The three most important elements when starting out with marketing on the internet is to 1) define success and 2) know your target audience 3) listen to your customers.
Once you form a foundation for your web strategy, the execution becomes easy. The goal is to constantly test and use different campaigns from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to email marketing in an attempt to achieve business objectives.
I often hear business owners talk about wanting to increase sales and generate leads but fail to define what success look like to them. In order to define success, you must first realize your current state of business from an analytical and financial perspective.
Do you have any existing data to help you take the pulse of the business? What kind of financial (Return on Investment or ROI) and non-financial (business impact) objectives and metrics are available?
Without real knowledge of your true costs, you run into a potential misconception of what your real ROI is.
Understand that ROI includes not just how much you pay for web hosting or your overheads, but also other costs associated with running the entire campaign such as, cost of time working on the campaign (broken down into average hourly wages), amount of labor burden costs (cost consisting of all indirect labor costs incidental to operations), SEO costs (monthly or accordance with your budget), email marketing costs, technology infrastructure costs etc.
Understand Your Costs and Metric
Once you have a true total cost of you running the campaign, you can run those numbers against your traffic and sales conversion rates to identify your ROI. Here is an example of how you can create a simple metric chart:
Assuming I get those numbers, with a quick glance the data shows that by spending 3 times amount of money on this campaign, the result returns 8 times more sales with the cost per sale reduced by more than half. This is a high level overview to help you define your goals for each metrics. Again, watching your real cost of the campaign will bring clarity to your true profitability.
Using Google and Twitter to Identify Your Customers Online
Once you define your goals and know what success looks like, the next step is defining your customer profiles then search for them online.
For starters, you should at least know the age demographic, income level or occupation. After you know who your typical customer looks like, you need to find where they are online and what they’re talking about to get a step closer to engage them.
This is where you should be looking at using some free online tools to help you gather useful data.
Let’s look at using a combination of Google and Twitter to find your customers. As an example, I’m going to assume that you own a local retail apparel store and you want to drive traffic to your store.
First you should come up with a list of keywords that people are searching on Google. The simple and fast way to do it is to use Google Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search.
Google Keyword Tool
Google offers the keyword tool so you can search and find what popular keywords people are searching around your products or services. I’ve used the keyword “evening wear” and as you can see, it returned all relevant keywords and the volume of searches for the past 12 months.
Feel free to make adjustments to show the data in different ways (I’ve sorted the list by Local search volume) and how much people are paying for those keywords.
There is no doubt that “evening wear” is the most popular keyword locally. This indicates that most people simply put in the keyword “evening wear” so if you want to target a narrower range like “evening wear tops” you will have less competition for the same keyword.
Click on Add and you can create your list (will be displayed on the right) and when you’re done adding, you can export the entire list in text or excel format.
Google Insights for Search
Once you have a basic list of keywords, head over to Google Insights for Search to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.
Now you can take popular keywords you’ve found and insert them into the search term area, and you’ll find more information about your keywords.
Unquestionably the keyword “dress” out paced all other keywords I’ve insert (evening wear, women’s shoes, handbags).
And you’ll also find that New York is the place where people search most for dresses.
Play around with the different settings and you can also export the results in excel format.
Google Wonder Wheel
The Google Wonder Wheel was introduced to simplify and arrange search results. It’s basically a pre-defined mind mapper which helps the user get all the related search results in a wheel shaped like display.
Simply go to Google.com and input your search term, click on the “show options” link and find the “Wonder Wheel” link on the bottom left to get your search terms mind-mapped.
Once you get to the Wonder wheel, you can explore around the related keywords and it’ll expand into another wheel.
I went ahead and clicked on the “discount evening wear” and the most popular and relevant keywords associated with discount evening wear shows up.
This is another great way to narrow your search term down to what your customers may be looking for in order to personalize the message.
So if I’m running a promotional campaign or sending out newsletters, I could use content such as:
“Discount designer evening gowns perfect for cocktail parties or formal events!”
Or combine with my findings from Google Insights,
“A night out in New York? Checkout our discounted cocktail dresses from BCBG! Available in plus size directly from Macy’s.”
Combining Google with Twitter
Since Google have no problem indexing Twitter’s data, you can now use Twitter’s search engine to find you target customers using keywords as well as conversational phrases.
First go to search.twitter.com and click on advanced search and start looking for conversations phrases around what people would say when they’re looking for clothing.
The example below shows a search for people saying “what should I wear” within 100 miles of Los Angeles, CA.
You can also leave it blank for broad search to view everything around the world, perhaps you have an online store so tracking both local, geo-targeted search and broad search make sense.
As you can see, the search result would return a stream of conversations with people saying “what should I wear.” You can take a moment to scan over the conversation, perhaps follow those individuals, checkout their profile and “listen” in on their dialogues.
However, you don’t want to spend all day reading people’s conversations, and searching for the same phrases every time. This is where Google Reader comes in handy. Google Reader is a great tool to aggregate all your RSS feeds into one place and it also has some analytical capabilities.
On your Twitter search results page, find the RSS feed icon on the top right hand corner, right click on it and copy the link address of the feed.
Then open your Google Reader and click on “Add a subscriber” and paste the link into your Google Reader to start building a collection of feeds around your target search phrases.
Once you’ve added the feed into your Google Reader, wait for a couple of days for the data to aggregate before you can start analyzing it (ideally you want to have at least 30 days).
You can start checking the data by clicking on “show detail” on the top right hand corner.
You’ll see data for the last 30 days, time of day and day of the week. Depending on how you look at it, you can see which day of the month people start talking about your search term.
Maybe it’s the end of the month, everyone got paid so a discussion about shopping starts; or perhaps everyone goes out on Thursday evening in LA so on Wednesday people are talking about what to wear for Thursday.
The time of the day is a good area to gauge when these people log on to Twitter to talk about your search term.
Another good use of these data is to figure out when to send out your coupons, promotions and newsletters so your message arrives when people’s minds are on your product or service.
Remember, personalized messages delivered at the right place at the right time are key ingredients to conversion.
Search Twitter Profile Using Google
Another method to find your target customer on Twitter is to search through people’s Twitter profile using Google. Go to Google.com click on advanced search and put in
and you’ll find a list of people that indicated they “love shopping” in their bio on Twitter.
Basically intext:”bio*xxxx” tells Google to search for text within the Twitter bio section. So replace xxxx with whatever you like that matches to what your target customer may put in their Twitter bio.
Now that you know from your Google Insights that shoppers in New York have the most interest in searching for dresses, how do we target people who loves to shop and lives in New York?
This is what you put in
intext:bio-*-love shopping intext:location-*-NY
Notice that there is a minor tweak to the search input. You will need to add – in between the * mark. So intext:bio-*-xxxx intext:location-*-xx where the xx is now searches within that state. Give it a try and you’ll find extremely targeted individuals
I don’t usually do detailed step by step posts, but I had repeatedly explain this to many business owners and marketers so I thought to share some of my tips to help you find your customers online.
I hope you find the above information helpful and it’s a very useful way to build your customer segmentation list.
I hope this helps you to set up your social media “listening station.”
And if you like to learn more tips like this, sign up for Profitable Knowledge FREE course below!