Defining Your Audience

If you’re a company that produces punched metal widgets, you need to know who it is that is looking for your product. If you’ve got a website that you’ve kept for a while, and you’ve been using analytics to measure your audience as they come and go, congratulations! You probably know who your audience is right now. If not, we’ll need to do some work to figure out who it is that you need to be talking to.  First up, who are your competitors?  Pick the most successful 2 – 4 of them. What are their websites? Take a moment and go to Compete.com and punch in your address and theirs. You’ll get something like this:

You’ll note that here we’re comparing three different websites in the same basic industry (in this case, online videogame sales). They all tend to have about the same traffic right now, but you can also see that the newcomers game.co.uk and gog.com have clearly gained some marketshare at gametap.com’s expense.  There’s another competitor in the market–a big one–called steampowered.com, but it’s so much larger that it makes the rest of the competitors on this graph unreadable. We’ll do some research on them, but they’re not shown above.

So: what have these brands done with their content? Well, let’s pretend that we’re the bottom man on the totem pole here (games.co.uk) and have decided that we want to spice up our content so that we can make up some of the gap between us and our competitors. Clearly Gog.com has been doing it right, and gametap.com has, perhaps, not been. Let’s do some research on each of these sites and see what words bring them traffic.  How do we do that? Well, as always, there are easy ways and there are cheap ways. We’ll focus on the cheap one, for now.

WHat browser are you using right now? Is it Firefox? If not, then go and get Firefox from the Mozilla foundation right now.  The reason you’re going to want to download Firefox is that one of the very best tools for researching content marketing, SEO Books’ Firefox Extension, requires that you have Firefox. So go and get both of those.

Now let’s head to gog.com and turn the SEO Book extension on (look for the grey SEO logo in the lower right corner of your browser window). Right click anywhere on the page and highlight SEO for Firefox, then click on SEO Xray:

(Yes, this is a screencap of me running Firefox and Google Chrome simultaneously. I have my reasons, I do).

Immediately, we can see some interesting information from the Xray by way of telling us what their meta tags are. Gog.com has a heavy emphasis on “free (something)” keywords in their meta tag descriptors.  Gametap, which has been losing marketshare, has very different keywords in their meta tags: tags like thier own domain name (which you should be able to rank for without the help of any meta tags) “online video games,” “buy games,” “leaderboard games”, “Atari 2600 games,” “Commodore 64 games,” “NEO GEO games”….and so on. A lot of these are very niche terms. For example, the Google Adwords Traffic Estimator says that “NEO Geo Games” nets about 12k searches a month, whereas one of gog.com’s later keywords like “free PC games” is a search that pulls in over 300k a month. If you’re looking to compete in this marketplace, you should be looking at the power of “free” in your content, clearly.

Industry leader steampowered.com doesn’t have any meta keywords or descriptors at all (which, strictly speaking, isn’t necessary for anyone). They pull ahead of the pack because there are nearly 5.5 million inbound links to them, so they’re going to rank well on a lot of search terms just because of that.  What kind of search terms does steampowered.com rank well for? Well, let’s keep the SEO Book tool on and take a spin around the block on Google. Search for steampowered.com. Under your usual search results, there’s a block of light blue text with a lot of numbers, most of which will likely make no sense to you whatsoever. That’s okay, in later classes at CrowdTamers, we’ll talk more about this tool, but for the moment let’s focus on just the Y! Page Links on the second row. Click on the blue text and a new window or tab will appear with a search like “link:http://store.steampowered.com/ -site:steampowered.com” on yahoo.com. You’ll see a lot of search results there (Yahoo’s pulling in about 1200 results for that search when I run it at the moment). Look at what kind of links steampowered is getting: all of the inbound links are for individual games, which makes sense. If you search for “pc games download” or “free pc games”, steampowered.com doesn’t rank on the first few pages of Google, which means that it doesn’t exist for all intents and purposes. Steam makes their money from selling newer games at full retail price for download, whereas gog.com and games.co.uk have different markets.

