I saw a video on the State of Social CRM post on Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang in which Paul Greenberg talks about how companies are having difficulties with cultural changes internally to execute against the new bread of customer, the social customer. In case you don’t know what CRM is, it’s Customer Relationship Management as described in Wikipedia as a “technology that allows companies to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.”
What an ear full!
My version would be just an application that keeps track of customer facing activities so you can find the gaps in your service and make adjustments to be more efficient.
The point both Jeremiah and Paul are making is that businesses are still figuring out how to integrate CRM and Social Media so the combination provides meaningful business value. The shift in how customers use social media is forcing companies to add the social element into their CRM system. They’re both spot on.
It also raises the question that if you’re not in the business of generating value and serving to keep the customer, then what are you in business for?
Social media encourages interaction which leads to generating a new type of intelligence that CRM system were not tracking before. Data such as reactions, activities, sentiments, locations, behavior and preference are converging providing a never seen before clear picture of each customer.
So how does this change the dynamics of your business moving forward?
Well, for one thing you have more leverage as a result of having more available data to target your niche and identify your prospects. In fact, as social CRM matures, I would expect to see companies shift their corporate strategy to ensure that every aspect of customer touch point is aligned with their marketing and sales strategy. And this is the reason why it requires a true “cultural” change, a mindset really, for businesses to not just think from the perspective of their customer but to become their customer, to feel and empathize with them.
Furthermore, this would mean that the employees may have to do the same by constantly thinking and enhancing the customer experience to the fullest. Instead of just using tools to do sentiment analysis by listening in on what customers are saying, companies can anticipate what customers will say and do before they’ve done it.
Checkout how Salesforce is making their CRM social with Twitter.
This would probably be the ideal desire outcome for most businesses: to proactively facilitate prospects and customers toward a market funnel and minimize customer frustration as problems are addressed before they happen.
Imagine a prospect is interested in finding out more about your product before a purchase, not only would you be able to answer questions using social CRM data to anticipate them, but to personalize your communication and create real-time offering to increase the rate of conversion.
By delivering relevant communication crafted with exactly what the customers want at the right place at the right time, this will be the next phase of effective social influence marketing.
The take away: It is important to recognize this emerging trend in CRM and social media. Even though a cultural shake out would be necessary for companies to fully utilize the benefits of social CRM, it would be wise to start making some basic evaluation of how going social may impact your operations and bottom line. What’s needed to make that jump and if you’re already using a CRM system, think how you can rally your staff to start thinking about new marketing processes and research more on how you can streamline social media into your CRM.
Social media is changing how businesses find customers and how customers engage with brands. There are many reasons to believe that it will eventually overtake email marketing, but I’m a firm believer that it’s here to stay. In fact, I believe email marketing combine with search (SEO) and social media will the best strategy moving forward.
However; let me get a few things straight. First, email is the original social network. Second, you need email to open social network account and get alerts. And third, search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) will continue to index and aggregate social network data not to mention most social network has their own internal search engine as well.
It sounds like there is a lot of cross-over between the three, so how should you use these three tactics to help you strategize your marketing efforts? It’s hard to realize how these tactics can impact your business without some basic understanding of the big three. Let’s look at how each works and what you can do to get the most bang for your marketing bucks.
The Big Three #1 – Email Marketing
Why email – Today it’s hard to find someone without an email account and majority of account holders have had it for a while (I still check my hotmail from 14 years ago) thus letting it go is not likely for most. Account holders may reduce the time they spent on email but it doesn’t have the abandon rate (Facebook, Twitter) like majority of the social networks.
Almost all basic business communications are done via email not via social networks. The perception is that it’s more secure, private and user friendly (centralized contacts, integrates with calendar, easily accessible via mobile devices). Simply put, people will use what’s easy to achieve the same goal – to get work done and to communicate. Another benefit of email is that it’s a direct private channel of communication to alert customers on new product offerings or promotions. At the same time, customers can use e-mail to provide feedback and ask questions.
