Website Rebuild S01E02: Crafting Perfect Digital Personas that Match the Business.

Discover how I strategically created and implemented digital personas for Ocelot agency, ensuring that all assets and resources are aligned in the right direction right from the start. By meticulously crafting these personas, I have effectively optimized the agency's marketing efforts, enabling targeted and personalized messaging that resonates with the intended audience. The result? Enhanced engagement, increased conversions, and a significant boost in overall brand success.

Understanding the Buyer Persona is crucial in today’s competitive marketplace. Digital Personas (Buyer Personas) acts as a comprehensive guide to your customer’s attitudes, behaviors, and needs, shaping and influencing your digital marketing and strategy.

Whether it’s content creation, content strategy, copywriting, designing sales funnels, videos, email marketing, strategizing paid traffic, or creating appealing lead magnets, well-structured Digital Personas are instrumental in guiding these processes.

In the context of Ocelot, a web agency that excels in creating energy-efficient WordPress websites optimization services, we will construct multiple digital personas.

These personas will provide key insights into our target audience, enabling us to tailor our services and communication strategies effectively to meet the unique needs of our customers.

By the Ocelot agency, we can naturally deduce several personas that apply to almost all internet service-oriented businesses:

Solopreneurs who are on a very limited budget and are willing to do things themselves, but need an expert to guide them.
Medium-sized businesses, who want a website that aligns with their beliefs but may not have the means for a fully customized site.
Bigger companies, with larger financial resources, are able to request the construction of a fully customized website.

In this article, we will delve into each of these digital personas and see how we can align our overall website strategy.

Of course, these digital personas will need to be validated by reality. Depending on the clients that come to the agency, we will have to readjust the personas to align with reality in order to gradually reach our ideal range of customers.

If you’re starting out and don’t have any real data to rely on, start with assumptions that seem logical to you. Based on feedback from your customers (or even your leads), you’ll readjust your personas to make them more credible.

In the case of Ocelot, for now, most of the clients interested are small businesses, with few large enterprises. We will start with these clients to provide them with tailored solutions. But of course, I will adapt them according to our special version of Ocelot.

Solopreneurs

Let’s start with the easiest one. It’s simply the easiest because it’s the type of client that Ocelot is currently attracting. So, I have data to rely on, which greatly simplifies the process.

However, the persona that I can draw from the current Ocelot is French, and I want an American customer, so I will have to adapt it. Let’s dive into this example.

Demographic Information

Name: Emily Solopreneur
Age: 27
Location: Austin, Texas
Marital Status: Single
Children: None

Emily Solopreneur is a young, ambitious, and independent professional based in Austin, Texas. At 27, Emily is single and without children, which affords her the time and flexibility to commit fully to her emerging business.

As a solopreneur, she is highly motivated and willing to invest time and effort into building her brand, but she operates on a tight budget. Emily values expert guidance to help her navigate the complex landscape of website optimization and environmental responsibility.

Business Information

Job Title: Founder of a sustainable fashion startup
Decision-Making Capacity: High (as the sole decision-maker in her business)
Work Environment: Home-based operations, occasionally co-working spaces
Annual Income: Approximately $35,000
Business Challenges: Limited budget, lack of technical skills for website optimization, balancing sustainability with profitability

Emily Solopreneur is the founder of a sustainable fashion startup. She holds the highest decision-making capacity in her business. Her work environment is primarily home-based, although she occasionally operates from co-working spaces for networking and collaboration.

With an annual income of approximately $35,000, Emily faces several business challenges. These include operating on a limited budget, a lack of technical skills required for website optimization, and striking a balance between sustainability and profitability.

Values

Core Values: Transparency, sustainability, empowerment, innovation
Business Goals: To position her brand as a leader in sustainable fashion, to grow her customer base, to make her website more energy-efficient, and to balance profitability with environmental responsibility.
Personal Goals: To make a positive impact on the environment, empower other women entrepreneurs, and learn more about GreenIT and website optimization.
Frustrations: Technical challenges in optimizing her website, budgetary constraints, and struggle to balance profitability with her commitment to sustainability.

Emily Solopreneur is driven by core values of transparency, sustainability, empowerment, and innovation. Her business goals revolve around positioning her brand as a leader in the sustainable fashion space, expanding her customer base, optimizing her website for energy efficiency, and balancing profitability with environmental responsibility.

On a personal level, Emily is motivated by her desire to make a positive impact on the environment, empower other women entrepreneurs, and deepen her understanding of GreenIT and website optimization.

She is frustrated by the technical challenges of website optimization, her limited budget, and the struggle to align profitability with her dedication to sustainability.

Source of Information

Preferred Media: Podcasts, Blogs, YouTube tutorials
Books: Sustainability-related books like “Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough & Michael Braungart, Business books such as “Lean Startup” by Eric Ries
Blogs: She regularly reads “TreeHugger“, “The Minimalists“, and “Startup Fashion“
Events: She attends local networking events and sustainability-focused conventions like the “Austin Sustainable Swap” and “Sustainable Brands” conference
Influencers: She follows sustainability influencers such as Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home), and business influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk
Social Media: Active on Instagram and LinkedIn, occasionally uses Twitter

Emily Solopreneur prefers digesting information through podcasts, blogs, social media posts, and YouTube tutorials. She is an avid reader of sustainability-related books as well as business books. Emily regularly reads specialized blogs and partakes in local networking events and sustainability-focused conventions.

