customer marketing | Marissa's Picks

Guest Post: Understanding Your Customers by Jenna Hegarty – Adtaxi

As digital advertisers, we are constantly trying to determine the optimal targeting for our SEM efforts. Understanding your customer personas, the profiles that represent your ideal customers, will help you tailor your digital marketing efforts and set your campaign targeting effectively.

While there are a handful of methods you can use to understand your customer base, including market research, surveys, polls, and social listening, one of the best ways is to dive into your site & campaign analytics. Google offers two tools that can help you quickly understand your audience: Google Analytics & Google Ads Audience Insights.

Using Google Analytics for Audience Research

Google Analytics is a rich source of information about your customers. You can see where your site visitors came from, which terms they searched to find you, how much time they spent on the site & more. You can also find valuable information on your customers’ interests, age, gender, location and even which device & browser they used.

Audience Reports in GA

Google Analytics Audience Reports give detailed information about who visited your site. Audience Reports contains over 15 subsections, but we will focus on Demographics & Interests here.

The Demographics report gives you insight into the age and gender of your site visitors, and each demographic group’s behavior on the site. The overview gives you a high level demographic breakdown of users by age and gender, and you can toggle through other key metrics like sessions, bounce rate, and session duration as well. The Age & Gender reports give a more granular look at each age group’s or gender’s behavior on your site, including bounce rate, pages per session, duration, and goal completion.

The Interest report in turn gives you a psychographic view of your audience. Google Analytics segments interests into three categories: Affinity, In-Market, and Other. Affinity includes users with a more general interest in topics, such as “Cooking Enthusiasts” or “Travel Buffs.” In-Market includes those users at the bottom of the funnel who are ready to convert, with more specific segments like “Home Decor” and “Hotel & Accommodations.” Other categories is similar to Affinity, but provides a more granular view, for example “Home & Garden/Bed & Bath/Bedroom/Bedding & Bed Linens.” Like the Demographic overview above, the Interests overview breaks down key metrics by each of the top ten interests in each category, and you can drill down into each category’s report acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics.

Understanding the demographic & psychographic composition of your customers will not only ensure your campaign settings target the users with the highest conversion or goal completion rates, but also inform the creative, ad copy, and overall messaging of your marketing efforts. These reports can also help you gauge whether your campaigns are, in fact, sending the right visitors to your site. You can even use age, gender, and interest segments to create remarketing audiences to use in Google Ads.

Using Google Ads Audience Insights for Audience Research

The Google Ads audience insights tool helps you learn about who your converters and website visitors are, as well as find new audiences to target. Audience Insights is housed in the Shared Library under the Audience Manager.

Google Ads Audience Insights report

The Audience Insights report is a valuable resource for determining where, when, and to whom you should be advertising your products or services to drive conversions for your Gmail, YouTube, & display campaigns, and can also help you choose more relevant keywords & messaging to implement in your search campaigns, set bids, and more. Audience Insights benchmarks your website visitors against the United States on demographics, location, devices and interests. For example, the traffic for one of our clients in home goods retail is 66% more likely to be female and between 35 to 54 years old, 42% more likely to be parents, and 76% more likely to be visiting from a computer than the general US population. We also know that our visitors are 10.3x more likely to be in-market for “Kitchen & Bathroom Counters” and 3.2x more likely to be “Beach Bound Travelers.” Armed with your customer persona, you can leverage your findings and refine your paid media strategy to drive high-value traffic to your site.

Once you’ve created your customer persona, continue to periodically review your data in Google Analytics & Google Ads. Buying habits & preferences can change over time, so it’s important to reevaluate and recreate your personas especially if you’ve gone through new product launches or industry changes.

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Adtaxi is a client-centric digital organization that brings scale, precision, and sophistication to digital marketing. Leveraging the belief that people matter as much as technology, we help advertisers solve complex marketing challenges with custom, performance-driven solutions. Adtaxi just recently won Digiday’s Worklife Award for Most Passionate Employees at an agency!