So after all this analysis of keywords, which is something you’d normally associate with SEO, we know what it is that our competitors are using to bring traffic to their site. Which of these keywords applies to you? Which ones represent business directions that don’t apply to your business? Write down a list of what applies to you, both the words that you find your competitors using and words that are unique to yourself.

Now that you’ve done the research of what your audience looks for, let’s think about identifying them more fully. Where do they hang out? What are their demographics? Look up your keywords on Technorati, see what blogs and bloggers are getting your audience’s interest. Ideally, you should be a member of your audience yourself (or know someone who is) so that you can muster the passion to serve their needs. Devote some time to writing down who will want to read your content.  Let’s continue our example from above: if I had a pc games download website, I’d try and write content that appealed to my niche of video gamers. Do I mostly sell shooting games? That’s the under 18 and male crowd. Do I sell social flash games like Farmville or Mafiawars? Those are very (very, very) popular with women in their 30’s and 40’s.  Do your research to see who out there wants what you have to sell, and how many of them there are online buying on sites like eMarketer, Pell Research, Marketing Sherpa, and others. This is invaluable in helping you to evaluate your goals later on in this process and correct them if you think you need to.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Spying on (and Learning from) Your Competitors: Step 5 of the 8-Step SEO Research Strategy (seomoz.org)
• 4 Pillars of Social Media Marketing (saadkamal.com)
• An Overview of SEO (webmanmarketing.com)

Making great content is the key to making Internet marketing–of any sort–work for you. And let’s face it: most of the content out on the Internet is crap. In order to help you understand just what it is that you need to do in order to make your content excel and get you more customers, CrowdTamers has created a 10 part series for you on how to plan and execute superior content.

1. Know Where You’re Going:

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Use Your Blog to Drive Social Sales (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• Simplified Social Marketing – What Is Social Media? (wordsellinc.com)
• How to Influence Social Media Influencers (quickonlinetips.com)

If you land on this page today, odds are decent that you came here because you heard me talk at OMS Orlando. Welcome!  For your convenience, here are the slides from today’s talk, embedded from Slideshare.

If you liked the workshop that I taught at OMS and would like to be emailed when my next series of Internet marketing classes starts in a few weeks, please feel free to sign up for my email list, and I’ll be happy to let you know. Please note that I will never spam you, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

That’s quite a headline there.  Point is, I’ll be the guy with the mic, asking all the hard questions. I’ve prepared a list of them, and I’m posting them here for the panelists to review before the meeting so they’ll know what kinds of questions I think Bill Segal could benefit from hearing us answer.  If you want to follow the conversation online, we’ll be tweeting about it Friday from 2.30 under the hashtag #SegalChat.

To clarify: Bill Segal is not an Internet / digital technology master. He’s not supposed to be. He’s the guy running for office. However, he is pretty well tech savvy, from what I’ve gathered, and he’s asking us to tell him what we think he should know. So, panelists, here’s the list of questions that I’ll be asking you in the hopes that you’ll have good answers for Bill:

1. Recently, incubators such as the Varick Street business incubator in New York city have demonstrated that even in a down economy, a municipality can foster growth and attract venture capitalist dollars into an economy. Do you think that Orange County could set up a business incubator that grows digital businesses in a similar fashion to the Varick Street incubator? What do you think that incubator would need to do to encourage growth?
2. What do you think are the determining factors in the success or failure of a new digital business? How can a Orange County help influence these factors to encourage a new business’s survival?
3. Some cities have experimented with providing free wifi throughout the entire municipality, ranging in size from small towns in Iowa to cities like Philadelphia and Taipei. While the benefits and ROI for those programs are debatable for small business, can you think of a similar public technology initiative that would be beneficial to growing digital business?
4. Do you think that promoting ‘Net neutrality at a municipal or county level is possible? Is it necessary?
5. The major players in technology and digital growth–companies like Lockheed-Martin, Disney, UCF, and some of the downtown Orlando startups are scattered across Seminole County and Orange County, which can make collaboration difficult. How can Orange County help bridge some of these gaps and help these companies work together to set policy that will foster growth in their industries.
6. The quality of education is crucial for a business looking to recruit local help to get its fledgling startup off the ground. What do you think of the quality of graduates you are seeing in your interviews today? How can Orange County work to improve their ability to participate in a digital business?
7. You can argue that a good part of what got Silicon Valley started in the 90′s was the tax breaks that San Francisco offered to qualifying new startups. Florida doesn’t have a state income tax like California, but what can Orange County do to encourage digital innovators to come here to launch their dreams?
8. Small businesses, especially in a down economy, need reliable income to make a base from which to build their innovative technology. Do you feel that the Orlando and Orange County government offers opportunity for small business to work with it and receive much-needed funds by providing Orange County with applications or websites? How can the county make it easier for small businesses to learn about these opportunities?

