together to define who eFileCabinet’s customers were. Like most businesses, they required multiple personas, but one particularly useful buyer persona portrayed an accountant who was frustrated with endless paper filing and tedious office chores.
Sure, this persona is an accountant, but he was far from boring.
We looked closely at what human emotions and pain points he faced, as well as ways he might enjoy letting off steam. The answer: taking a hammer to the often-frustrating office equipment he sits in front of every day. Enter: the Rage Cage.
So they could live the Office Space dream, our team crafted an experience for an accounting conference that would give them what they really wanted — the chance to smash old office equipment. Then we connected with these individuals to introduce them to the benefits of eFileCabinet’s problem-solving, headache-reducing software. This became an award-winning campaign that brought eFileCabinet the highest influx of MQLs in a single month and 100+ closed deals. None of this would have been possible without concrete, memorable, human buyer personas.
One 97th Floor client, a data service company called Qubole, was facing a long sales cycle that they were eager to tighten. We knew that buyer personas would undoubtedly help Qubole target the most promising potential customers. So we took a closer look at Qubole’s ideal buyers and got to work.
We created a persona who was a data scientist at a growing tech business that needed to scale quickly. We got to know his pain points with bringing on a data company—including security and IT complications. Knowing this information we created a hyper-focused content strategy that was built with him in mind.
With the help of this persona sitting in the driver’s seat of our newly targeted content strategy, Qubole’s traffic and conversions skyrocketed. In fact, 97th Floor's strategy led to a 600% increase in organic traffic and a 300% increase in qualified organic leads. In addition to chopping their buyer’s cycle from 240 days to only 90 days.
As with most NBA teams, the Utah Jazz found themselves struggling to sell their summer season ticket. They came to us with a desire to increase their summer ticket sales and maybe, just maybe, they’d be able to do something never done before: sell out the entire lower bowl for the summer season. As always, we began with the audience and personas.
Because we are from Utah, we knew what a typical Utah Jazz fan looks like, and so we had a good understanding of the audience to begin with. The final version of our persona consisted partially of what we knew from the standard Jazz fan and was merged with the data we had collected about folks who buy low-cost items (like summer season tickets) via Facebook Ads. Once we had our more specific persona, building the campaigns in Facebook Ads came very naturally.
First, we fanned out our ads’ reach to a wide audience of Jazz fans on Facebook. Then, we conducted tests to see which ads were the most effective at increasing sales (this information even informed our personas to make them better for the next round). We found that segmentation, even to a non-Utah Jazz audience, and sales-focused ad copy brought in a positive ROAS, a great achievement for the low budget of their summer season marketing. Our knowledge of the buyer personas of these summer customers gave the Utah Jazz an increase in ticket sales by over 300% MoM.
As these examples show, personas are not reserved for folks in content marketing roles. Entire teams from SEOs to paid media specialists to well, everyone, should be well versed in your buyer personas because a good persona will have insights that influence every decision from every member of a marketing team.
It’s no secret that conversion rate optimization (CRO), is an essential part of business strategy in this digital age. No matter your business model, your online presence is imperative to your success.
Marketers have known this for decades. But optimizing a site for the customer’s journey can’t just be intuited out of thin air. Every action a potential customer makes on the website is a part of their personal journey, and small changes can make a big difference when looking at the site holistically. The ease of a customer’s journey is essential in turning potential customers into active, happy customers.
CRO is the process of removing barriers to conversion, enticing action, and creating an overall positive page experience for your customers.
It’s easy to think there’s some kind of “magic bullet” when it comes to CRO-- a tried and true formula that produces immediate results for every industry and website. Unfortunately, there’s not. Instead, the true secret to CRO is knowing what to test and how to test it. You need intuition to know what to test, but sometimes the results of those tests will surprise you.
CRO testing is a quantifiable way to discover what is truly working on your site and what is not. It will save you money in the long term, with the potential to increase your revenue in the short term. Plus, you’ll learn things about your customers that you never imagined.
KOIO sells handcrafted Italian leather shoes. Their boots had hit a wall: they had consistent traffic viewing their product pages, however these users rarely added products to their cart. They were unsure what they could do to turn more visitors into customers, so they came to 97th Floor with the goal of capturing more users who were bouncing from their pages.
97th Floor knew KOIO’s situation and recommended a CRO campaign to provide actionable insight as to what site changes would produce the most dramatic results. They are a B2C business whose primary customer is a luxury audience willing to purchase products at a high price point. As a result of the average product price, revenue increases were closely tied to higher conversion rates. This made CRO an incredibly effective strategy in achieving their goals.
Audit: First, 97th Floor analyzed KOIO’s site and noted points of the customer’s journey with the highest potential for improvement. We worked to understand what bumps in the customer journey might cause potential customers to leave the purchase pages prematurely (and why). We did this by actively seeing things through the customer’s eyes. With the customer’s journey in mind, we identified areas where we could improve or modify KOIO’s current value propositions and CTAs.
Another site variation we were especially interested in was understanding the behaviors of their mobile and desktop users. Nearly 70% of users on KOIO’s site are on mobile devices, so we wanted to know: how effective was KOIO’s site for mobile users?
Using the findings from the audit, we made tactical hypotheses about what changes would best improve conversion rates. Then we designed a campaign to test which elements were the most potent forces for conversion.
Based on the specific situation and KOIO’s unique goals, we recommended multivariate testing-- a type of CRO in which several different variations are tested simultaneously and data is collected about each variation’s effectiveness.
Hypothesis: In order to optimize the testing process, we gave each of our hypotheses a score based on which ones we expected to perform the best. We thought about user experience, and the messaging they were exposed to on the product level. Then we scored them as to how likely the change was to increase the likelihood of sales. After our ranking evaluation, we placed each hypothesis on a priority road map to be sure that the majority of our resources focused on testing the highest potential variations.
Tests: After we’d formed our strategy, it was time to start testing. In order to be most efficient with our client’s budget, we set an appropriate timeframe for running tests, and determined to only continue running the tests that showed significant improvements. More traffic means faster results, and because our previous SEO strategy was already bringing in the traffic we needed, the results came quickly. For this test, getting significant results took about two weeks.
In addition, we ran two separate tests: one on the desktop site, and the other on mobile. For both tests, we kept the content nearly identical, but altered the placement of different elements as outlined above-- more on the importance of this strategy later.
As these tests were running, we monitored the results to evaluate trends and pivot as needed. For example, one of the tested variants (making “free shipping and returns” float) quickly showed that the results wouldn’t be helpful, so that variant was stopped.
Once the tests were in place, the results began rolling in.
