3 Online Marketing Tools To Deeply Understand Your Audience
Marketing, whether online or offline, revolves around your people, what we here call your WHO (see Online Marketing - A Love Story for a definition and the fundamentals). Therefore, we are going to go over 3 awesome tools to understand your market so that you know exactly what their desires are and how to serve them better.
Before we dive into the tools, let me tell you a true story that has recently broken my heart. This is the story of Christine, a woman only with a "vision" and no idea about marketing. She built an apartment complex for retirees here in the south of Germany (where I happen to be living right now) because her vision was to create a community where they could all live together, help each other and get her coaching.
It is really a sad story because after a very considerable investment, it bombed. Nobody wanted to leave their home and move to her community, no matter how intense her marketing efforts.
What can we learn from this story? We need to understand our people first before we design our services and products. Marketing is in essence about people.
Hot Marketing Strategy
Whether you choose the Internet as your marketing medium or you use other media, start with your market.
These are some of the most important questions you should be able to answer about them. The better you are able to answer them about your market, the more money you are going to be able to make helping people.
- What is their biggest dream?
- What is their irrational passion?
- What is their pain?
- What is their bigger fear?
- What do they Google?
- Who do they follow?
- Where do they hangout together?
- What associations do they belong to?
- How can you reach them tomorrow?
- What solutions are they proactively looking for?
- What are they already paying good money for?
- Who is already selling them the most stuff?
Web marketing tools for small businesses
Small business owners don't have the marketing budget of big corporations but that doesn't mean that you should skip marketing research, especially in this day and age when search engines, like Google, Yahoo and Bing, provide us with invaluable research tools and most of them are absolutely free.
Today we are going to concentrate on 3 very powerful tools to help you deeply understand your market.
1) Google Keyword Planner - https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home
This is Google's latest tool and it replaces Google Keyword Tool. You can check your ideas and see what people are actually searching for as well as how many searches there are per month. (You can even see how much the other market players are already paying to advertise).
NOTE: to get access to this tool you need to have an Adwords Account, which is free.
Once you have logged in, go to the TOOLS AND ANALYSIS menu and select KEYWORD PLANNER. Click on SEARCH FOR KEYWORD AND ADWORD IDEAS and under YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE type the topic you want to research. Press GET IDEAS and select the KEYWORD IDEA tab.
This video shows you how it works:
2) Alexa - http://www.alexa.com/
This tool shows you:
- how popular a website is;
- how engaged the visitors are;
- who visits the website;
- visitors by country;
- where the visitors come from, ie. on which website they were before they came;
- where the visitors go next;
- what sites link to this website;
- what sites are related to this website;
- and more!
You can find out the websites of the big market players and use Alexa to discover the profile of their visitors.
3) Quantcast - https://www.quantcast.com/
It allows you to search sites for demographic and traffic statistics. In other words, Quantcast provides insights with geographic, demographic and lifestyle details of the audience of a certain website.
15 Hot Online Marketing Tools
These online marketing research tools help you to find out where your audience is online and what they are already investing in.
- Google Keyword Planner
- Alexa.com
- Quantcast.com
- Keywordspy.com
- Spyfu.com
- Facebook (search)
- Twitter (search)
- YouTube (search)
- Amazon
- 43things.com
- Socialmention.com
- Freekeywords.wordtracker.com
- Google Trends
- Yahoo groups
- Boardreader.com (to find forums,etc.)
One Last Extra Marketing Tip
Set aside a block of time and start your market research. Set a timer and focus on understanding your audience. This activity can take as much time as you decide to devote to it, so set your timer. Know, however, that it is a process and you will always be updating your results.
In our next post we are going to talk about what to actually do with the results of your research.
Till then keep building a business to be proud of!
Ana