A little while back we did some work with a company’s web analytics data. Their online revenue had doubled, and they wanted to know why. The answer to the question was not obvious, and only after extensive analysis did it present itself. It’s useful to see the process of how to use web analytics to come to a conclusion. The analysis was written up on the Tableau Software blog; you can read the entire story here.
Today’s market is transparent. With the advent and popularity of web 2.0, everything your company does can be tracked, recorded, discussed, and reviewed. And all of that information is freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
Because the market is going to get more and more transparent as the tools of web 2.0 continue to grow in popularity, increasingly marketing is not going to be about the message you engineer and send out through advertisements. Increasingly, marketing is going to be about who you are (or perhaps better said, who your company is). You will be defined by how you do business, how you treat your customers, and the quality of your products and services.
It’s not going to be about what you think your company is, or how you seek to portray it through advertisements. Batman got it right; it’s what you do that will define you.
How are you defining yourself?
Seth Godin recently explained a principle he calls “First, Ten.” An interesting idea of this principle is that spending time with the few in order to reach the many is, in fact, more effective than spending time with the many to reach the many.
The Magical Penny
We all remember the trick we were taught in elementary school. Go home and ask your parents if they will give you a penny on the first day of the month, and then double it every day for just that month. Day two is 2 cents, day three is 4 cents, and so on. In return you would promise never to ask for any more money, as long as you lived.
A penny doubling for a month, at first consideration, seems harmless. Until we do the math. As it turns out, under this system of payment you end up receiving over $10 million on the final day of the month. What began as a lowly penny has turned into a fortune.
The “First, Ten” Principle
Let’s get back to Seth’s advice. He says the following:
“Find ten people. Ten people who trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you…
Those ten people need what you have to sell, or want it. And if they love it, you win. If they love it, they’ll each find you ten more people (or a hundred or a thousand or, perhaps, just three).”
Now we’ll make some assumptions and do some analysis on this idea. First, you spend a week finding 10 people. Now, let’s say in the next week, each of those 10 people brings you just one more person each. Now you’re at 20. Let’s say the same thing happens the next week, bringing you to 40. Continuing on, we will have over 5,000 people in 10 weeks, over 150,000 in 15 weeks, and over 5 million in 20 weeks.
Now consider the quality of these potential customers – they didn’t hear the message from an advertisement or from you (except the original 10); they heard it from a third party source that they knew. And that makes them that much more likely to trust you and become a customer.
Focusing On The Few
Our quick analysis shows that this can be an extremely effective, albeit somewhat unconventional, way to market. Have you ever considered taking an entire week, and focusing on finding and marketing to just 10 people? Take all the work and time you would have spent designing advertisements, sending copy through various marketing channels, optimizing online ad campaigns, and all other marketing activites, and spend that time instead focusing on just 10 people.
Spend time finding the right ten. Spend time explaining your product and service, showing it to them, letting them test it, and answering all their questions. Spend time getting their feedback, allowing them to become more invested. Spend the time necessary to gain their trust and respect. Forget about all other marketing efforts for the week. Your only goal, by the end of the week, is to have 10 evangelists for your company.
Assuming your product or service is worth something and really does provide value to these people, you are about to have a lot of business on its way.
For any business that has not yet heard of groupon.com, it’s definitely worth your consideration. They use the power of collective buying to deliver a great value proposition to both consumers and businesses. Businesses get risk free advertising, new customers, and increased revenue; consumers get great deals and find out about new products and services that interest them. The groupon site does a great job of describing the process; check it out their video here.
Not only is using groupon a great business tool in and of itself, but it’s also interesting from a market research standpoint. Want to gauge the demand for a new product or service? Want to see if your product will sell to a new demographic? Want to see if an expansion of services will help or hinder your value proposition? You can do this all risk-free using groupon’s services.
You can set up any promotional, targeted at any audience, for free. If there’s no demand, then you don’t pay anything. If there is demand, then groupon just gets a cut of the revenues you earn from the promotional. What’s more, you can track how many new customers come from the groupon promotional and who they are. This will give you data on the amount of demand and the customer base so you can successfully implement further marketing efforts.
The average person reads between 200-250 words per minute. If you’re trying to do marketing with any kind of written message, you need to be aware of this.
How much time do people have to give you? How long is your message in relation to that time? If it’s too long, work it down and use clearer, more precise language. Forget the fluff, and get to the point.
(If you’re average, this post took you about 20 seconds to read. Reasonable?)
Being human is an important part of being a marketer. And generally, the people that are best at being human are the ones that are good at being grateful. So how good are you when it comes to gratitude for others? Take a look at this metric:
Number of times you’ve said thank you / Number of times you’ve been helped = Your level of gratitude
According to this math, if the ratio equals “1”, you are perfectly grateful. Except you’re not. Saying thank you is nice, but real gratitude involves more than just talking. Let’s improve our equation:
Number of times you’ve helped / Number of times you’ve been helped = Your level of gratitude
Now, a score of “1” would indicate perfect gratitude. Except it still doesn’t. Are we really able to calculate this metric with exactness? Let’s look at this equation:
Number of times you have been helped that you know of / Total number of times you have been helped = Your level of awareness
No one will ever earn a score of “1” on this metric. We are forgetful, we lose track, we tend to focus on the negative more than the positive, and we just aren’t aware of everything that happens or has happened. Can you calculate the number of things your parents have done for you? Not likely; a numerous amount of them happened when you were a baby. How about calculating how much sacrifice has gone into making your country free? Again, it’s impossible. And these two examples say nothing about the things that are done for us day by day that we simply don’t know about.
The point is, we are all in a great deal of gratitude debt. So much so, that even if we spent our whole lives being grateful in every way we knew how, we’d never get it paid off. So why bother calculating it?