If you remember, we started with five hypotheses and dropped one (that was clearly showing negative results). The four test variants that continued all resulted in positive lift percentages on the desktop test. The highest of these increases was a jaw-dropping 28.5%. Now, let’s emphasize that having several high performing variants is an unusual occurrence in CRO. Usually one variant pulls ahead as the clear leader. We were delighted to see that in this case, every variant was a positive one. This is a good reason to run multiple tests, so you get a clear picture of what is possible, rather than running the risk of missing something in testing a single hypothesis.
The highest individual increase was a 52% revenue increase for the variant in which we removed the financing option. This particular variant also brought us new information about KOIO’s customers-- their luxury audience did not respond as well to the product when asked if they’d like to choose a financing option. This is a valuable insight into how their customers want to be addressed and treated. However, if we had not run these tests it would have been easy to overlook a small detail like this, without which we would have lost both the 52% increase, and the valuable insight into our customer’s desires.
KOIO also gained valuable insight into their customers’ mobile experience as a result of CRO testing. A common misstep in any sort of multivariate testing is to run a desktop test, and blanket apply the findings to both the desktop and mobile versions of the site. Fortunately, 97th Floor knew better. We tested the mobile and desktop experiences separately, allowing us to see distinctions in desktop and mobile behavior. Our client was then able to take this information and create a plan for a separate mobile-optimized site.
With this information, we organized the product pages to better serve the customers, and the rest is history.
The total result for all of the variants combined was a 29% increase in revenue in 18 days. Those kinds of growth numbers are worth stopping for: CRO is no joke. Because of these higher conversion rates, our client experienced more than a quarter jump in sales and the bounce rate dropped significantly. Most importantly, KOIO now has a clear game plan based on solid data that they will use to maximize their revenue into the future.
KOIO is now bringing in more revenue than ever, because of the simple steps they took with us to optimize their site for their customers.
CRO has the potential to provide businesses with actionable insights that make a real impact — but it must be done right. Testing backs up intuition, and the two make an unstoppable CRO pair.
At 97th Floor we love to talk shop. We also love to talk about pop culture, and you better believe that television tropes are frequent points of discussion. You may have heard of the classic trope known as, A.I. is a crapshoot. It’s the scenario where a supposed perfectly created artificial intelligence rises up, and ultimately leads to humanity's demise — or at the very least ruins someone’s day.
This isn’t a new concept. In fact, it features (in varying degrees) in some of the worlds most well known movies and television franchises: Terminator, The Matrix, Avengers: Age of Ultron, 2001: A Space Odyssey, TRON, Logan’s Run, Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, and the list continues on until you get to the genteel Pixar classic, WALL-E (I am of course referring to the evil co-pilot robot, not the cute one that saves the world).
If pop culture is any indication, it’s pretty clear that we, as a collective whole, have trust issues when it comes to cold, soulless data. But if that’s the case, then why are marketers so keen on putting the numbers in charge?
Now, don’t get me wrong; I love data. But I have to love data. A digital marketer literally cannot function without data. So when I see “data-driven” on a resume or across an agency’s site, it’s almost like they’re saying nothing at all.
It’s like seeing a pizzeria advertising that they use dough on all of their pizzas. I mean, sure, it’s better than the alternative (although dough-less pizza would be a big hit with the keto crowd). It’s probably just not something that needs to be advertised. It’s a pizzeria; even without being told, we’re already pretty sure that dough is part of the equation.Data and modern marketing are inseparable. So stop bragging about it.
Additionally, I believe there’s a growing flaw in the data-driven mindset, namely that data becomes a dictator in the strategy. But handing over the reigns to analytics programs is exactly how LA got cremated inTerminator, and doing the same thing with marketing strategies is only slightly less careless.
If you’ve ever read a terribly unhelpful blog post, you could probably trace it back to some SEO who saw a valuable long-tail keyword, and then threw together some heavily optimized (but ultimately worthless) dumpster fire of content designed to capture it. Or, if you’ve ever been accosted over email relentlessly asking for a purchase with varying price discounts, it’s probably because the data said that users make purchase after 14.2 emails, which led a marketing automation specialist to believe that hitting you up on a daily basis would make you convert faster.
And yes, obviously analytical insights are invaluable. And strategies built exclusively on data can even work sometimes. But the returns will seldom stack up to what you can get with a flesh-and-blood marketer calling the shots. The point is that data doesn’t run marketing strategy for humans. Humans make campaigns for humans, and we need to keep it that way.
In other words, you never put the robot in charge of the nukes, and you don’t let a spreadsheet do your marketing for you.
The same logic applies to every marketing convention that gets codified as "best practice." Once something earns that label, it belongs to everyone — which means it belongs to no one's advantage. Udi Ledergor, former CMO at Gong and B2B marketing strategist, makes the case that the marketers who win aren't following the consensus — they're the ones who acted before it formed. This short video captures why arriving at a best practice on time is usually arriving too late.
But PJ, you’re in digital marketing. Are you saying you ‘don’t use data?’
No. I’m not saying that I don’t use data. Quite the contrary, we need data. We rely on it — always have, and always will. In fact, let me tell you a story:
In the first version of competitive research I ran at 97th Floor, we collected 43 metrics for each result on the first page of Google, plus the page we were trying to rank.
Don’t worry, I’ll do the math for you: That’s 473 different cells being manually populated. And when I say manually, I really do mean manually. We used 10 different tools to get everything we needed. Metrics ranged from word count, to load time, to followed backlinks, to Google+ shares (do you feel old yet?). A single SERP would take someone 1.5 – 3 hours. Let’s just say I got through a lot of podcasts during this method of competitive research.
And while time consuming, this method of data mining was therapeutic, restful, even invigorating. The process of gathering data by hand was lengthy, but every hour in the trenches saved weeks of bad strategy.
A lot has changed since then at 97th Floor, we’ve scaled that research process into our suite of proprietary software. Now of course we have our competitive research tool (more on that to come later), which lifts all the metrics we need through the glorious use of APIs and some custom formulas. But the core truth, that our data helped us do a better job, remains.
So yeah, we like data. We respect data. We use it and abuse it. But data, all by itself, does not move the needle — like at all. It’s the action you take based on the data that makes all the difference.
I’d be lying if I said that we’re not proud of our new set of proprietary tools that have essentially taken our drawn out processes, and condensed them into something simple, effective, and efficient. But the reason we love these tools so much is because of the time they save us on the front end of a campaign. If we can condense the first week’s worth of data gathering into an afternoon of well coordinated data pulls and analysis, we’re that much further ahead. But we’re certainly not done.
Not all robots are bad. Heck, R2D2 certainly picked up more than his share of the slack. And sure, most of the time data does the heavy lifting.
I remember a relatively recent situation where a newly onboarded client approached us with a keyword they had been struggling with for years. They had a well optimized page for it, the page had many links going to it. On paper they should have been doing better for this keyword.
