October 26th, 2007

Social Media - Bigger is NOT necessarily Better !!

andy in Small Business, Social Marketing

When discussing Social Media Optimisation, the big social sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us, almost always come up, but search marketers should consider  spending some time learning
about some of the smaller niche social media sites - sometimes called - micro communities.

For some businesses, search engine optimisation (SEO) or pay-per-click
(PPC) advertising simply may not be enough. SEO can take a long time, and PPC prices continue to become more and more competitive. In some high profile markets, it simply may not be practical for a smaller business to compete. Niche social media sites have the potential to
help drive a higher volume of traffic than some of the more traditional methods can achieve.

At the recent SMX Social Media
conference, SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin and Liana Evans from KeyRelevance discussed the concept of micro communities,
and how they could be used to drive traffic to niche sites.

At SMX Social Media, Liana Evans presented a case study for a site offering meal replacement products.  They had poor organic ranking results (except for their business name), and had spent tens of thousands of dollars on PPC - with very few inquiries and no sales as a result.  Liana
worked with the client to implement a social media campaign focused on bloggers of sites that discuss ways to lose weight.  The concept was to reach these people, and
see if they would be interested in trying the meal replacement product - for free.  

The
results of this micro community campaign were far superior to the original PPC campaign.
They were delivered hundreds of trials, got hundreds of dollars in
direct sales, got good brand exposure, and even received a number of
links with the resulting SEO benefits as a bonus.

OK, so
how do you find the right social site, with the right target audience
for your project?
One obvious way to achieve this is to use the search engines, naturally.

Rand Fishkin also suggests the following as a sample of niche communities:

Arts & Design

  • deviantART - focused on the arts
  • Urbis - artist and design community
  • ThinkVitamin - for web designers, developers,
    and entrepreneurs
  • SportsShooter - for sports photographers
  • threadless -
    t-shirt designs community
  • VIRB - art and design of all kinds (including web design)

Business

Food & Wine

  • BakeSpace - share and swap baking recipes
  • FoodCandy - network for talking about food
  • Cork’d - one near and dear to my
    heart, review, cellar, and share wine

Health & Wellness

Kids & Parenting

  • DonorChoose - community for public and private schools
  • Minti - parenting
  • imbee - Facebook for kids 7 - 13

Shopping

Other

  • Care 2 - community for non profits and charities
  • Librarything - share and review
    books
  • Wayfaring - create and share maps
  • CouchSurfing - network of
    people offering up couches to sleep on for travelers
  • Helium - human powered knowledge portal


If you are careful about choosing the right micro community, the traffic is likely to be much more focused on your niche, than you could hope to achieve at a traditional social media megasite.

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August 14th, 2007

Do You Really Know Your Target Market ?

andy in Internt Marketing, Social Marketing

Do you have a very clear understanding of your customers ? Do you know who they are; what they like; where they live; what at else they buy; and what they like about your products ?

Perhaps more importantly what do you know about the visitors to your site (or shop) - who don’t actually end up buying a product. What encouraged them to visit (or pop in), but didn’t entice them to buy ? Were they really potential customers at all ?

If you don’t know who your target market is - if you don’t understand who your best prospects are (and I mean if you don’t know everything about them) - you’ll end up wasting a lot of blood, sweat and tears (not to mention time and money) marketing to those who will never buy from you.

Of course, you may be targeting several markets. But if you can’t properly identify all your audiences, you’ll almost certainly end up chasing after the wrong crowd. You’ll waste your time promoting your products and services to someone who, was never really interested anyway.

Spending some time and effort very carefully defining your customer and thinking outside the box for who might be potential customers can be very a powerful exercise. One of my clients recently doubled annual sales once they realised their best target market was actually one they had never considered would be interested in their products.

So, what are your best target markets? Can you clearly define them? Can you get narrower in your description? How are you addressing each in your marketing communications? Do you truly understand their objectives, key pain points and potential buying objections?

Whether your products sell for $10 or $1 million, make sure you’re absolutely clear about who’s going to “get it.” Then, go to market with a message that each of your clearly defined target markets can relate to.

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