Done right, you will be kept away from the spam folder and earn a permanent spot on the white list. This is why great email marketers tend to focus on delivering high value content at the right time, with the proper frequency using attractive subjective lines that encourage clicks and forwards.
Building your email list should still be all marketers’ top priority. Give people a reason to subscribe and to remain subscribed is the ongoing art and science of email marketing.
The Big Three #2 – Search Engine Marketing
Why SEO – This one should be a no brainer. What is the first thing you do when you’re looking to buy a product? If you do your homework you would first Google it. This applies to almost anybody looking to learn more about a company, a product or how to do something. Often times, people don’t even question the search results because it’s just easier to trust Google’s rankings and feel good about the decisions you’ve made based on what was found.
It’s no surprise that 79% of United States hiring managers and job recruiters search online information about job applicants according to a recent research commissioned by Microsoft.
This is why smart businesses (and individuals) are putting more emphasis on content marketing and shifting their mindset to operate more like a media company. They understand search engine is catered to “people” and people want relevant, valuable content that’s going to move them a step closer to identify the information they’re searching for.
The key is to create great content around what your customers are interested in when looking for your product; such as how things work (the outcome of your product or services), step-by-step guides or research reports that reveals product comparisons. Then tie these high quality content with relevant keywords and over time you’ll likely to move higher through the non-paid “organic” rankings. And today you can SEO anything from websites, blog posts, videos, images, podcasts you name it.
SEO is one of the key marketing arsenals especially for retailers, direct marketers and authors. The latest Internet Retailer Survey (some sample data below) clearly shows a growing interest and investment in search to drive more online sales. It’s not a matter of why, but how.
There is simply too much information and too little time. Search engine is our instant gratification to today’s ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder) society.
The Big Three #3 – Social Media
Why Social – If search engine is a way for people to find information, then social media is a way for people to find conversations and be part of them. It adds the credibility fuel to the fire of trust since social media is basically word-of-mouth. Instead of just believing in what you read from company websites or reviews you found online, you can talk to people you trust or listen to experts you follow. Similar to search, you can get people to your site with social media, and it’s a great tool to tell customer stories, demonstrate expertise, and stack up your social proof to win business from competitors.
The goal is to connect with customers on an ongoing basis to further understand their needs, wants and concerns. This will help you to build strong, lasting and engaging relationships with your customers for future business as well as referral opportunities by getting people to share your products on social networks to bring in traffic and find new customers.
And since social media is word-of-mouth, it’s your brand’s reputation on the line. Your digital reputation is your first impression and perception is reality.
How The Big Three Can Work Together
Although you can choose to only do one or two of the three, but to get the most out of your marketing investments, you should consider doing all three.
Here are a few ideas to consider on how to leverage the big three:
1) Create Once, Recycle Many- Focus on content not just promotions and sales, it’s about facilitating people through the sales cycle. People usually don’t buy base on just one piece of data think of it as adding “trust points” to people’s decision to buy. If prospects consumed a great piece of educational content on your landing page, that’s one point. If they read some great reviews about your product from a third party site, that’s another point. If there is more positive comments than negative ones about your brand in social networks, that’s another point. The goal is to accumulate enough trust so prospects feel good about why they’ve made the decision over you than others.
You want to invest your time and money on creating the best blog content, how-to articles, educational videos, whitepapers or anything that will get your audience to bookmark, download and share. Then make sure you optimize the content for search engine with the proper keywords and deliver them to the right people in your target channel via email and social networks.
For example let’s say you have a really good article on how to do something (try not to involve your product first, focus on solving the problem then introduce your product later when appropriate), you can package it in a downloadable PDF put it on a landing page that’s highly optimize for SEO. Then abstract the summary from the content for your email newsletter so you can send your subscribers to that very same landing page, a typical web marketing campaign. But let’s take it a step further by turning that piece of content into a video (using screen capture tools like Camtasia, or with a webcam or FlipVideo) and upload it to YouTube, Ustream or Vimeo to drive traffic back to your landing page. Then post the video on your blog, tweet it out via Twitter, send it to relevant groups on LinkedIn or submitted to social network sites like Technorati, Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. Continue to produce great content and after 3-6 month you can recycle that piece of content with some updates and do it again.
