In this post, I explain the process for building a beauty website and content that drives organic traffic*. As with all content it needs to be user centred so it starts with market and user research; determining keywords that your audience searches for online, identifying the best form of content, frequency, style and format.
*Definition: Organic traffic refers to visitors of your website, who come from search engine results pages.
This process is tried and tested, so by repeating it you will be able to build powerful content that will produce a steady flow of organic (free) traffic. So follow these steps:
Step 1: Build your Buyer Personas (your ideal beauty salon customers)
The correct place to start your entire website building journey is by researching your target audience. You need to establish who your beauty salon customers are and what kind of individuals do you want reading your content. We recommend the best way to get a full understanding of your target audience is by creating buyer personas.
Buyer personas are fictional, stereotypes of your perfect customers. The purpose of developing buyer personas is to help you understand your customers and then make it easier for you to develop content that is specific to their needs, wants, behaviours and reservations.
Creating a buyer persona does require market research and insights from your existing customer base. This may sound a little daunting, but it’s actually really good fun and does certainly help you focus and build a better website. You can claim your free Buyer Persona template here.
Here is what a simple sample buyer persona for beauty treatments may look like:
- Gender: Female
- Age: 30-45
- Married: Yes
- Children: Yes aged 2 and 6 years
- Income: 40k+ per annum
- Career: HR Business Partner
- Location: City Living
- Communication Preference: Text Messages and Email
Step 2: Build your target market keyword list
Your audience and potential customer base defines everything about your website and its content. If you want to attract organic traffic to your website, then you need to cover topics that your target market is searching for. It’s a simple process:
- your target market searches for something on Google
- you create useful content for which they are seeking
- you get organic traffic
Here’s how to find out what your audience is searching for:
1. Get to know your market
You should have excellent knowledge of the market you are trying to serve. The more you know in advance, the easier it will be to create content for that market.
2. Pick 5 niche topics that your target market searches for
Based on your knowledge of your beauty treatment market, choose five topics, or phrases, that your target audience searches for most. Since we’re looking at topics in a niche, these should be relatively narrow.
For example, “Massage” is not a good keyword. You need to be far more specific, because people digest content that is created for their niche. “Back Massage” is more of a niche. Within that niche, you could have phrases such as “Deep tissue back massage” or “Swedish back massage” – these could be used as categories for blog posts.
For example, using those two topics, you can come up with a few blog articles:
- Getting the most out of your deep tissue back massage
- What’s the difference between a deep tissue massage and a Swedish back massage?
- What is a Swedish back massage and how will I benefit?
Learn more about keyword research and building keyword lists
3. Deep dive into your topics
When you land on a subject your target market loves, you should spend time and effort creating content that digs deeper into that topic. For example, the longtail keyword “Swedish back massage” can provide you many options for creating additional media for ebooks, webinars, podcasts,etc.
Step 3: Identify the content that your market loves best
The purpose of creating a buyer persona is to establish the kind of content your target audience wants. Here is a list that illustrates what most businesses use for marketing purposes:
It’s good to experiment with different types of content, but ultimately you want to focus on one that you can be really good at. Your market will gravitate towards a particular communication method, and this is what you should focus on.
Here are some examples of the more common types of communication channels where you could find your niche:
- Blogging. For many companies, blogging will take the lead and become their main source of qualified leads. (If blogging is your niche, make sure you understand the basics of SEO and make sure your posts are optimised).
- Strong Images. Adding images and a strong visual push in your content is also important. All the leading beauty and cosmetic brands have strong visual elements.
- Email. Email is a great communication channel for many and it can be a real income generator. The key is to ensure that you segment your audience based on where they are in the buyers journey. This is so you can tailor your emails to their needs and help them towards making a conversion. Learn more about inbound marketing basics and the buyers journey here.
- Social media. Not every organisation has a blog, but they may be very converse with social media. There are companies who have found their audience on Linkedin, Twitter and Google+, so naturally the same companies confine their efforts to this channel.
- Video. Videos aren’t cheap, but when done correctly they can really influence your target audience. YouTube could be a real revenue stream and help with product sales and aftercare service.
To find out which type of marketing channel you should focus on, keep in mind these questions:
- What are your buyer personas searching for on Google?
- What is the intent behind these searches?
- What problems are they trying to solve?
- Which type of content makes them stop, click, and consume?
Remember, your audience (not you) should dictate what type of content you produce and the channel in which you communicate with them. Allow the consumers of the content to decide what channel that content arrives.
Step 5: Content Frequency
By now you will have discovered who your target audience is, what they want, and the channel they prefer to receive it. Now you need to find out how frequently you are going to communicate with them.
1. Your marketing channel will determine the frequency
Blog and website articles will be less frequent than say a twitter update. As a general rule, the more difficult it is to product the content, the less frequent that content will be.
2. Your audience will determine the frequency
You should always keep your audience in mind, so you should have a good understanding of when they will access your content and the frequency. There would be little point running webinars during the day, because your buyer persona is more likely to be at work and unable to join the conversation. Emails, however may be best received either late in the day (when the kids have gone to bed) or first thing in the morning.
3. Keep a diary and stick to the schedule.
Once you have decided on the frequency, it needs to be scheduled. I’m a big fan of automation and one of the reasons why I love Inbound Marketing and WordPress. Planning things in advance is the best way to execute successfully.
So what’s the next steps?
Why not let me develop your website and take all the strain out of running it. For just £500 I will build you a mobile and tablet responsive beauty website design, take care of all the inbound marketing and search engine optimisation, and you’ll get 12-months unlimited support and updates. If you are interested in discussing working together either give me a call or drop me an email.
Related Articles:
- 10 common beauty website mistakes – this article will help you understand how your content should feature on your website.
What you should do now
If you are serious about having a great website, you should read my blog, it’s packed with ideas and suggestions to help improve your site.
If you’d like me to dramatically improve your website and bring you new customers, visit my website designs for small businesses in Birmingham and then contact me for more information.
And if you have any comments or questions about this article, contact me.