Once upon a time, that page had been in an above-the-fold position for its SERP. Then it had begun to drop. The client added more copy to the page to counter the dropping ranking. But more copy caused it to drop even further, which suggested to the client that they had to add even more copy. This game of cat and mouse went on until they were off the first page entirely. And that’s where they were when 97th Floor was brought in.
After assessing the situation, we threw the page into our proprietary competitive research tool. Once the data was finished crunching, the answer was obvious. They had vastly over-optimized the page!
When looking at the top 10 results on the front page of Google, the SERP was seeing an average word count of 1,983. But the page our client has built had… any guesses?
17,744 words.
Not characters, words. Oh and the page was using the exact-match keyword more than twice the amount of the average on the SERP.
The data called out a problem. It helped save the day. But the data didn’t come up with the solution.
We got to work crafting a strategy involving everything from keyword usage, to semantic analysis, strategic internal links to alleviate cross page cannibalization, and strategically cutting and reworking sections of the page. Essentially, we deoptimized the page. After the above plan was executed with the client, we saw fruit — jumping from page 2, to spot 2 in less than a week.
I love this story because:
1) The tool saved us a bunch of time upfront on research and on the backend by ensuring we weren’t wasting time reoptimizing what was already too optimized.
2) The SERP data lead us deeper down a very productive rabbit hole; cannibalization, which upon more research, yielded some very actionable tactics.
3) Possibly my favorite, we didn’t have to waste any time and energy on backlinks.
The above story and hundreds before it have happened at 97th Floor. While we can’t function without data, we certainly can’t function with numbers alone. That’s why it’s called digital marketing, not digital analyzing.
That’s why I love this industry. We’re a fun breed of humans that crave and cultivate good data, and then create something bold and beautiful — with or without the data’s support.
I cringe a little when I hear people say, “well, this is what the data says we should do.” I’m sorry did I hear you just imply that this spreadsheet told you to increase your bid strategy? Of course not. What you meant to say was, “I believe we should increase our bid strategy.”
Own that strategy, don’t let data own you.
Don’t be handcuffed by data; have the courage to look beyond surface-level data inferences, and use your own intelligent, problem solving, human brain to figure out the rest. Because, when all is said and done, your clients aren’t interested in hiring a spreadsheet (or even R2D2).
One of the not-so-secret secrets to successful marketing is knowing your audience. Arguably, the best way to do this is to use persona based marketing. When we onboard new clients at 97th Floor, we always ask for their existing personas, and they often shrug their shoulders and rifle aimlessly through some papers. “I think we had some made about a year or two ago,” they say. But in this age of smart digital marketing, that just won’t fly. The world needs more personas—and better personas. We at 97th Floor have the expertise, and we’re here to make the internet a better place. So we put this guide together to help you build personas for your business that will bring in consumer insights that will elevate all of your marketing efforts and increase your revenue.
A buyer persona is a fictional depiction of an ideal, individual customer. Creating and applying a buyer persona helps marketers craft campaigns that feel more true and have more impact. A good buyer persona can turbocharge the understanding of your customers, leading to more traffic, higher conversions, and eventually, bigger revenue figures.
This is Tony Zambito in 2001. He invented the concept of buyer personas, according to
himself and the internet. “Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (modeled) representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions.”
Sound familiar? Maybe you're thinking of a time when you fit in a very small chair at a very small desk and were instructed that 5 W's and an H - Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How - belong in every story. Hmm. And we didn't think they taught marketing that young. But the truth is that you need these components for your company's storytelling and you must have them for your consumers' sake.
While we're here, let's consider what a persona is not.
Consider this quote from Scratch: “Consumers aren't as interested in your story until it helps them tell their own. Personas are a powerful and concise way for you to use data to understand your consumers—and help your whole company understand your consumers - so that they are ultimately interested in your brand story”. Sounds rather important, right?
Persona based marketing is the practice of building your entire marketing strategy around detailed, data-driven buyer personas. Instead of creating broad, one-size-fits-all campaigns, you develop messaging, offers, and experiences tailored to the specific needs, motivations, and challenges of your ideal customers. This approach ensures every ad, blog post, email, and social media update speaks directly to the people most likely to engage with your brand. When executed well, persona based marketing increases clicks and conversions, builds trust, fosters loyalty, and keeps your brand top of mind for the audiences that matter most.
In the past few years, our client teams at 97th Floor have launched wildly successful campaigns driven by insights discovered through building personas.
In-depth personas are invaluable to our teams and our clients.
Rachel Bascom, head of content at 97th Floor, shares these benefits from using personas:
And if your personas are doing that, they're ultimately bringing you this:
We're confident that data-driven personas enable every department to work better for clients and the company.
How should you create a buyer persona? The ingredients are simple, and the process is not rocket science. Like baking bread, you already own most ingredients—flour, water, yeast, salt—and the things you don’t already have in your cupboard are easily accessible.
Begin with a little market research. What data do you already have about your customers? What are their current job titles, responsibilities, and interests? If you can, use a tool like SparkToro to find out more about what your customers care about. Ask: Why would they benefit from your brand? What are their pain points, and how does your offer solve them? The more research you can do, the better.
Then add a little speculation. If your persona loves running, you can assume they’ll care about running form or proper running shoes. If they’re a busy mom, you can assume they’re looking for ways to relax and save time. Some assumptions are okay, and even needed, but be sure you don’t get off track.
Once you flesh out your customer with a few assumptions, mix your research and speculation together with a knowledge of the user journey for your product or service. For instance, how do they come in contact with your brand? Will they be eager to buy, or will they need a little persuasion? What appeals to them on your site?
Finally, sprinkle a little creativity on top. This is the fun part: make it a story. Be as specific as you possibly can. What is their name? What do they look like? How does an average day in their life flow? Don’t be shy, write it out. Use your imagination. The end result should be fun, spunky, realistic, and easy to remember.
In baking bread, you simply put the dough in an oven. For personas, however, you need something much more rare: objectivity. A good persona requires you to set aside what you think you know about your customers and to see what the data tells you. This is very, very difficult for most businesses, which is why it makes sense to ask someone else to do it for you. When it comes to paying someone to create a customer persona for you, the greater the objectivity, the more you will pay. Spend less, and you will have a few assumptions mixed in with your objective assessments.
However, assumptions, especially when used in the less-critical and less-controversial parts of the buyer persona, are likely a good trade-off for many businesses. Not everyone needs to spend $50,000 to get something truly useful.
The personas that we build for our clients at 97th Floor are a mix of strategic assumptions and objective research. We are intentional in our approach, choosing where we can assume and where to use data. It might not be the right approach for every business, but it’s appropriate for most businesses most of the time.