2) Streamline with Process – Think about how your customers consume information and respond to connections. It’s NOT jamming the information down their throat like traditional one-way push advertising but allowing them to discover and get permission to establish a relationship. Talk to your customers, ask them what they read, who influence them and why? Understand what they don’t care about (don’t be surprise if it’s a lot of what you do) is just as important as what they care (a lot of what you should know). If you make the wrong assumption it will bring you the false conclusion which will impact on how you strategize your campaign.
For example if you know your customer reads certain blogs regularly, should you advertise on their site or is it better to build a relationship with the blogger? Once you’ve made your decision, focus on identifying the path to your web properties. Take out a piece of paper and map out that path and create a process to streamline every possible step that your customer may take so you can funnel them via your sales pipeline.
Remember, not everyone consumes media the same way, some people like to read while others prefer to watch videos or listen to a podcast. It’s important to have as many media options as possible available to maximize engagement opportunities.
3) Target, Track and Repeat – Without the right data you won’t know where to focus your marketing efforts and no accountability in your actions. What happens after your prospect conducts a search? What actions were taken after consuming your content? Was it shared on Facebook or forwarded to a colleague?
The biggest benefit from tracking your email, search and social media analytics is that you will be able to tie them all together and figure out your ROI. You’ll know where your site visitors are coming from, which email links they clicked on and what gets shared so you can make adjustments to improve conversion rates. Why continue to do something that doesn’t work? You need to know so you can keep doing what works and stop doing what doesn’t. Perhaps Facebook is not the best social network to target your audience or is it because your marketing messages aren’t resonating with them? Marketers must aggregate customer behavior information to build a holistic view of the customer.
This means analyzing quantitative data to measure and monitor customer-related metrics such as customer attrition rate, customer retention rate, number of products purchased, repeat purchases, likelihood to recommend, etc. When you have the right customer insights, you’re in a position to address customer needs, improve processes (to shorten the sales cycle), and to maintain a strong connection for an opportunity to turn customers into fans and fans to brand evangelists.
Do Your Homework, Fish Where Fish Are
Before you start, you should learn where your customers are at, the tools they use and why. This allows you to make better informed decisions and build a framework for your assumptions before you jump in. You can find some valuable research data from the internet and here are two examples I’ve found.
First is the Morgan Stanley Internet Trends Analysis, which has a lot of in-depth information about all things internet, mobile, cloud computing, email, social networks and more. (Check out slide 12 on social networking vs email usage).
The second report is from Edison Research on “Everything You Need To Know About Who’s Using Twitter.” I found it particularly interesting that people actually go to Twitter to learn about products, far more than they do with other social networks. (51% of active Twitter users follow companies, brands or products on social networks)
The take away: Email marketing, search engine optimization and social media are all great, but it takes a combination of know-how and creativity to get people just to open your e-mail, to click on your search results or to retweet your messages. Business owners and marketers need to have some technical knowledge of what methods produce positive results. Your goal should be to have a mix and balance of the big three utilizing content strategy that is useful and easy to share.
Think like a publisher, not only do you have to figure out ways to engage your subscribers (and to remain subscribed) but also prospects, people on the fence and try to sway influencers your way. Yes, it’s time consuming like what Jay Baer mentioned recently but think of it as investing in your customers, you get what you put in. It’s easy to setup your email newsletter, social network accounts and have SEO gurus optimizing your site, those are executions of tactics NOT strategy.
First, learn before you start, listen before you talk and research before you decide. You’re better off investing your marketing dollars to build your own targeted database (and customer segmentation!) with accurate information.
Questions on email marketing, search engine optimization or social media? Drop me a comment below.
There has been a few interesting development recently on the social web specifically with Facebook replacing the ‘become a fan’ phrase with a ‘Like button‘ and launching ‘Community Pages‘; expect all mainstream websites to gradually adopt the like button enabling visitors to see if their friends or family like the content (peer influence) as well as the number of people liking something. The other news is Twitter’s new tool that allows tweets to be directly embedded on third-party sites, making it easier to quote and share content .