Can you think of anything that I’ve omitted? Let me know and I’ll be sure to ask it.

I’ve had more than a few interested pings from people I’ve been meeting at networking events about how they should undertake implementing a social media plan for their company, especially if they have a conservative organization.  When I teach my coursework on social media, there’s a reason why it lies so close to the end of a session: it’s a relatively advanced tactic, and one that isn’t going to work for you before you already have everything prior to it performing properly first. So assuming that your website, analytics, landing pages, email marketing, and search marketing are all performing up to spec, let’s look at how you’d get your company to start using social media.

1. Social Media is a Tactic: Define a Goal to Guide You

Tell me what it is that you want social media to do. As they say, you need a goal before you can set tactics.  Social media is just another tactic in your company’s goal of “Make 5% more money in 2010″ or (more likely for many of us) “Earn as much in 2010 as you did in 2009.”  You need to come up with a compelling way to show that you can use social media to help you achieve that overall company goal, while not being such a difficult to execute tactic that no one in the company has time for it. So are you senior enough to define a goal at your organization? If so, great, if not, then you probably want to:

2. Social Media is a Tool: Get Buy-in From Someone Senior On Using It

Speaking to the VP of Whatsis (I speak here as someone who has been a VP of Whatsis in the past) can be intimidating for people who don’t usually rub elbows with decision makers. If you’re not the head of your department, then start with them and talk about how you think your company needs to work on some social media planning.  You won’t have the advantage that I do if you take this approach, since I’m a hired gun that companies–by the very nature that they’ve hired me–will take more seriously, but you can still get your boss, and your boss’s boss if necessary, to agree that something needs to be done about that social media thing.  So once you’ve made it to that point, you need to remember to:

3. Social Media Requires Work: Keep it Small

In a conservative business environment, people want numbers. They want tracking. They want to know every detail they can about whatever it is that you’re doing before they approve the next step. In that light, it only makes sense for you to limit what it is that you’re doing at once.  Don’t forget that you don’t have you social media like Facebook or Twitter for your company (although you certainly can!). Perhaps you can use a wiki as a project collaboration tool, or set up a password-protected WordPress blog as an internal company newsletter. With a little creativity it is very easy to demonstrate tons of savings using social media internally or externally as a communications tool.  Once you’ve defined the scope of what it is you’re doing, then you need to make sure you:

4. Social Media Really Requires Work: Get Buy-in From Someone Junior

“Someone junior” could be you, of course, if you’re relatively junior at your organization. The fact is, if you’re a VP of Whatsis, you likely don’t have time to manage a social media effort all by yourself. So find someone who’s savvy in the ways of whatever tool it is that you’re using in your company, and use them to help grow your social media usage. If you’re that junior person, then go out of your way to include people in the company in the social media tool that you’re using. If it’s an internal wordpress newsletter, then you can interview people (or better yet, get them to write their own articles!). If it’s a project management wiki, offer to have a little class for the department that’s using it in order to show them how awesome their new wiki is.  And finally, once you’ve done all that:

5. Social Media Requires Training, Too: Make Sure Your Team Knows How to Use It

Because there’s no faster way to make sure that your initiative will be irrelevant than if no one knows quite how to use it. Yes, of course, I could shill for CrowdTamers’ social media and Internet marketing education here, and point out that I can teach workshops for you on a wide variety of social media and Internet tools. Instead, I would suggest that you search the Internet for tutorials, both video and written, on how to make the most out of the thingie that your company is using to help achieve its goals.  Most of the time, you’ll be able to find good resources on how to do what you want to, and if you don’t feel free to ask me here. I’d be happy to help.  Above all else, remember to:

6. Social Media Takes Time: Be Patient

It takes time for social media to work its magic–especially in an organization that takes its time making changes. I saw someone write a blog post headline the other day (I do not jest) that said, “Businesses: Still think that the Internet is a fad? Well not anymore!” There are businesses that might still see the Internet as a whole as fine, but less the social media revolution. So be patient with your company as they explore what it is that they’re willing to use social media for, and recall that good things come to those who wait.

Have any questions? Leave a comment below!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Media Use in the Workplace Is on the Rise (blogs.forbes.com)
• Social Media is Like Water: Build an Ark (chadschomber.wordpress.com)

I was asked by an acquaintance at a doterati meeting a few weeks ago how to prove value for a social media campaign that had already been completed and for which the usual tracking that I’d recommend wasn’t in place. It took a moment to devise a way to show the value that a social media campaign had created for a brand, but I ended up with these 7 steps. As a firm believer in “working smart” instead of “working hard”, have edited that email a bit and now present you with 7 Steps to Demonstrating the Value of Social Media:

1. Look at all of the bit.ly links that were spread through social media. This will show how many hits each link has gotten, and even how many hits a day (which is probably more granular than you need).
2. Total up all the hits on each of the pages individually that the social media campaigns have linked to.
3. Then, go to Google’s Sktool (hey, I didn’t name it) and put the URL of each page that social media directed people to (like the organization’s homepage, for example). Google is going to do its best to guess what kind of advertising keywords that page  should be associated with.
4. Pick a few that are actually relevant (Google’s best guess is often laughably wrong).
5. Normalize the price per click (as in sum up all of the prices that are associated with relevant keywords and then divide by the number of relevant keywords) to derive the (approximate) value of each click that page would have cost via PPC advertising.
6. Multiply the normalized value by the number of clicks that social media brought to that page, and there you go! Now you know the value of the clicks that your social media campaign brought you on that page.
7. Repeat for each page that got an appreciable number of clicks. If you have 40 pages that all got 3 clicks, just take the sktool pricing from your organization’s homepage and use it as a rough for all of the pages whose click rate was so low that it’s not worth figuring individually.

Bonus Tip: If you take screen caps of the Google Sktool pricing while you’re working, you can generate a nifty “cost benefit analysis” report with hard numbers that no one can argue with when you give a presentation and show just how much social media saved your organization.

This is just one way to demonstrate value of a social media campaign (and a rough one at that), but for someone who’s just getting started and wants to be able to show the higher-ups why they should invest some more time in social media, it makes a very compelling argument. Got any questions on this? Leave me a comment or email me and I’ll be happy to answer.

Every day, I teach people about how to use interactive media. I tell them that getting the attention of the world is hard, and you can’t run around and grab 6 million people by the lapels of their shirts and say, “Hey, look at what I’m doing!” There’s too many people out there. You can’t email 6 million people and tell them that you’re awesome. Heck, statistics suggest that you probably can’t even get 600 people to follow you on Twitter.  Running around from social media tool to social media tool without discipline, strategy, and coordinated effort is a sure-fire way to waste time, money, and opportunities. So what do you do? I’m going to answer that question by starting a series here that outlines the exact same lessons that I teach in my seminars: The 7 Tools of Social Media Leverage.

Archimedes said it first:

Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the Earth.

You don’t need to move the whole earth, but you do need to move your market and shift it a little closer to you.  Tackling your market all by yourself is a lot of work; but using a lever and finding the right place to stand, you can make all of the difference for your business and your market.  Some people have already figured this out. They have their website, social media, opt-in marketing, and paid advertising all running together and building on each other to make their company a dynamo of business.  This isn’t a series for those companies.

This is a series for the guy who’s been trying to figure out how social media is supposed to make him money, how he can justify the time that people keep telling him he needs to sink into Facebook or a blog. This series is for the entrepeneur who spends all day working on her business and doesn’t want to spend two hours poking on Facebook, following on Twitter, and spending time on LinkedIn that she doesn’t have. In short, this series of posts is for most of us.

