How To Stalk Your Customer Online
We all know the importance of customer profiling. You need to understand your customer before you can embark on any type of marketing strategy. You need to know what type of information they value, what problems they need you to solve, and where they spend their time and money.
This is all stuff you've heard before:
What does your target audience look like? Define demographics, socioeconomics, etc. You may have to segment your target audience into a few lists, spending on your business.
Who are the ultimate decision makers? If you're targeting businesses, this can be tricky. If you're selling something for pets or kids, you're going to be targeting Mom.
What problem are you solving for them? What motivates them?
What is your unique value, as a business? What makes you better than the competition, and why should they do business with you?
Once you've been able to answer these questions, and probably more, you'll have a solid understanding of who your target customer is.
But now what? How do you actually find out where these people are, so you are able to connect with them?
This is where some major brainstorming, plus trial and error comes in. The point is that you invest the time now, and develop a strategic approach that you can implement and monitor.
One of the best ways to stalk your customers is to find out what type of conversations people are having online, that are related to what you're doing.
For example, let's say that you sell exercise clothes, like yoga pants, and your target customers are women aged 18-35.
Through our customer profiling exercises, we've determined that we think women aged 18-35 who would purchase exercise clothes are online talking about:
So, we're going to search online for conversations happening based around this language, and see what we can find.
Search engines:
Checking out Google and the other search engines is a great way to find blogs, magazines and forums where your target audience might be. By searching with the actual language they would be using, you'll be able to pull up blog posts and see the online chatter already happening around your niche. This also gives you insight into what type of content your target audience wants to consume, and allows you to gain insight from the competition.
Amazon:
Checking out reviews on Amazon might seem like an odd approach, but the sheer volume of customer reviews are what makes this a great place to dig. One thing I really like doing is looking at book reviews. You can find books related to your topics of interest, such as losing weight or eating healthy. This gives you a lot of information from natural language being used by your target customer, to finding out what type of books and content they like to consume. The reviews are really insightful because people love to complain online, and you can see what type of things they don't like, and what type of information they wanted to see.
Quora:
This is a great place to search for questions related to your business. There are countless questions and answers that can give you tons of information. You can gain insight from the language in the questions being asked, and check out the responders. Get an idea of what type of questions your potential customers have, and take note of how they're answered, and who is answering them.
Reddit:
This site can be really great if there are discussion groups based around your ideal customer's interests. For example, a quick search of "exercise clothes" on Reddit shows me that there is a subreddit called Fitness for Women! with 104,822 subscribers. This is the ideal place to join, search and dig. See what type of things people are talking about, reading about and sharing.
Social Media:
All of your social media platforms will be a major resource in finding out where those ideal customers spend their time. You may find some duplication of the results from your initial Google search, but that just confirms that you're finding the most popular stuff.
Searching on Facebook, for example, can yield results of Facebook groups and pages that are talking about things like exercising and healthy eating. You'll probably find lots of blogs and small communities.
On Twitter, you'll likely find a lot of blogging and influencer chatter. This will help you uncover more blogs but also see what type of conversations are happening around your main areas of interest, and see who the big influencers are in the market. Do they have blogs where they broadcast their messages? Who are the people that follow them?
So now that you've done all this -- and make sure you take plenty of notes and copy down all the URL's that were of interest -- you've gotten a ton of information.
You have a deeper understanding of what your target customer is interesting in, talking about, and what type of content they want to consume.
You now have a list of blogs and books they read.
You now have a list of Reddit and Facebook groups and communities where they hang out.
What are you going to do with this information? Use it, of course.
This knowledge can serve you on many different levels:
You can look at the blogs they read. You can see what type of content is the most popular and talked about, and take a look at who is reading those blogs.
Do these blogs have advertisements on them? Do they have guest posts? Do they do product reviews? Think about all the ways you could get yourself on these blogs, in front of your target customers.
You may have noticed a lot of complaints from customer reviews. This is an opportunity to fill that gap, and create content that fills that need.
Influencer marketing is a huge part of today's online world. Did you find any of them on Twitter, talking about things your ideal customers would be interested in? Take some time to explore this and see how you may be able to connect with them, and become part of the conversation.
Join some of the groups you found. For example, that group on Reddit would be the ideal place to become a part of. You could be there, answering people's questions and even posing your own questions, to create engagement that is genuine. You're not being promotional, rather you become a valuable part of the community and position yourself as an industry expert.
What else can you add to this list? How do you target your own customers online?