This growing trend of the web becoming social will continue to encourage people to use it social. The more social the web gets, the more conversations it generates resulting in a permanent record of everything and anything people talk about, including your brand. Even if you’re not online or don’t have an online business, internet will continue to record down what people say about your brand.
And reputation is word-of-mouth thus it will only benefit your business if you include your community in defining your brand. So how can brands take control of their reputation via the social web?
One solution is through community building, the foundation of your brand’s reputation.
What’s In A Community?
Think of your community as a single platform where people can all gather to interact with your brand and each other expressing their opinions about your products and services. You don’t need thousands or even hundreds of people to start a community, it can be started with just a few people with the same interest and are willing to participate.
When building a community consider the following groups that makes up the community ecosystem:
Prospects – Interested in your product or want to learn more about it Customers - Made a purchase already Employees - Individuals that works for you and/or stakeholders Vendors - You bought from them (suppliers, service providers, operating expenses) Partners - Companies or individuals that you have business relationship with, a reseller or distributor of your products Media - Journalist or publications that covers your industry or your product category Regulators - Authorities or individuals that regulates your industry, could be government or non-government
If you’ve been in business for a while, you should be familiar with the groups above. The idea of having your own online community is to centralize communication via a single platform where you can empower members of your communities to interact with each other and engage with your brand.
How Communities Benefit Brands
Why would companies want to spend time, resources and money on building their community? The answer is simple, community defines your brand, demonstrates social proof and creates business opportunities.
Defining your brand - So instead of trying to control how you want people to see your brand, the ideal approach is to become part of that process by providing a dedicated community. A platform that allows prospects, customers, peers, colleagues and stakeholders to interact with each other, ask questions about your products, comment on their service experience or simply give praises. This is why brands are uniting their customers and fans online using platforms such as an online discussion forum, a Facebook Fan Page, or a LinkedIn Group as their primary ‘homebase’ to build their community. It’s fast, simple and easy to do.
In addition you can expand the community offline or locally adding tools such as Meetup.com, Amiando or Eventbrite. The goal is to provide easy access across multiple channels for your fans to hangout and express their feelings and ideas about your brand.
Social Proof and influence -The best way to change people’s behaviors is through peers that they trust and/or respect. Done right, your community will become one of your most powerful marketing vehicle helping you sell via conversations and defending your brand during crisis. This is also an emerging trend as many brands are leveraging customers and employees as brand advocates to help spread the “brand voice.” If prospective customers read some comments on how great your services are and sees many happy customer feedbacks (via your Facebook wall, Yelp, Amazon or blog), you’re likely to move them further down the sales cycle not to mention the information can be used for marketing as well as support reference.
Even Toyota is bouncing back from it’s PR nightmare because the brand still has a strong following and they’ve earned their customer’s trust over a long time. This is why sports fans are loyal to their teams and often go to the distance to defend their teams/players because they are part of a specific team’s fan community.
Opportunities to improve – Another benefit of building an online community is over time your community will accumulate enough information to enable you to abstract valuable insights to improve your products, services and reputation. One of the more popular approach is using crowdsourced data to help craft marketing campaigns and get the community involve to deepen the trust and create brand awareness.
And with those that are concern about negative word of mouth? My recommendation is to have a plan in place so you can respond in a timely matter with the right social media and crisis management policies. This way, when things go south, you can quickly pinpoint the problem and identify the proper solution to resolve the issue. In fact, it’s an opportunity to turn negative buzz to strengthen the relationship with customers.
As for managing the community it really depends on how your organization is structured for customer engagement. For example, during presale you can task your sales team to answer pre-sale questions and have your customer support staff responsible for postsale engagement. Then categorize and archive the Q&As to be used in the future for prospectives and customers. You can import them into your CRM system or publish them as FAQs.