Let’s break it down.
There are three major parts to buyer personas
As you might presume, demographic information tells us the external details about the persona. This describes the age, gender, racial identity, socio-economic details, family status, occupation, and such. We glean it from a number of sources: existing customer profiles, analytics data, competitive analyses, etc. We use whatever we can get our hands on.
When we build our personas, we use a balance of assumption and evidence. Our stance is that in this area, the information that we infer is good enough for the purpose, and the potential mistakes are low-impact ones. But don’t get me wrong, you shouldn’t go wild with assumptions here.
There isn’t much value in knowing that your average age customer is 37 rather than 39 or 40. But there is a significant difference in the average age of 30 instead of 45. Be careful that you have enough evidence for the correct ballpark. But don’t waste resources digging into teeny specifics if they aren’t likely to be impactful.
Remember that a buyer persona is different from a target audience. This is not a broad composite, but a fictionalized specific individual. There is value in having a target audience in mind--in knowing a range that describes the whole of your customers--but the value of a buyer persona is to clearly envision one perfect client.
The demographic information describes the external details of the individual, while the psychographic information describes her internal life. We want to know what she likes and dislikes, what makes her excited or nervous, what she reads and who she follows. This is the information that a savvy marketer will prize.
We obtain this through research into tens of thousands of individuals’ web habits. With this information, we can better predict the specific behaviors and biases of a likely customer, but also general principles that describe a lot of people. There are tools out there that will help you to accomplish this task with some confidence--just don’t forget the critical role of objectivity here. We’ve seen clients with personas that only really describe the client themselves. It’s an awkward conversation: “Since you’re just launching Bob’s Widgets, is it realistic that your persona is already a member of the Bob’s Widgets Fan Club?”
When you get the psychographic profile right, it’s almost magic. For example, our research might uncover that people who like your brand are also fans of the Chicago Bulls or the Los Angeles Dodgers. It is probably too specific to know which particular team they root for, but it is useful to know that your audience is sports fans (as opposed to, say, fans of quilting or politics or tattoos).
Many clients we onboard don’t have personas (or have only target audience information). Others have spent tens of thousands of dollars on specialists to get personas built. These expensive ones are often very slick, visually stunning, but a little impractical. While there is a lot of good stuff in these large personas, the mental strain to use them—and to tell what is most important—is too much. So we developed a convenient method that uses our inherent human neurological strengths to make it memorable.
We tell a story.
Maybe our stories aren’t on par with Shakespeare, but we are not doing this to scratch a creative itch. We are doing this because, as humans, we remember stories. We also remember songs, but that seemed like a little too much. So we’ve chosen to always tell a story about our persona.
There is no new information in the story. All the data we use for the story is already covered in the demographic and psychographic sections. But when we craft it into a couple of clear, easy-to-read paragraphs to describe the character succinctly, suddenly she is easier to understand and easier to remember. Because of that memorable image, it is easier to keep clearly in mind, and thus easier to create campaigns just for her.
Critically, when we tell a story, we have more of the facts in easily accessible memory. Without personas, marketers will create campaigns crafted for one or two of the most obvious customer characteristics, and they generally fall pretty flat. They’re not much better than target audience descriptions. But a good story to anchor our memory allows us to retain a fuller picture of the individual. In turn, our campaigns therefore have more depth, fullness, and richness. They are, simply, more effective campaigns.
She tried to diet and exercise, but her goal seemed so distant. Plus, was it even realistic for her to lose 50 pounds when she barely had time to pee alone before one of her hungry kids found her? She wanted more direction, maybe from a personal trainer or dietician, about what her goal weight should be. But they were so expensive.
She’d tried doing her own research about her BMI and ideal weight. But those gave her wide ranges or goal weights that seemed impossible.
Do you see how this little clip from Sharon’s life makes her a tangible woman? We feel her discomfort at the party. We understand why she is the perfect customer for this fitness company. We even get excited to find marketing strategies that will help Sharon find our client’s company and feel empowered on her next birthday.
Personas that hang around in a company’s back pocket unused aren’t doing anyone any good. A successful buyer persona is one that gets frequently referenced and utilized. The team has read it, talked about it, and knows it. They know that fictionalized individual as well as they know each other. She feels real to them.
Not only should these personas feel real to your team. You should lean on them during planning and writing content. This is the essence of persona based marketing. For instance, as you're sitting down to plan out Q2’s content, turn to your personas. Mention, “Taylor (your persona) has young children. During Q2 those children will start summer break. How might that affect the kind of content she wants to access during that time? How might it affect how much time she has to engage?” Use the persona’s name. There’s power in shared vocabulary. Of course “Taylor” won't mean much to those outside this team, but your marketing team should be using your persona’s names. Use the personas to tap into the daily life of your content consumers, and they will feel a more realistic connection to your company.
All of this work might seem like the buyer persona is creating extra work: compressing data into a single point, and then it has to be expanded again when doing the actual marketing. The magic of the buyer persona is that it enables, and even encourages, the marketer to work at an individual level but to have that function at a broad scope. The compress-decompress that the buyer persona facilitates will hone the edge of the campaign. In practice, if it’s done right, it can feel like a superpower.
We create personas for clients as a service, or we upgrade existing ones, but personas are only the launching pad into the deep pool of consumer-facing work. Here are a few examples of great client work powered by a marketing team that understands its audience using the processes we describe above.
Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales built the world's biggest knowledge base by knowing exactly who he was building it for. He shares the one insight that turns audience research into a real negotiating edge.
eFileCabinet came to us with a goal of increasing its brand visibility. In a fairly stagnant industry, their cutting-edge technology had a hard time gaining the excitement it deserved. Our team came together to define who eFileCabinet’s customers were. Like most businesses, they required multiple personas, but one particularly useful buyer persona portrayed an accountant who was frustrated with endless paper filing and tedious office chores.
Sure, this persona is an accountant, but he was far from boring.
We looked closely at what human emotions and pain points he faced, as well as ways he might enjoy letting off steam. The answer: taking a hammer to the often-frustrating office equipment he sits in front of every day. Enter: the Rage Cage.
So they could live the Office Space dream, our team crafted an experience for an accounting conference that would give them what they really wanted—the chance to smash old office equipment. Then we connected with these individuals to introduce them to the benefits of eFileCabinet’s problem-solving, headache-reducing software. This became an award-winning campaign that brought eFileCabinet the highest influx of MQLs in a single month and 100+ closed deals. None of this would have been possible without concrete, memorable, human buyer personas.
One 97th Floor client, a data service company called Qubole, was facing a long sales cycle that they were eager to tighten. We knew that buyer personas would undoubtedly help Qubole target the most promising potential customers. So we took a closer look at Qubole’s ideal buyers and got to work.