This is all stuff you've heard before:
What does your target audience look like? Define demographics, socioeconomics, etc. You may have to segment your target audience into a few lists, spending on your business.
Who are the ultimate decision makers? If you're targeting businesses, this can be tricky. If you're selling something for pets or kids, you're going to be targeting Mom.
What problem are you solving for them? What motivates them?
What is your unique value, as a business? What makes you better than the competition, and why should they do business with you?
Once you've been able to answer these questions, and probably more, you'll have a solid understanding of who your target customer is.
But now what? How do you actually find out where these people are, so you are able to connect with them?
This is where some major brainstorming, plus trial and error comes in. The point is that you invest the time now, and develop a strategic approach that you can implement and monitor.
One of the best ways to stalk your customers is to find out what type of conversations people are having online, that are related to what you're doing.
For example, let's say that you sell exercise clothes, like yoga pants, and your target customers are women aged 18-35.
Through our customer profiling exercises, we've determined that we think women aged 18-35 who would purchase exercise clothes are online talking about:
- wanting to lose weight
- wanting to eat better
- looking for new workout routines
- want to look cute while at the gym
- want to run errands and socialize in their gym clothes too
- sick of dieting
So, we're going to search online for conversations happening based around this language, and see what we can find.
Search engines:
Checking out Google and the other search engines is a great way to find blogs, magazines and forums where your target audience might be. By searching with the actual language they would be using, you'll be able to pull up blog posts and see the online chatter already happening around your niche. This also gives you insight into what type of content your target audience wants to consume, and allows you to gain insight from the competition.
Amazon:
Checking out reviews on Amazon might seem like an odd approach, but the sheer volume of customer reviews are what makes this a great place to dig. One thing I really like doing is looking at book reviews. You can find books related to your topics of interest, such as losing weight or eating healthy. This gives you a lot of information from natural language being used by your target customer, to finding out what type of books and content they like to consume. The reviews are really insightful because people love to complain online, and you can see what type of things they don't like, and what type of information they wanted to see.
Quora:
This is a great place to search for questions related to your business. There are countless questions and answers that can give you tons of information. You can gain insight from the language in the questions being asked, and check out the responders. Get an idea of what type of questions your potential customers have, and take note of how they're answered, and who is answering them.
Reddit:
This site can be really great if there are discussion groups based around your ideal customer's interests. For example, a quick search of "exercise clothes" on Reddit shows me that there is a subreddit called Fitness for Women! with 104,822 subscribers. This is the ideal place to join, search and dig. See what type of things people are talking about, reading about and sharing.
Social Media:
All of your social media platforms will be a major resource in finding out where those ideal customers spend their time. You may find some duplication of the results from your initial Google search, but that just confirms that you're finding the most popular stuff.
Searching on Facebook, for example, can yield results of Facebook groups and pages that are talking about things like exercising and healthy eating. You'll probably find lots of blogs and small communities.
On Twitter, you'll likely find a lot of blogging and influencer chatter. This will help you uncover more blogs but also see what type of conversations are happening around your main areas of interest, and see who the big influencers are in the market. Do they have blogs where they broadcast their messages? Who are the people that follow them?
So now that you've done all this -- and make sure you take plenty of notes and copy down all the URL's that were of interest -- you've gotten a ton of information.
You have a deeper understanding of what your target customer is interesting in, talking about, and what type of content they want to consume.
You now have a list of blogs and books they read.
You now have a list of Reddit and Facebook groups and communities where they hang out.
What are you going to do with this information? Use it, of course.
This knowledge can serve you on many different levels:
You can look at the blogs they read. You can see what type of content is the most popular and talked about, and take a look at who is reading those blogs.
Do these blogs have advertisements on them? Do they have guest posts? Do they do product reviews? Think about all the ways you could get yourself on these blogs, in front of your target customers.
You may have noticed a lot of complaints from customer reviews. This is an opportunity to fill that gap, and create content that fills that need.
Influencer marketing is a huge part of today's online world. Did you find any of them on Twitter, talking about things your ideal customers would be interested in? Take some time to explore this and see how you may be able to connect with them, and become part of the conversation.
Join some of the groups you found. For example, that group on Reddit would be the ideal place to become a part of. You could be there, answering people's questions and even posing your own questions, to create engagement that is genuine. You're not being promotional, rather you become a valuable part of the community and position yourself as an industry expert.
What else can you add to this list? How do you target your own customers online?
-
trobo -
Thanks
{{ DiscussionBoard.errors[10722601].message }} -