Keep in mind that managing the community should not be limited to the marketing department, in fact, the marketing department should help facilitate the interaction to improve the brand experience by providing insights abstracted from the community to other department. Product engineers can learn how customers are using the product, sales staff can identify the main concerns of prospective customers and marketers can better position and communicate more effectively.
If your organization needs to hire a community manager, I highly recommend following the Community Maturity Model by The Community RoundTable, a private peer network for community managers and social media practitioners.
According to The Community RoundTable, “this model does two things. First, it defines the eight competencies we think are required for successful community management. Second, it attempts – at a high level – to articulate how these competencies progress from organizations without community management that are still highly hierarchical to those that have embraced a networked business ecosystem approach to their entire organization.”
This is an excellent way of looking at what’s necessary to build a serious, large scale community. As for small businesses, I recommend to simply focus on 1 or 2 of the competencies below that aligns with your business objectives and just keep working at it. Use a systematic approach to nurture your community and determine how it impacts your business.
Are you ready to start building your online community? Here is 3 areas to think about:
1) Intent vs Outcome – Know why you’re doing this, what the community is about and be prepared to respond to unexpected outcomes. Create policies and define a clear purpose also helps to motivate members by giving meaning to participation and build collaborative work by providing a common focus. With clarity, members will define the purpose on a common ground to grow the community. Once trust and respect are earned from the community, members will be more incline to be loyal to your brand and what you stand for which should be beyond just a profit-making machine. It’s a commitment between the community and its members. Your reward as a business should be fueled by the appeal you have with the community.This is why a growing number of companies are investing in content marketing by publishing free resources to influence the perception of brand value and demonstrate expertise.
2) Communicate with Meaning and Authenticity - The key in building a meaningful community is to be authentic and stay true to you brand. If you ask your customers what your brand means and you don’t like the answer, perhaps you need to rethink your brand strategy, marketing communication and your corporate culture. Effective communities develop leadership teams, equip and deploy members for action, understand and engage with their community purpose to achieve impact. Besides, if you already have customers out there, they may be waiting for you to provide a platform to speak.
Companies are humanizing themselves and to be human is to have a personality. You must accept that you will make mistakes and not everyone is going to like your personality. However, you should be able to demonstrate expertise in whatever it is that you provide via free education and resources.
If you say what you mean and mean what you say, your community will be on your side.
3) Serve First, Sell Later – The perception of an expert is not only to have invaluable knowledge but a positive reputation. Focus on the needs of your members by making things as easy and frictionless as possible. It’s a team effort, the community as a whole never just about one person but a collective effort to keep the community going. The bottom line is community builds trust and it’s not related to making money.
Focusing on financial gain leads to short-term decisions based on cost that’s not sustainable for the future. A focus on the community (or the customer), on the other hand, can lead to happy customers, employees, and partners.
I thought this TEDtalk by Derek Silvers on “how to make a movement” was an interesting way to think about building a community for your brand and why leadership may be over glorified. The video is about 3 minutes long.
The take away: Brands have customers and when these customers have reasons beyond the product and services that they sell, there is a cause. That cause is what motivates people to connect and spread your brand’s idea. The greater the commitment to a cause the greater the commitment to the community. Like the great American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.”
Whether it’s in a social network or a weekly local meeting, ALL brands should consider fostering relationships through community building. For me, I have my blog and Facebook Page to build my community.
Do you have a platform to grow your community? Where should your customer go when they want to be part of what you do and what you believe in?
After my last post on “How to use Google and Twitter to Find your Customers,” I’m following up on how to abstract value to improve your ideas; whether it’s for your marketing research or product innovation, the intention for gathering these data should NEVER be for spamming but to help integrate your value proposition into what people are truly interested in.
If you can become part of what people are interested in, you will have a better chance of connecting. Therefore it’s best to utilize permission marketing when executing your communication strategy. Getting more data is great, but it’s not intended so you can just add more people to your weekly email blast. Making quantitative analysis can help you create interesting ideas that differentiate your brand and drive actions.
So how can social media create opportunities for you?