We created a persona who was a data scientist at a growing tech business that needed to scale quickly. We got to know his pain points with bringing on a data company, including security and IT complications. Knowing this information, we created a hyper-focused content strategy that was built with him in mind.
With the help of this persona sitting in the driver’s seat of our newly targeted content strategy, Qubole’s traffic and conversions skyrocketed. In fact, 97th Floor's strategy led to a 600% increase in organic traffic and a 300% increase in qualified organic leads. In addition to chopping their buyer’s cycle from 240 days to only 90 days.
As with most NBA teams, the Utah Jazz found themselves struggling to sell their summer season ticket. They came to us with a desire to increase their summer ticket sales and maybe, just maybe, they’d be able to do something never done before: sell out the entire lower bowl for the summer season. As always, we began with the audience and personas.
Because we are from Utah, we knew what a typical Utah Jazz fan looks like, and so we had a good understanding of the audience to begin with. The final version of our persona consisted partially of what we knew from the standard Jazz fan and was merged with the data we had collected about folks who buy low-cost items (like summer season tickets) via Facebook Ads. Once we had our more specific persona, building the campaigns in Facebook Ads came very naturally.
First, we fanned out our ads’ reach to a wide audience of Jazz fans on Facebook. Then, we conducted tests to see which ads were the most effective at increasing sales (this information even informed our personas to make them better for the next round). We found that segmentation, even to a non-Utah Jazz audience, and sales-focused ad copy brought in a positive ROAS, a great achievement for the low budget of their summer season marketing. Our knowledge of the buyer personas of these summer customers gave the Utah Jazz an increase in ticket sales by over 300% MoM.
Our beauty and skincare client uses playful design, sustainable ingredients, and
delicious flavors to deliver products that feel like a treat for their consumers. But the company wasn’t leveraging its audience to maximize conversions. They needed real customer personas, complete with a goal and journey for each.
Using analytics, we built—you guessed it—5 consumer personas.
Each persona included personality traits, concerns, risks, influences, an analysis of the buyer’s current status with the company, and solutions for improvement.
This in-depth analysis led to a full-funnel strategy, including launching on new platforms.
Our research helped us craft persona-focused messaging. Our discovery that certain personas were interested in astrology inspired our design team to create these stunning ads for a zodiac sign campaign, targeting shoppers based
on their birthday.
And the results? Highest-ever engagement, volume of purchases, and ROAS of all client ads.
Using only
4.1%
of total ad budget
Accounted for
42.5%
client's total purchases
While achieving
Historic ROAS
of all purchases
As these examples show, personas are not reserved for folks in content marketing roles. Entire teams from SEOs to paid media specialists to, well, everyone, should be well-versed in your buyer personas because a good persona will have insights that influence every decision from every member of a marketing team.
We've all stumbled through a cluttered Walmart. The seasonal decor, random furniture, and crates full of $5 movies and cereal boxes stall your progress to the single thing you came here for. Pretty annoying, huh?
In 2009 Walmart addressed the mess with Project Impact. The project's purpose was to improve customer experience by reducing clutter and improving the aesthetics to compete with Target. This idea came from a survey that asked customers, "Would you like Walmart to be less cluttered?" The answer was an overwhelming, Yes. But who wouldn't say yes?
Walmart halted the project when the first 600 locations that they tidied saw year-over-year sales plummet. Walmart lost an estimated $1.85 billion in sales. It appeared that all the extra clutter led to people buying more.
Fueled by turkey and pumpkin pie and armed with a Christmas wishlist, nearly 155 million Americans make Black Friday weekend the biggest shopping event of the year. Seattle-based outdoor retailer REI would rather not participate.
Instead of wow-ing shoppers with massive markdowns, REI closes its stores, activity centers, distribution centers, call centers, and headquarters for its annual #OptOutside campaign.
In 2015, REI saw 10 times more traffic than any other retailer on social media as thousands posted with the hashtag.
In 2021, REI expanded the campaign to challenge its members and community to get outside and build an inclusive outdoor space.
And yearly earnings? Up and up.
Alright, alright. So we can't really say for certain that Walmart wasn't using personas and that REI was. But what we can say for certain is that REI understood its mission and its consumers' habits and lifestyle far better than Walmart did.
Persona based marketing is an ongoing process that shapes every part of your overall strategy. The more you refine your personas with real data and insights, the more precise your targeting, messaging, and campaigns will become. If you’re ready to turn buyer personas into a powerful growth tool, let’s talk about how 97th Floor can help you build and use them to drive measurable results for your brand.
See how an audience-first approach translates to bottom-line results.
it can be hard to be aware of the human side of the business while also making sure we’re focused on the business side. when people are the happiest and feeling fulfilled and accomplished in their role, it benefits the whole company.
Welcome to the the 97th Floor Mastermind Interview Series where each week we sit down with one of the makers, thought leaders, and visionaries behind the biggest and/or up-and-coming brands around. We talk about everything from business and marketplace insights to personal journeys and successes, to failures and legacy.
In this episode we’re talking to Miranda Barnard, Vice President of Marketing at Vivint Solar, about the marketing value of understanding your audience, creating sharable messaging, recognizing and employing trends, and more. Using personal experiences and insights, Miranda dials in on what it means to provide a great customer experience, how that focus is changing the world of business, and how leadership in business is adapting.
0:10 About Miranda
2:37 Storytelling
4:28 Communicating with authenticity
7:09 Career changes
8:36 About Vivint Solar
14:15 Onboarding
18:11 Leadership style
19:33 Letting people go
23:09 Creating vs recycling content
25:30 What keeps you up at night
26:30 Handling conflict
29:02 Miranda’s legacy
Learn more about Vivint Solar
Connect with 97th Floor on YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel and get notifications - we’ll drop a new episode every week.
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At first glance, comparing value is pretty easy. For example, if one restaurant is offering a $13.00 burger and another has one for $7.00, then it doesn’t take an economist to see which is the better option.
But there's usually more to it than just price. Maybe the $13.00 burger comes with a drink and your choice of sides. Maybe it’s made from higher quality beef. Maybe it’s assembled by a skilled chef, who puts their own unique artisan touch into every bite… and maybe the $7.00 burger fell on the floor.
The point here is that there’s more to value than just the initial price tag.
When figuring out a marketing strategy, a business usually has two options: building their own in-house marketing department, or hiring an agency. And often the deciding factor is cost — which option will save the company more money right now? But like burgers, marketing options are made up of a lot of factors, and when it comes to value, initial cost is only the tip of the bun.
So, before you put in your order, let’s do a quick breakdown/comparison of the actual costs, and shine a heat lamp on the the other ingredients that an effective marketing agency brings to the table.
