Target the right audience

Buyers personas vs JTBD

When developing content for your potential customers, you should know who you are talking to, what they want and why. Buyer personas are fictional people you can direct your message to, but people have multiple needs during the day, week, month or year. That is why I suggest using the JTBD (Job To Be Done) approach.

The jobs-to-be-done framework (JTBD) is a way to look at customer motivations in business settings, and identify the reason they buy because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. Identifying the job they want to solve, you can market something tailored to what a customer wants.

Let’s put this in real life: your product is an e-commerce cart abandonment solution.

Your buyer persona is Jennifer, a 32 years old e-commerce manager at a Fortune 500 company. Monday: her dog is sick. Tuesday: her parents plan a visit for the next few weeks, she has to find a hotel for them. Wednesday: she’s reporting the number of coupons sold this month. Thursday: she identified a higher than the average number of abandoned carts. Friday: training day for the new members of the team. Saturday: early walk up to the mountains. Sunday: relax and book day.

Jennifer can potentially be interested in your solution for a limited period, and this is the moment when she can look and find your content and product.

Identify your audience

Your SEO process should start with a simple question: who are your potential customers? Answering this query can help you to identify why they want your product, what you should publish, how to engage and make them turn into paying customers.

There are multiple ways to identify who your audience is:

  • Customer interaction: ask your sales and customer support teams about your current customers and identify their most common needs
  • Interview your customers: talk to the people that already use your product
  • Internal data: use different sources such as emails, web chat, reviews, complaints, compliments, most popular features, analytics data, paid ads, etc
  • Competitors: analyse competitors’ activities and properties such as websites, paid ads, newsletter, free trial, onboarding sequence, etc

If you are starting, you can aggregate external sources of data:

  • Competitors’ websites: top pages by traffic, keywords they rank for
  • Industry blogs: most trafficked pages, recurring themes, etc
  • Review: analyse your competitors’ best, average and worst reviews
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