The World is Changing, How are you Marketing to a Changing Audience? The average person now spends more than 12 hours online everyday! This is great news for marketers because by 2020 over 80% of the buying cycle will be under their control. It also means that marketers will need to better understand the the mindset of online users.

Every 60 Seconds:

98,000+ Tweets are sent

696,000 Facebook status updates

11 million instant messages

698,448 Google Searches

1,820 TB of data created

217 new mobile web users

168+ million emails sent

(Source HP Vertical)

Every 60 seconds over 98,000+ tweets are sent! Talk about a fast paced world! @BMAGlobal15 #BMA15 pic.twitter.com/KuhF7NsOID

— Marissa Pick (@marissapick) May 27, 2015

We need to understand what people want from their content. We live in a crowded marketplace and we need to find innovative ways to put our customers first, cut through the noise, and deliver a good and memorable digital experience.

Is your brand ready? It better be with stats from the one minute snapshot above! We live in a world where people trust peer recommendations more than advertising, and users seek out information online. You MUST ensure your brand has a digital presence, and a strategy for the future.

Below are six tips to keep in mind to help you recharge your marketing:

1) The User Is KING, your customer MUST come first:

Many marketers have always said Content is King, however this year the user is king, and we as marketers must ALWAYS put our customers first. Often we forget that someone is on the other end receiving the experience that we are creating. Marketers often assume because they can do something, that they should do it. It’s important to think about what not to do while considering what we are doing. These decisions matter.

We should focus on delivering clear messages, placing our customer first, and keep our brands messaging simple. Be honest, give them a reason to know you better.

2) Track Your Customers Journey:

Today, brands should be using information to deliver more personalized experience for individual users to help them along in their customer journey. Cookie based tracking now allows a brand to better understand a users mindset and online behavior. Now with the rollout of marketing automation more brands should focus on getting to know their customers and where they are within their buying process to better deliver messages customized to where they are within their journey.

3) Manage Unlimited Channels:

It used to be a simple uncrowded space back in 1960 when there were only a few marketing channels. In 2015 it’s become a crowded space with over 70 channels to choose from! The challenge marketers will face as we continue to expand is that now will have little control over the channel since the power will lie with the user and how they interact with one another without the brand’s involvement.

4) Organic Reach is Limited, Consider Methods to Stick Out and Reach Your Targets:

Research has shown that only 2-4% of a brand’s fans will see their content in an organic framework. As a result brands now should look into investing in paid social media to further leverage their message to their targeted audience. Content should be packaged with different images and messages to best optimize and leverage messaging. It should also be created with a strategy to be shared across various social networks. All messages and paid advertising should point to the same end channel, but marketers must test & optimize to better reach their audience.

It’s important to review, tweak, reinvent and develop campaigns to enable your brand to stand out and cut through the noise.

5) Publish the Right Content with the Right Platform:

As marketers we have an end goal of creating shareable and compelling content to further expand our brands value. Often those within my role often find themselves with the challenge of ensuring it’s optimized as best as it can be to encourage sharing across social media. We need to work to create a strategy before we create content. Chris Brogan said it best, “Content Marketing is weaponized storytelling.” We must to turn the tables and use great media thinking to drive content curation, and not the other way around. Remember, content is fire, and social media is gasoline!

6) Have a Visual Social Media Strategy:

The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text with 90% of the information transited to the brain is visual. If you want to stick out on social media test video, images, and quotes.

People don’t engage equally with every tweet. Research by Media Blog, which analyzed the content of over 2 million tweets sent by thousands of users over the course of a month, shows that adding a photo URL to your tweet can boost retweets by an impressive 35%.

There’s a ton of tools to help you get started to develop free visual content, my favorite are pablo by buffer, canva, and quotr.

Hope you enjoyed this post, send me a tweet and let me know what you think, or leave a comment below!

Marissa's Picks

Thoughts from the brain of marissa pick, social media & b2b marketer based in NYC!

Tag Archives: customer marketing

Using Google tools to understand your audience