Let’s be clear on one point before we dive into things: There are some advantages to keeping your marketing in-house. Your team probably won’t have to deal with as much of a learning curve regarding your products, services, and brand, and they’ll be able to focus all of their energies on marketing for a single client (i.e. you). What we’re trying to say is that the comparison to the less-than-appetizing $7.00 burger isn’t totally accurate.
However, at the same time, cost isn’t quite as clear cut either. Sure, the hourly rates associated with marketing are generally lower when you keep everything in the family, but hourly rates don’t tell the whole story.
For every employee on your marketing team, you’ve got an entire host of associated costs. Salary and benefits are two obvious ones, but what about training expenses? What about expensive tools and analytics programs? What about the hiring costs, particularly when you’re trying to assemble a talented team from scratch? Don’t forget that “marketing” is an umbrella term that includes specializations in SEO, content and copywriting, analytics, design, link development, strategy, paid search and paid social ads; just finding the right people is going to cost you time and money, and keeping them up to date on best practices is going to cost you even more of both.
And once you’ve got your team assembled, there’s always the threat of turnover. Hey, just because you brought them on and trained them up, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they won’t leave and take their new skill sets with them. That means the possibility of recurring costs, and no clear idea of how much you’ll be needing to invest until the money is already leaving your pockets.
So maybe an in-house marketing department isn’t a floor burger, but it is a burger that costs an undefined heck of a lot to make, may end up costing you an undefined heck of a lot more as you go, and that still might not satisfy your marketing hunger.
So, how does that compare to the cost of hiring an agency?
Big companies looking for aggressive growth are usually allocating $25 – $40k/mo in digital marketing spend with agencies, while small and medium sized businesses are investing between $5 – $15k/mo into digital marketing. That probably sounds like a lot, but what’s worth recognizing is that it’s all-inclusive.
With the right marketing agency, everything is so much more concrete, and that goes double for cost. The hourly rates are probably higher than what you’d be spending with an in-house marketing department, but the hidden costs are non existent. It’s a burger with everything on it, and you’re not going to get billed extra for your pickles somewhere down the line. No to mention the sides, not just french fries—we have the premium sides, all-inclusive.
You don’t have to worry about hiring specialists or assembling a team, because the agency takes care of all of that on their end. The same goes for training and tools. All you have to do is pick from a menu of services, and you’ll always know exactly how much those services are going to be impacting your budget. And if contract-renewal time rolls around and you want to switch things up, scaling to meet your changing needs is just as easy. With agency marketing, you only pay for what you want.
To top it all off, let’s not forget the real value that comes from experienced digital marketing. As the co-founder of SEOmoz, co-founder of Sparktoro, and all-around marketing and SEO thought leader, Rand Fishkin enjoys a uniquely informed perspective on marketing agency services, and this is what he has to say:
I think a lot of web marketing agencies are undervaluing their work, or perhaps competition is getting more cutthroat. Back when SEOmoz was an agency (2005-2009), we were generally charging in that $10-$25K/month bucket, and were by no means the most expensive group on the market.
The best agencies enjoy a time-tested, intimate understanding of the marketing universe — what’s come before, what’s happening right now, and what’s around the corner — so that they can tailor a marketing strategy to fit your business and your industry. And, with multiple clients, agencies also have nearly limitless opportunities to test and evaluate new ideas, advancing their capabilities with every new contract. In short, you end up getting back more than you give out.
Clear-cut costs, proven expertise, and ever-expanding skill sets — now that's a burger you can sink your teeth into.
Sometimes the less expensive option isn’t really the less expensive option. So, when you’re looking over the marketing menu and trying to decide which option is the best fit for your business (and your budget), consider all the costs. After all, you probably wouldn’t want to buy a burger without knowing exactly how much it’s going to set you back, and with a qualified marketing agency like 97th Floor, you’ll always be getting the best brand exposure for your buck.
Let us feed your business the results it craves; check out 97th Floor today, and see what we can cook up for you.
one of the best things we've done at chatbooks is to create a clear set of values; we promote, reward and cut based on these values.
Welcome to the the 97th Floor Mastermind Interview Series where each week we sit down with one of the makers, thought leaders and visionaries behind the biggest and/or up-and-coming brands around. We talk about everything from business and marketplace insights to personal journeys, successes, failures and legacy.
In this episode we’re talking to Chatbooks Chief Marketing Officer, Rachel Hofstetter. Rachel joined Chatbooks in November 2015 and played a pivotal role in creating the video The Real Mom, which has since amassed more than 100 million views. Rachel did this while also overseeing the overall brand that is turning instagram photos into instant coffee table artwork. Prior to Chatbooks, Rachel worked at “O” the Oprah Magazine, Reader’s Digest, wrote a best-selling book Cooking Up a Business and founded a company called guesterly. Her insights in this interview on everything from just getting started on a project or life goal, to failing, to defining your teams’ north star are spectacularly clear and spot on. Let’s jump in!
0:35 An editor, best-selling author and entrepreneur—Rachel Hofstetter's start and journey to Chatbooks.
3:37 Validating an idea, starting a company and getting noticed by Glamour, Real Simple and Procter & Gamble.
6:39 Storytelling and entrepreneurship.
7:14 Chatbooks launch and the story behind the simple idea and brand.
10:58 The process (and myth) behind creating a viral video; collaborating with the Harmon Brothers.
14:58 Creating a clear vision and three objectives of a CMO.
17:27 How to grow an all-star team and defining the 5-points of the Chatbooks north star.
22:55 The remedy to fear of failure.
29:00 Rachel's guiding principle to always improving and growing.
31:37 The art of essentialism and getting the right things done.
33:27 Saying "no" without saying no.
what I give doesn't have to necessarily be what you asked for and it can still be beneficial to you.
36:24 Legacy; what Rachel wants to be remembered for.
39:04 Advice to those figuring out what they want to have, be, do next.
Learn more about Chatbooks | guesterly
Chatbooks "The Real Mom" video
Rachel's book Cooking Up a Business: Lessons from Food Lovers Who Turned Their Passion into a Career -- and How You Can, Too
Connect with 97th Floor on YouTube | Facebook | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn
What’d you think of the episode? The conversation continues in the comments below. Be sure to leave your insights.
If you liked this episode, subscribe to our YouTube channel and get notifications - we’ll drop a new episode every week.
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You’ve seen it happen: a brand posts a clever hashtag or starts a striking thread, and suddenly it’s everywhere. But is trending on Twitter just a matter of luck? How do you create a campaign that actually sparks conversation and drives sales?
Twitter campaigns (or X campaigns, these days) are a way to bring intentionality to your social media growth. Tweets feel like a simple click when you post on Twitter, but there are all kinds of coordinated efforts behind the scenes that capture your audience and build a community.
