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.

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• 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)

1. Know Where You’re Going:

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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.

In short, no. But we *are* having a sale, here. We’ve dropped our prices on our workshops about 20% for the next few months, and we’ve cut our email management prices something like 80% from what they were. That’s a crazy number, but what can a guy do? Check out the new pricing information at our services and pricing page.  Sorry for the (blatant) commercial message; we’ll resume our more traditional educational posts soon.

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!

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Push vs. Pull

The MBA definition of push marketing would say it’s a top-down marketing where the person who manufactures a product sells it to a retailer, who in turn sells it to the consumer.  Let’s simplify the definition and say that push marketing is generally business to consumer and doesn’t tend to have a lot of viral growth.

Push marketing requires reach. It is frequently based upon interruption (like radio or TV advertisements, for example), but you can push market without interruption. I think QVC, woot, and Groupon are good examples of push marketing that don’t interrupt your experience elsewhere.  When you go to any of these places, you know that they’re going to market things that you don’t necessarily want to you, but that’s why you go there. If you visit Groupon, for example, I’d say you’re giving tacit permission to be push marketed to.

The classic examples of push marketing that is interruption-based makes up most of the industry. But “push marketing” shouldn’t immediately be a dirty word in the minds of permission marketers everywhere.

Pull marketing

The business school definition of pull marketing is a product that creates consumer demand to the point where they go to the stores and request it. Examples of this are children’s toys and anything Apple has made during the memory of someone who’s just now graduating high school.  For Internet marketing purposes, it can be business to business or business to consumer, but the key factor is that it has huge potential for viral growth.

Pull marketing draws you in through a channel that you have trust in.  You have friends who follow @moonfruit, they tweet about a contest that the webhost is providing, and you find yourself pulled into the promotion.  You didn’t have to give Moonfruit permission to market to you; they told someone who told your friend who told you, and because you read your friend’s tweets, you learned of the contest through a trusted source. Pull marketing without permission, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing either. How else would you learn about new things?

Interruption vs. Permission

You can probably see where I’m going with this now, but bear with me.  Interruption marketing is the old model of traditional media: louder commercials, bigger billboards, splashier newspaper ads, all trying to get your attention in an increasingly advertisement-blind society. Permission marketing gets results. Whether you’ve got a list of a thousand emails that you carefully curate and send only items of interest to or  ten thousand mobile numbers you can text a coupon to, if you’re considerate and thoughtful of your lists and don’t abuse that permission, you will always see ROI’s in the high hundreds (or thousands!) of percents on your campaigns.

Building permission lists takes time, and it takes even more time to curate them well so you aren’t abusing the permissions that you’ve been given.  Properly done permission advertising blows interruption out of the water. If you don’t have that permission-based list, though, think about using some old fashioned push and pull marketing to build your brand and your lists before resorting to something ineffectual and damaging like buying someone else’s lists for your own use.

Further Reading

• Pros and cons of Push and Pull product positioning and differentiation (johngannonblog.com)
• The dangers of experiential spam (mumbrella.com.au)
• Is Social Media a Viable Venue for Business-to-Business Marketing? (inin.com)
• Hard Interruption vs Soft Interruption (avc.com)

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.