Episode 55 – Building Reviews Online, Finding Your Competitors, and Building Customer Personas

Welcome back to another week of Digital Natives where our hosts Matt, Rai, and Kyle explore your digital reputation, competition, target market, and more! Never miss an episode, subscribe to our episodes on our website at: www.digitalnativescast.com

Building Reviews Online [4:10]
Finding Your Competitors [13:50]
Building Customer Personas [21:40]

Building Reviews Online

To kick things off our host Kyle dives into the power of reviews online and how they can help you build trust and credibility without even talking to new business prospects. We discuss strategies build them with your new and existing customers, where they’re important, and more!

“85% of millennials say reviews impact their purchasing decision.” -Kyle
“80% of people say reviews are just as trustworthy as a firsthand recommendation.” -Kyle
“To ensure you’re getting the reviews you need, you should be set up on Google My Business, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, and all those other locations.” -Kyle
“Facebook is getting really into trying to get people to review locations.” -Rai
“Before you create a new business page on Facebook, search for your business and see if there’s an existing page already and claim it if there is one!” -Matt
“If you feel like you’ve done a good job, solicit reviews from your customers.” -Kyle

Finding Your Competitors

The first step to success in any business is understanding your competitors, inside and out! Our host Rai explores tactics to identify and research your competitors online and discover some of their hidden strategies that could put you and your business ahead.

“To kick things off, look at the digital space and who are taking up space you want to be present in.” -Rai
“Make sure to consider international or out of your scope competitors so you can see what they’re doing and copy those tactics if you will.” -Rai
“First, you need to identify your core product or service. This will help you narrow do your keywords for search.” -Rai
“Start searching your keywords and take note of the top two or three competitors per keyword.” -Rai
“Once you’ve narrowed down your competitors you can visit their websites and confirm their relevancy and then you can remove people you can’t compete with or evaluate their tactics.” -Rai

Building Customer Personas

Arguably more important than knowing your competitors is knowing your target customer extremely well. Our host Matt explores our internal process of building a customer persona and discusses why it’s so important so you can use It to your benefit!

“When we build customer personas we sit down with you one on one and run through a series of questions that really identify who your ideal customer is.” -Matt
“When you’re building a customer persona, you tend to get rid of the idea of your ideal customer because they’re usually not your typical customer but the whole idea is to get more of that ideal person.” -Matt
“Think of your customer persona outside of work. If you look at those outside values, you can include those small pieces into your marketing” -Matt
“When you identify all the finite details of your ideal customer, you can take a step back and really evaluate how well your attempts to obtain them are.” -Matt
“Always consider your buyer persona from a thousand foot view, just take a step back and look at them unbiased.” -Matt

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