Don’t let your efforts peter out as your brand gets lost in the scroll; let’s break down a realistic strategy for your tweets.
Twitter campaigns are a coordinated marketing effort to build awareness, conversations, or conversions. Instead of relying on a single tweet to catch fire, campaigns bring strategy and structure to how your brand shows up on the platform.
What makes them powerful is the way they combine creativity with direction. A strong campaign ties together:
Put those pieces together, and you have a campaign that can grab attention and keep it, strengthening brand recall and putting your business on the digital map.
Most Twitter campaigns fall into two buckets:
Both have value. When brands blend both approaches, that’s when campaigns really shine — organic posts build authenticity, and ads make sure the right people actually see them.
Campaigns on Twitter can serve very different purposes: some build awareness, others gather support, and some drive direct sales.
A hashtag can turn into a rallying point when it’s easy to remember and share. Simple, memorable, personal. Take Coca-Cola and its #ShareACoke campaign. Throwing names on bottles gave people a reason to personalize their posts and be playful, which made the hashtag succeed beyond the standard ad.
If you want your audience to care about what you post, you have to post about what they care about. It sounds obvious, but it’s an easily missed opportunity for people to really get your brand. And, purpose-driven campaigns help build momentum by connecting to shared values and real-world issues, like with the #MeToo movement. A single phrase unified millions of voices, which just goes to show how powerful a campaign can be when it sincerely resonates.
Want more engagement? Give your consumers something to do — or even better, something to gain. Incentivize them to vote during polls or share their experiences with your product. Audi’s #WantAnR8 is a great example of this. Fans who tweeted the hashtag were entered for a chance to test drive the car. This gamified campaign created so much online excitement, about the event, yes, but also about the memorable Audi brand.
You can create some urgency with a time-based campaign or get real-time engagement with a live event. Take Nike’s #Breaking2. They built anticipation by documenting every step of its marathon barrier attempt, which kept viewers engaged from start to finish — literally.
Instead of leaving your tweets up to chance, get really intentional. Here’s how to design a compelling and effective campaign for lucrative results.
Every campaign starts with a purpose. Do you want to build awareness, generate leads, or drive conversions? Making sure your end goal is crystal clear is the easiest way to choose the right campaign type and metrics to track.
The best ads or tweets will fall flat if they don’t reach the right people. Twitter’s built-in Interest Categories can help you zero in on who to reach and discuss what that audience actually cares about.
Categories
Twitter recommends that you do not have more than two interest categories per campaign or more than 10 sub-interests in one campaign. Interests are broken down into interest categories and sub-interests — some interest categories have up to 25 sub-interests.
When you select an interest category and run a campaign with many sub-interests, be sure to check it frequently and refine your sub-interest targeting to include only the best performers. It’s also recommended to combine related categories (e.g., “Golf” + “Men’s apparel”) so your campaign feels relevant and cohesive.
Once you know your audience and goals, the next step is matching them to the right campaign format. The type of campaign you choose should support your objectives and play to the way your audience engages on Twitter.
Choosing well keeps your strategy focused and avoids wasting budget or effort on campaigns that don’t fit the outcome you’re aiming for.
Okay, so you’ve launched the campaign…now what? Track results and make adjustments. Some of the best ways to do that are to:
The most effective campaigns share a few common traits. Here’s what’s working:
A hashtag should be short, clear, and easy to use. The fewer people who have to think about it, the more likely they are to join in. Always’ #LikeAGirl campaign flipped a tired (and stereotypical) phrase into a message of empowerment. It was surprising, but it was also really concise and easily recognizable, which is what made it spread so quickly.
The more visual, the better! People are scrolling through thousands of bits of content, but an iconic visual can make campaigns recognizable, even when messages are shared or remixed. Google Maps is a good example of a clean, consistent brand that is identifiable in a crowded feed.
Emotion also makes a campaign memorable and encourages sharing. Storytelling helps audiences connect with the message on a personal level. Look at Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful campaign, where Dove confronted negative comments about women and reframed the narrative around positivity and self-love. The universal and inclusive message is easy to relate to and easy to share.
When people create content for your campaign, they’re, yes, amplifying your voice, but they are also lending authenticity you just can’t recreate on your own. Calvin Klein’s #MyCalvins did this well when fans were invited to post photos of themselves in CK products. Suddenly, their audience was their marketers and filled feeds with user-generated content tied directly to the Calvin Klein brand.
Nothing is quite as powerful and attention-grabbing as humor. A lighthearted or funny bit cuts through the noise and makes your brand unforgettable. Charmin’s #TweetFromTheSeat leaned into the unconventional elements of their brand and made it something funny and real.
Here are the big metrics you can’t overlook if you want to put your data to work for future success:
For example, Nike’s #Breaking2 livestream generated millions of impressions, but the real value came from audience engagement — thousands of tweets and shares that extended the campaign far beyond the initial event.
The shift from Twitter to X brought a new name and new features, but the basics of successful campaigns haven’t changed. Brands still need clear goals, compelling content, and strong targeting.
What has changed are the tools:
In short, social media campaigns on X run on the same principles as before, but with new opportunities to experiment and engage.
Twitter campaigns still matter, and with the platform evolving into X, brands have more ways than ever to connect with their audience. But running campaigns that actually drive awareness and conversions is a big and ongoing task that takes testing and expertise to get right.
At 97th Floor, we’ve managed Twitter ads campaigns and organic strategies for brands across industries. We know how to target the right audiences, craft content that resonates, and track the KPIs that prove impact. More importantly (and what sets us apart), we help brands align campaigns with bigger marketing goals so that social efforts pay off across the board.
If you’re ready to go viral on purpose, work with a team that knows how to turn Twitter campaigns into measurable business results. Let’s talk.
Every interaction a user has with your company tells a story. And that story starts long before someone clicks a button or fills out a form. It begins with how easily they understand what you offer, how confident they feel moving through your experience, and how quickly they can get what they came for.
In other words, it starts the moment they begin to experience your brand.
A UX design strategy defines how user experience decisions are planned, prioritized, and connected to business outcomes. It ensures design choices are intentional, informed by research, and tied to real goals like growth, engagement, and revenue. Without strategy, design becomes reactive. With strategy, design becomes a tool for progress.
Psychology plays a central role here. Users bring expectations, habits, and emotions into every interaction. A strong UX design strategy accounts for how people think and how they decide to act as they move through an experience. When psychology and strategy work together, user experiences feel trustworthy and effective.
Here, I’m going to break down what UX design strategy is, why it matters, and how it impacts both users and businesses. I’ll cover the benefits of a strategic approach, the core components that make it work, and the psychological principles behind effective experiences (and how intentional UX design supports conversion, retention, and long-term growth). And, because this is a company blog and we’re proud of the work we do, I’ll also discuss how 97th Floor approaches UX strategy as a collaborative, research-driven process.
