Profiting from Scenarios
Information architects make extensive use of scenarios. So do Guerrilla Marketers. Scenarios help you serve your market better by helping you see them as individuals, instead of an undifferentiated mass.

Scenarios are fictional one-page documents that create meaningful stories that reveal a lot about your clients and prospects. A scenario details:

Who is visiting your web site.

Why they’re visiting your web site.

Their location in the buying cycle they’re in—i.e. just looking, ready to buy, already bought, etc.

What specific information they’re after.

What other web sites they’ve visited.

Who the visitor is representative of.

By giving them a name, a work situation, and specific needs, scenarios help you focus on individuals, not market generalizations.

Taking the time to prepare three or four scenarios for each of your marketing documents before you begin writing forces you to focus your of your market’s needs (i.e. buyer benefits) instead of product or service features (which usually mean more to you than to your prospects.)

Take-away. Take the time to prepare three or four scenarios describing visitors to your web site. Then, review your web site. Does the existing web site completely satisfy your visitor’s information needs?