So any lever consists, fundamentally, of two parts: the lever (which lifts the load) and the fulcrum (which provides the turning point for the lever whereby the force on one end moves the load on the other). Without a fulcrum, all you have in your hands is a stick. So before we start using the social media tools to build a lever, let’s develop the fulcrum first.

The Fulcrum

What’s the fulcrum of your interactive marketing efforts? Your website. It’s the point around which all of your interactive marketing  moves, and there’s no point to going any further unless you’ve got a website that can take the leads you’ll be generating and convert them into money. You’ll notice that in the diagram above, the fulcrum is represented by a triangle; that’s because there’s three parts to the fulcrum that your website represents:

1. Content: Use a content management system to create and maintain the content of your site. It’s so easy to set up a professional CMS like WordPress or Joomla nowadays that there’s literally no reason why you’d want your content in a static HTML site. Part of what you’ll be doing with your new website is realizing that content in your CMS-based website doesn’t have to be static–and shouldn’t be! Your website should be;  treated as a living thing. The tool I recommend? WordPress for most small businesses
2. Measurement: In order to know what works and what doesn’t, you need to measure what changes effect your clickthrough and your conversions. Measuring or analyzing the aggregated traffic to your site to see what trends emerge is called Analytics.  This goes beyond simply putting an analytics package on your website and includes putting tracking codes in all of your advertisements so that you send out through the web. The numbers themselves won’t improve your business, but they give you the knowledge you need to do so.  What tool do I recommend? It’s hard to go wrong with Google Analytics, which is not just one of the standards of the field, they’re also free.
3. Sales: There’s content that you write to establish your knowledge or share your passion, but there’s also content that you write to get someone to give you money. These are usually not the same thing, and when you’re paying to get traffic or attention to your website, you generally don’t want to drop your visitors off on your main page with no idea why they should care about you. Take your new visitors who are arriving on your website to a page created specially to address their motivation for clicking on your ad. This will, all by itself, get you more conversions on the ads that you’re already running. What tool do I tell my clients to use? I’ve recently become a fan of Unbounce.

Don’t worry about trying to complete your interactive marketing plans until you’ve gotten these need addressed. If you’ve already got a Facebook page or if you’re already paying for advertisements on Google, Yahoo, or Bing and you’re seeing a positive ROI, you might be tempted to ignore addressing these three needs. Don’t.

“But I don’t have time to create landing pages for all of my ads!” you may say. So categorize your ads by basic type and create a landing page for each type. “I don’t understand the point behind most of the information that Google Analytics throws my way–it’s too overwhelming!” Don’t worry, we’ll get there together. But get your website prepared to make money first.

The Lever

The lever is made of 4 parts, and there’s a reason for this: if you went to a hardware store and bought a 10 foot long dowel that’s an inch around, you’d have no problem breaking it over your knee.  Buy 4 of them, wrap them together, and try the same stunt, and you would likely find that you couldn’t anymore. You can shift more people your way by using multiple channels than you can with 1 channel.  So what are those 4 parts?