Well, we shouldn’t. We have learned our lesson from trying to calculate it. And that lesson is that we need to be more grateful than we think we should be. Because in the final analysis, even that will end up being less than we really should be.
Showing gratitude, being helpful, and adding value are good marketing practices. More importantly, they’re good human practices.
How much mindshare of a specific term do you own online? In other words, what percentage of searchers online find out about you when they type in their search query?
If you’re talking about a broad search term, such as ‘sandwich,’ then you probably don’t own a lot. If you’re talking about a specific term like ‘low cost sandwich shop in Pocatello, Idaho,’ then you have a chance at owning quite a bit.
Sandwich is broad and impossible to own. With a little work, however, you do have the ability to gain significant mindshare for specific, long tail terms. And although these specific terms might get less traffic, it’s better to own most of the mindshare of one of these terms than little or none of a broader, higher trafficked one.
Here’s how you can tell how you’re doing. See what the monthly search volume of a term is with Google Adwords, and then take a look at your website’s analytics to see how much traffic you get to your website for that specific term.
Visitors to your site for term x / search volume for term x = a good estimate of the mindshare you control
And as mindshare goes up, business will improve. So how do you increase this ratio? One question to ask yourself is if you’re following best practices for search engine optimization.
Or, and this is perhaps even more important, you could ask yourself what is it exactly that you have to offer the market that no one else does. What is your specific expertise? What do you do that no one else can? Where are you located, and is that important to what you’re selling?
Find lower volume, long-tail search terms that match your specific differentiation and own them.
There is something to be said about the law of scarcity. In a recent consumer trending report, this was said:
“In 2010, just sell something special, something premium, something desirable in just one (geographical) location. Which means forgoing a chain-wide rollout or selling to all from a borderless e-shop. The limitation this will put on distribution opportunities will be compensated for by enthusiasm, PR and premium prices.”
The shotgun approach is almost never the best way to go. By targeting everyone, you end up getting no one. But if you’re going to target a small audience, you’d better know where to shoot. So where is the one, targeted location that you’re going to roll out your special, premium product or service?
Take a look at Google Insights. Type in some terms related to your product or service, and Google will pull its data together into a visualization to show you where the most demand is located. After typing in a few key terms and taking a look at the results, you should have a pretty good idea of where the people are located you want to target.
A great way to extend your ability to listen and keep tabs on the market is with the use of Google Alerts. With this free service, Google will send you e-mail updates whenever new content gets added to the web that you are interested in. Just enter in the keywords that relate to your industry, and you will receive the relevant alerts.
This is useful for many reasons. Enter a competitor name to track news updates, blog posts, and website additions. You can do the same for your own company name to see what people are saying about your brand. Enter words related to products or services you sell so that you can not only track what the industry is doing, but discover new competitors or potential partners that you haven’t been aware of. Or use the alerts to track job and business opportunities; they are great for getting the heads up on sales leads. You can even use them to track what is being said about people, like company executives.
The one problem with using the Google Alerts system by itself is that if you are tracking many different words and are receiving a large amount of alerts, it becomes a logistical nightmare to try and keep tabs on all of them. Lucky for us, there is a wonderful free service provided by AlertRank that provides for the classification, ranking, and sorting of all of your Google Alerts. This makes it possible to use Google Alerts in an efficient and effective manner; if you haven’t checked it out yet, head over and sign up for a free account. I would also recommend reading through the 5 part series on how to use the system so you can take advantage of all the advanced features.
Have a great business idea? Need to convince the boss to move into a specific market? Need to show a client the market potential your services could offer them? There are numerous free online tools that can be used towards any of these ends.
Let’s just take a simple example and say we’ve invented a revolutionary new fishing fly that outperforms flies currently on the market. Now we need to answer the question of whether or not there is a large enough market to support a business selling such a fly.
Search Interest
We’ll start with search. Head over to Google’s Keyword Tool and type in some terms relative to your business. In this case you might try “fishing fly” or even get more specific with “trout fly” or “streamer flies.” It also helps to search around in Google first and read some sites related to your topic to get more word ideas to input into the tool.
The great thing about the tool is that it not only gives you a long list of related terms, but it also tells you how many people search for each of the terms every month, giving you an indication of how many people could be interested in out business. Go ahead and export all the words into Excel and graph the information to show visually how interested the market is in each specific word.
Location of csv Excel export button
Web Surfer Interest
Now let’s go back to Google search. Type in some of your relevant key words and visit the sites that pop up. Bookmark a few that are the most relevant to the market you are researching, and head over to compete.com. Sign up for a free account, and input the url’s of the sites you found to get an estimate of how many visitors each site gets per month. Important types of sites to put through this type of analysis would be blogs, news sites, ecommerce sites, and informational sites dealing with your given business idea. Below is the one we performed on fishing fly ecommerce sites.
Monthly Traffic Estimates
Another good indicator of web interest is simply how many blogs or web pages that exist that relate to your business idea. How many blogs exist that talk about fishing? Technorati and Blog Catalog are two good places to look. Finding this out also gives you a good idea of how many bloggers you could potentially reach out to so that they will feature your new product and spread it to their readers.
Social Media Interest
Let’s check out interest on Twitter. You can do this by hitting twitter directories such as Twellow and Wefollow to see how many people come up when you search for your key terms. What’s more, you can see how many followers these people have to figure how much influence each would have if they tweeted about your product.
Facebook is another important one to check out – do a search for groups or fan pages related to your business. How many pop up? How many members or fans do they have? Again, this gives you numbers representing people interested in your business that are on Facebook – and the amount of people you could potentially reach through that medium.
Summary
Now you have a decent look at the market potential for your business, and an idea of how many people you could reach using online channels and search optimization. And the entire analysis can be done in about 1 hour, for free.
