Everyone knows that the more targeted your message, the better your website will convert. But many of the times, do you know who your audience are?
We have had clients who approached us asking to build websites around upper level executives because they are the ones ratifying the business decisions and signing off on the proposals. However, are they truly your audience?
From previous research and our most recent round of user testing, we have found a couple of key points regarding this persona:
1) They don’t have time to visit websites. On average, they are on the internet about 4 – 7 hours a week and most of the time, it’s for personal email.
2) Since their time is money, the don’t have time to “waste” looking around for vendor information on websites. They let their employees do that research and build the business case for implementing new solutions within the company. This means you are not building the websites for the VP’s and CEO’s, you are building it for their middle managers or specialists who will be doing the research. However, these users still need to be able to find the finanacials and calculators to be able to build a solid business case for the product / service itself.
3) They like graphs and pictures. Graphs summarize large amounts of quantitative data into a single viewing plane, making the information easier to digest and quicker to understand.
4) They are all about ROI but that’s not the only thing they look at. Of course they want the numbers and the financials behind a product or service. But they not only look at “hard costs” but also “soft costs.” Soft costs are elements that are more qualitative but are just as important as the hard costs. These include things like how quickly can their employees learn the new product, how much support is there for the product to decrease training time, what is the usability of the product, have the employees had previous experience with it that would diminish the time to start?
5) More and more executive management personnel are using iPads. If we want to get to them, designing for this technology should be a part of your online marketing strategy.
What does this mean for us? How do we market to the CEO’s / VP’s?
In the next blog article, we will discuss the B2B vendor selection process and how to market to the Executive persona.