Emily follows sustainability influencers and business influencers on social media and she is particularly active on Instagram and LinkedIn and occasionally social media posts on Twitter.

Pain Points and Challenges

Primary Business Challenges: Limited budget for technology and marketing, lack of in-house technical skills to optimize the website, and finding sustainable, cost-effective suppliers.
Pressure Points: Struggling to balance profitability with sustainability, finding the time to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in sustainable business and e-commerce, and managing all aspects of the business single-handedly.
Expected Solutions: Cost-effective, easy-to-implement tools for website optimization and sustainability, mentorship or guidance in sustainable entrepreneurship, collaboration opportunities with like-minded businesses, and educational resources on sustainable business practices.

She seeks cost-effective digital tools for website optimization and sustainability, mentorship in sustainable entrepreneurship, collaboration opportunities with other organizations, and educational resources on sustainable practices.

Potential Objections

Emily Solopreneur might have a few reservations or objections as she embarks on the journey of creating her website under professional guidance.

Budget Concerns: Considering her limited budget, Emily may be worried about the cost of professional services for website creation and optimization. She might hesitate to spend a considerable portion of her budget on a professional guide when she plans to build the website herself.
Time and Control: Emily may have concerns about the time commitment required to collaborate with a professional while also managing her business. As someone who is used to having full control over her operations, she may be apprehensive about sharing decision-making responsibility.
Technical Challenges: Since Emily lacks strong technical skills, she might be anxious about her ability to implement the professional’s instructions effectively or fear that the technical aspects may go over her head.
Alignment with Values: Emily may question whether the professional can truly understand and implement her vision of a sustainable, energy-efficient website, aligning with her business values and goals.
Long-term Maintenance: Emily might be concerned about her ability to manage the website maintenance and further optimizations in the long run after the professional’s guidance period ends. She may worry about the potential challenges and costs she might face in this scenario.

Key purchase drivers

Emily Solopreneur’s key purchase drivers are mainly influenced by her strong commitment to sustainability, her entrepreneurial spirit, and her practical business needs.

Value for Money: Emily is operating on a limited budget and needs to ensure that any purchase she makes provides excellent value for money. She will likely be driven to invest in services that offer superior results without breaking her budget.
Sustainability: As an eco-friendly entrepreneur, Emily is committed to making environmentally responsible decisions. Any services or products she purchases must align with her sustainability values.
Ease of Use: Given her lack of technical skills, Emily is likely to be drawn to products and services that are user-friendly and don’t require expert knowledge to implement effectively.
Education and Support: Emily values mentorship and guidance in her entrepreneurial journey. She would be attracted to purchases that include ongoing support or educational resources to help her better understand and manage her business.
Time Efficiency: As a solopreneur, Emily’s time is stretched thin. Any purchases she makes will likely need to save her time or help her manage her tasks more efficiently.
Community and Collaboration: Emily shows interest in networking events and follows influencers in her field, suggesting she values being part of a community. She might be more inclined to invest in services that foster collaboration with like-minded businesses or provide access to a supportive community.
Long-term Benefits: Understanding the future needs of her business, Emily might be driven to make purchases that offer long-term benefits, such as scalability and easy maintenance, ensuring her investment remains valuable as her business grows.

As you can see, the ideal customer of solopreneurs is already quite comprehensive. Of course, it will be necessary to refine and develop it over time by interviewing the different clients who come to Ocelot.

How did I create this persona?

If you have read my previous post on persona creation, you know that there are different possible sources of information for developing user personas.

I generated it using artificial intelligence but cross-referenced the information with Ocelot’s current data. Web applications like ChatGPT enabled me to imagine realistic representations from a country other than France, in order to have more accurate data than if I had imagined it myself. The Internet is wonderful sometimes.

Jumping into the mid-sized companies’ Persona

For the following person, I will create one for medium-sized businesses. This is currently an underrepresented market at Ocelot, but I would like to include it in my website redesign simulation. It has the potential to significantly increase Ocelot’s revenue, so I don’t want to miss out.

Running a Market Research?

The best would be to run market research to find out user personas and see who could be interested in Ocelot Services. But it is pretty expensive, and I would like to have a quick start on it.

Use new digital tools instead

The problem is that I currently don’t have any data to create it. So, I will leverage the latest technologies to make an initial draft and see if the output is relevant. We can then refine this persona over time. But for now, it’s time for assumptions, so as not to get stuck on non-existent customers.

To this, I use ChatGPT again, which exploded the Internet the past year, and which is trained on a huge dataset. They may not be up to date currently, but this technology should give me a theoretically acceptable starting point to develop ideal customers for the business.

I don’t know what the output will be, so I’m putting it as it is.