UX design strategy is the plan that guides how user experience decisions are made to support business goals and user needs. It connects research, design, and execution into a cohesive direction. While UX design focuses on individual interfaces and interactions, UX strategy defines the why, when, and priority behind those design choices.
At its core, a UX design strategy brings together research and usability principles, supported by psychological insight and organizational alignment. It creates a shared understanding of users and clarifies how the experience should support both them and the business.
A UX design strategy gives teams a clear framework for making decisions that serve both users and the business. Instead of relying on opinions or assumptions, strategy creates direction and consistency across the entire experience.
This matters because it:
A UX design strategy is made up of several connected parts that guide how experiences are planned, built, and improved. Each of these components plays a specific role in shaping how users move through an experience and how well that experience supports business goals.
Research sets the direction for every UX decision that follows. By studying user behavior and gathering stakeholder input, teams gain insight into needs, expectations, and obstacles. This groundwork helps reduce assumptions and ensures design decisions are based on real evidence rather than internal opinions.
Usability focuses on how easily users can navigate and complete tasks. Clear pathways and familiar patterns help users move through an experience without confusion. When usability is prioritized, frustration is reduced and progress feels natural.
Information architecture determines how content is structured and labeled. A thoughtful structure helps users understand where they are and where to go next. When information is organized in a way that feels intuitive, users can find what they need with less effort.
Interaction design defines how users engage with elements on a screen. Buttons, transitions, and feedback signals all influence how responsive an experience feels. Well-planned interactions guide attention and reinforce a sense of control.
Accessibility ensures experiences can be used by people with different abilities and needs. Designing with accessibility in mind improves usability for everyone and helps brands reach a wider audience. It also signals care and responsibility in how experiences are built.
UX copy supports users through clear and purposeful language. Labels, prompts, and instructions help users understand what actions are available and what will happen next. Good UX copy removes uncertainty and keeps experiences moving forward.
Testing and iteration allow teams to refine experiences over time. By observing how users interact with designs, teams can identify issues and make informed improvements. This ongoing process helps experiences stay effective as needs evolve.
Cross-functional alignment keeps UX efforts connected to broader business initiatives. When design, development, and marketing teams share the same goals, execution becomes more efficient. Alignment helps ensure the experience feels cohesive from start to finish.
We make daily decisions on what brands we choose to engage with, what brands have earned our trust, and what brands compel us to spend money. How do we make those decisions?
Psychology studies have shown that our feelings and instincts cause us to behave. It is said that emotions drive 80% of the choice we make. So the first visual impression a customer receives from your brand is crucial to a positive customer experience, or a customer experience at all.
Good design is more than just good looks, it’s the catalyst to trust and loyalty towards any brand or company.
Trust is often the first hurdle a brand needs to clear, and design is usually the deciding factor.
That’s because design is emotional. It evokes moods, attitudes, and personality. Together, these emotions create “gut feelings” and stir thoughts in our mind. And before even being exposed to actual content, visual queues have already shown us how to feel towards a brand.
So when we’re browsing the web and come across a ‘spammy’ looking website, the visual queues are telling us it’s untrustworthy. When junk emails pop up, poor design makes us question the legitimacy of the content. When we find a good deal on the web, but the checkout page to fill out credit card information looks sketchy, we back out. As a result, we don’t engage with the brand, we don’t subscribe to the service, and we don’t buy anything at all. And it all comes from gut feelings created by bad design.
And when trust breaks down at the visual level? Users rarely stick around long enough to reconsider.
Belief is what bridges the gap between curiosity and commitment.
There’s a reason for the old adage don’t judge a book by it’s cover. It’s because we do! As consumers, we expect the quality of products/services to match their appearance. We don’t have time to be convinced that a certain brand/product/service is good, we should already be able to see that it is (or isn’t). A brand with good design is more convincing than a brand with bad design because we assume appearance reflects quality.
Have you ever found yourself wanting to purchase the organic or brand name cereal rather than the generic brand? We expect good packaging design to be the shell of a good product. Have you ever spent more money on a product just because it looks better than the cheaper version? By sole appearances, we assume more credibility with one brand than another, and we take one brand more seriously than another.
When design communicates quality clearly, customers are more willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Brands with an up-to-date design make us feel like their product/service is likewise current and relevant..
Some brands stand out as cutting edge in their industry simply because they look the part. We’d be less likely to purchase a product from a website designed in the 90s, because we associate the outdated web design to the product/service. It’s as if we think, how can a product/service with a website from the 90s, serve the needs I have in 2026? There’s got to be another brand who is more current and fresh. With no progression in any aspect of design, it’s easy to assume there hasn’t been progression with the product/service either. A brand’s entire look and feel should show that it is leading the industry. Brands who look the part, convince their audience that they actually are.
Think of it like this: when design reflects forward momentum, audiences are more inclined to believe the brand can meet modern needs.
Design isn’t just how your brand looks; it’s how it feels. Feelings and instincts from good design cause positive behaviors. And the same goes for bad design causing negative behaviors.
Simply put, design dictates the user experience. So, take a second look at your brand. Does the design reflect the quality of your service/product? Is the design of your logo, website, flyer or whatever visual medium you’re using to communicate with your audience look like you’re a superior, dependable brand? Or do your visual mediums make viewers hesitate?
Visual design focuses on how an experience looks. UX design strategy focuses on how that experience works, why decisions are made, and how success is measured.
Psychology informs UX by explaining how people perceive information, form opinions, and make decisions. UX strategy uses that understanding to guide structure, flow, and priorities across the experience. Visual design then supports those decisions by expressing them clearly.
In terms of scope, UX design strategy is the broader of the two. It considers research, usability, business goals, and cross-functional needs. It is also measurable, with success defined through outcomes like engagement, conversion, and retention (rather than preference alone).
Building a UX design strategy requires intention, structure, and a willingness to learn from users. While every organization is different, most strategies follow a similar progression.
UX design strategy becomes clearer when viewed in context. Consider the following hypothetical scenarios:
These are, of course, only a few examples. The reality is when it comes to UX strategy, design must be adaptable to your product, your audience, and the specific situations where the two come into contact. A firm understanding of customer psychology, backed by reliable research, makes this possible.
UX design strategy matters because it shapes how users experience your brand and how confidently they move through it. When strategy is grounded in psychology and supported by research, design decisions become more justifiable and easier to scale. Teams gain clearer alignment, usability improves across touchpoints, and development effort is spent solving the right problems.
If you’re ready to build or refine your UX design strategy, 97th Floor partners with teams to create research-backed experiences that support both users and business goals.