Understand The Social Network Ecosystem
First, learn how each social network ecosystem works and the habits of the emerging “social consumers.” Think of each social network as a town and the ecosystem is basically the infrastructure of the town. Knowing how each social network is used is like having the map of the town. Once you have knowledge of the streets around town, the next step is to find and connect with your customers. This is where my last post comes in handy, if you can identify a social consumer online, he or she is more likely to have multiple social networking accounts which can help you to further profile your target audience. This is especially helpful if you use a CRM (Customer Relationships Management) system such as GoldMine, Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.
Let’s look at B2C (business-to-consumers) social consumers; these are people that are willing to share their personal information on social networks engaging in activities such as updating their Facebook status, displaying their locations on Foursquare, leave their product reviews on Amazon or restaurant reviews on Yelp. If you apply the Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule, you can expect the power users represent 20% of the users that’s generating 80% of the activities. Accordingly to the latest study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, “consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers…The study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch.”
The idea is to focus more on the power users that command influence within the social networks. Keep in mind connecting with “medium” and “light” users also helps to earn social proof and trust via the long-tail.
For B2B (business-to-business) the leading examples are LinkedIn, BusinessInsider, StockTwits, OpenForum by AmericanExpress and BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange to see how businesses building communities that connects and shares information. They represent how social network can be utilize to build a community by providing practical value whether it’s a piece of software, platform, resource center or networking destination, they give back in return to what participants put in.
I recommend doing some in-depth research to get useful data on demographics of your target audience. Then identify the appropriate social network(s) that fits your demographics to go after. The key to success will be your understanding of how your target social consumers think, act and make decisions. What and who influence them? How much research was done prior to the purchase? What was the second or third option?
Implementing Accountability and ROI
Now that you’ve got your customer profiles and social network(s) identified, what’s next? For businesses serious about ROI (return on investment), it’s time to increase accountability of your marketing efforts.
You can do this by using existing data or the customer insights from your research (profiling, surveys, CRM) to create campaign projections, a realistic goal that you aim for. Then create a mix of financial and nonfinancial metrics that you NEED to measure, not what you can measure. This is to help you understand how your marketing activities impact the bottom line and how you can optimize them by doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
Make sure you track your marketing cost as well as where the money is coming from to justify true ROI and conduct performance analysis. How much does it cost to run a local campaign vs. national campaign? What results are you getting targeting moms instead of kids? Can you compare the effectiveness of your marketing investments in direct marketing and affiliate marketing?
Another great use of these valuable customer data is to share the insights with your customer service representatives, sales staffs, product development engineers, design teams, or anyone that will benefit from them. If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch. If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products. If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.
You can also involve them in the insight generation process to help increase the adoption and with regular distribution of these insights, everyone will take part to improve your business incrementally.
Ultimately you want to have a holistic view of your customer data so not only do you know what they’ve purchased, but also what they think about your industry, how they talk about your brand, and why they react to your campaign a certain way.
Simply put, it all comes down to keeping up with the shifts in how people think and act as well as the technologies used. If you’re unable to keep up then outsource part of your social media efforts to marketers, consultants or agencies; but make sure you understand the implications.
Here is an short and excellent report on how social media influences paid search by GroupM Research.
The take away: The key to effective marketing communications is to have a solid brand strategy. It’s indicative that social media must work together as an integrated whole of your brand strategy because your brand lives day-to-day in communication platform such as sales presentations, company brochures, product packaging and now the semantic web. Synchronizing these efforts assures consistent communication of your brand’s strategy, helping to create brand awareness and recognition of who you are and why you matter.
Moving forward, there will be an increase demand for marketing ROI as more data becomes available and new measuring tools are developed. As always, focus on the signal instead of the noise, maximize the value of social media to improve your business beyond marketing.
What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts and feel free to share your ROI metrics.
he study also uncovered perceptions among consumers that those brands not engaging in social media are out of touch. When asked the question “What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?” they said the following:
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?
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.
If you’ve got questions or better way to use these tools, feel free to share them here.