1. Online Ads: PPC, SEM, or even some crazier non-traditional stuff like what IZEA.com is doing, you need to get the word out to people by making use of someone else’s reach to attract attention that you don’t currently have.  What’s the best online advertisement? That’s like of like asking “What’s the best color?” The short answer is: “It depends.” What’s a good tool to get started in online advertising? Google AdWords.
2. Opted-in Marketing: The best consumers are the ones who want to hear from you. They’re easier to market to, they click through in higher percentages on ads and they buy more when they do. Find out how they want to hear from you and get their permission to do so. Whether it’s email addresses, SMS numbers, mailing addresses (because some people still prefer paper catalogs), or even social media, you want to relate to your customers in the arena that they want to hear from you. How do you figure out where that is? Well, if you’ve installed an analytics package like I mentioned above, you can measure what returns the best results and focus on that kind of messaging. That said, I’m a fan of email marketing as a starting point, and recommend MailChimp with very few reservations for small businesses, and ExcatTarget for larger ones.
3. Social Media: I’m a guy who trains about social media, and the fact that I’ve placed “social media” #6 out of the 7 tools that you need to get social media leverage should tell you something. Social media by itself is a great way to sink a lot of time and effort into something and see nothing come back out of it, unless you’re approaching social media from a results-driven perspective. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, BeBo, YouTube, and so on are all great–if you need them. The message I keep coming to when I teach “Social Media Leverage” is that you need to find your audience online, and then cater to where they want to be. You don’t want to try and force a thousand Facebook friends to follow you on Twitter; they’re happy where they are and you should make plans that communicate to them on the channel they’re on. What tools do I recommend you use for social media? The classic triangle is Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (depending on what it is that your company does, of course), and there are a number of smaller social media sites that may be worth investigating as well.
4. Trending Media: Trending media? That might sound annoyingly vague, but there’s a method to the madness. When there’s a new hot media type that’s just getting popular (like mobile or hyper-local are now), it’s usually cheaper to use them intelligently to reach your market than it can be to get the same reach with a traditional media.  So if you’re reading this in 2012 or whenever, take a look around the Internet and see what’s new and trending then and think about how you can use it your advantage to communicate with your audience. s of the current date of writing this article, hyper local advertising and mobile advertising solutions are good places to look for niche advertising that carries punch beyond its price. Also, purchasing an inexpensive video camera and using social media video can pay off unexpected dividends.

So, with a fulcrum to shift everything around, and with those 4 tools to use as a lever, anyone can find that they are able to shift their market a little closer.  The next logical question to ask someone who makes his training other how to use social media is: how the heck do you use all of those tools?

Let’s leave something for the next article, shall we?

CrowdTamers does its fair share of social media marketing, it’s true, but I do a fair amount of social media training as well, and there are few tools that I can get as enthusiastically behind as I can for Unbounce. A simple platform where you can create customized landing pages in a dead-simple WYSIWYG editor? Sign me up. More importantly, sign my clients up, because as often as I say that landing pages are crucial to making your campaigns convert, they frequently can’t spend the extra money to get a professionally-designed landing page created and hosted somewhere. Unbounce registration is free (for the moment) so go run over there right now and sign up with an account. If you need more eloquent reasons why you should sign up, they’ve already given you 6 great features here.

When I train on how to use social media, I always emphasize the lead. Social media is a huge lead-generation tool, and when you’re doing it correctly you will find that it’s easy to use the reach of social media to get the leads that your business needs to increase its income.  Social media by itself doesn’t make any money for a business, so figure out what your business can sell online (even if it’s just your expertise in a specific field so that they’ll call you and have you install cabinets or write a will) and use social media to get the attention of your audience. I advocate using targeted different looks and feels for incoming leads from each social media source, so let’s make a test case for a lead generation campaign on Twitter.

First, you need to give ‘em something:

If your landing page doesn’t give your visitor something in exchange for their information, they will most likely bounce away (unbounce or not) to find a better offer elsewhere.  One of the classic free giveaways to offer someone is a free ebook or other informational piece that they can learn something from.  I’ll give away a PDF pamphlet from OvernightPR on how to follow up on a press release  to increase the likelihood of being carried in a press outlet (also known as “pitching a release,” for any of my readers who work in PR).  Note that this isn’t the best offer for me to be making over Twitter (I’d be better served with something like, “How to Get Journalists’ Attention Through Twitter” as a free download on Twitter) but I’ll work with what I have.

Let me interrupt here and say that offering a “free consultation” is not a good choice for a free giveaway on an initial social media campaign. Consultations are what you’d call a “late-process” decision-making tool for most buyers. Before a buyer wants a free consultation, he or she is going to want to know what it is that he or she doesn’t even know to ask about.  When you’re buying a car, you don’t generally start by running off to the dealer for a test drive. First you poke around online, seeing what models of cars and prices fit your needs and budget. The “free consultation” of a test drive happens once you’ve got most of your decision making already done.

So think about what it is that you can give away to visitors, and then let’s get started!

Read the rest of this entry »