Motive Mining™
Key to persuasive content
Motive Mining™ is the means by which we figure out how to get your visitors to persuade themselves to become your customers. There are two sets of motives that are simultaneously in play when a visitor arrives at your website:
- A felt need to have your product (or your competitor's).
- Intellectual and emotional needs related to the visitor's preferred buying process.
An effective website marketing strategy
(turning visitors into buyers) is based on satisfying both sets of needs for a diverse target market.
An effective search engine marketing strategy
(attracting qualified traffic) is based on the keywords someone with those particular needs would type
to find what they want.
Understanding your target market's motives is therefore the basis for both your search engine marketing strategy and your website marketing strategy.
The process of understanding your buyers' motives and agendas begins by imagining yourself as
someone with a need for your product.
Persuasion Architecture,
Goal-Directed® design
and Carl Jung share a terminology that refers to these imagined characters as "personas"
or "archetypal visitors".
Try the "Persona Creation Exercise" and you'll quickly understand how a recognition of the personas
or archtypal visitors you are trying to attract will help. You need to identify the motives
your target market has for typing certain keywords in their search engines when they are looking for a company like yours.
Persona Creation Exercise
Pick a real customer or make one up. Put yourself in this person's shoes when he or she was looking for
whatever it was they bought from you. Dream a little about the product you are searching for and how
much it's going to improve your life and make you happy.
Think about the problems it will solve. You would really like to experience instant gratification of your need to have what you want, but life isn't like that, so you are on a mission to find it. You are running searches and seeing if the results are any good.
When you click on one of your search results, don't you just simply want to find what you were looking for??!!
And isn't that exactly why you used a search engine that has the proven ability to sort real quality
out of the vast sea of SEO tricked-out, time-wasting spam sites?!!
To see a list of common buyer personas see Buying Rituals.
Relevance
Sooner or later it hits you: The key to the search engines' success at bringing you quality websites is that
they have taught their robots to recognize real content! And not only that, but to an amazing degree
those robots even manage to make subjective judgements about how relevant a particular page really is to a
search term. It doesn't take much experimentation to make the observation that a good search engine's ability
to sniff out relevance is quite impressive.
Once you realize just how smart the search engines have become and how much they love good content, your SEO tactics become clear. You must produce good content!
Anyone who thinks it is bad news that they will now have to produce quality content rather than continuing to fool the search engines with spam techniques just hasn't yet realized what a golden opportunity exists in the way search engines detect relevance for search terms.
Once you've fully grasped your target market's driving motives you can produce a great body of content that speaks directly to their needs. The optimal strategies for SEO and conversion go hand in hand. The catalyst to this natural synergy is Motive Mining™.
What are the Stakes?
We must never forget that our buyers have options. Virtually limitless options. You were picked out of a list of results from a search. This is your moment to shine.
Next: Why do you need a conversion strategy? Website Marketing Strategy
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