How to Understand Your Audience: Data Collection & Analysis
The internet is a fast-paced environment. People can come to your website at any hour from a wide range of locations, each of them with different intentions or needs. Unlike physical retail stores, you can’t see who is coming in and browsing around. You don’t know much about the people reading you. How can we develop a rough profile of all these individuals?
You already get a glimpse of them everyday when they interact with your website. Some may register for an account, leave a comment or send you an email. But many are ‘invisible’. They get to your site, see what you put out, click on a outbound link and disappear.
What you currently know about these individuals comes from a combination of visible user actions (e.g comments/emails) and statistics (e.g visit frequency/visit length). Is this knowledge sufficient for most businesses or bloggers? Yes. But I think it would be tremendously helpful to learn even more about your audience.
In marketing and advertising, we proactively define our target audience. We start with our end goals and then structure our website/ads with the right buzz phrases, pitch, style, keywords and angle to appeal to people we want to attract as a consumer/user/reader. Gathering information on visitors to our website makes us more effective marketers.
It is helpful to analyze and construct a general profile of your audience, however shifting it may be, because it provides you with information that will allow you to better improve your content scope, site usability, conversation rate or marketing campaign. Let’s split this process up into two sections: statistical analysis and data collection.
Statistical Analysis: Start Working With What You Already Have
Image Credit: Mint
Depending on the stats tool you’re currently using, you can get a lot of information on how visitors are using your website, where they come from and what they are looking at. There are obviously a lot of different metrics to look at but I’m listing what I think is more relevant to understanding visitors in general:
- Visitor loyalty, bounce rate, recency, time on site. These sites measure one critical thing: the level of engagement. They reveal how often people visit your site, the last time they used it and the depth of their visit. While these numbers aren’t a definitive interpretation of on-site user actions, they are a gauge of their enthusiasm.
- Visitor Location. This allows you to make cultural and linguistic assumptions of your visitors. If you know you receive the most visitors from a few specific countries, you might want to create landing pages/offers or content with a geographic focus.
- Visitor search terms/keywords. This includes both search engines and on-site search boxes. The clearest indicator of visitor interest, search terms tell you what they want to get from your site and it reveals information gaps you can fill up. This is where data collection gets specific. If you consistently get a lot of queries for a specific phrase, you can safely assume that there will be visitor interest in content or offers related to it.
- Traffic source. This includes search engines, referrer sites, type-in/bookmark traffic and ad campaigns. Pay attention to referrer sites: it reveals what visitors are reading or using. Traffic sources also tell you where to improve for greater visibility.
Take some time to look at these statistics. Instead of only looking at them at each single point in time, it makes more sense to regularly study them to see how they trend over the lifespan of your site or the course of a marketing/ad campaign. On the whole, they will give you a good idea of what users want and what draws their attention.
How to Get More Audience Data: Using Polls, Surveys and Features
Now for the fun part: the active solicitation of user information. Instead of simply monitoring web statistics, you create opportunities for visitors to voluntarily reveal personal data and opinions. These can be achieved in several ways:
- Polls. An excellent and informal way to get information on user preferences, they are very easy to set up and maintain on any website. The questions asked can be diverse and they are a good way to gradually accumulate a lot of information without being too invasive. Run a poll for two weeks and change the questions to pull in more information. They can be integrated on a regular basis alongside articles or they can be left alone on a visible corner of the website.
- Surveys. Depending on their length and how they are created, surveys may be more labor intensive. Some visitors will avoid them if they are too long. They are ideal when bundled with competitions or special offers which provide incentives for completion. Short surveys can be used for exiting visitors or as a follow-up after a user completes a specific purchase or opts-out of your payment plan/subscription.
- On-Site User Features. If you’re running a community, social media service or even a blog, you can get more information by simply offering more user features (ways users can interact with each other and your site). For example, allow users to input more biographical info in profiles or give them the option to favorite/rate your blog posts and the contributions of other users. Features also add value to users and increase their engagement with your site. Think strategically about what data you want and create a feature that allows users to indirectly reveal it. Facebook is a good example of a site with features that generate a lot of mineable data. Of course, it is always good to have an appropriate privacy policy and allow users to opt out easily from their side.
- Audience Feedback. To understand your visitors, its useful to ensure that you monitor your feedback channels. Comments, emails, incoming blog links, mentions on online communities and even tweets allow you to get an intuitive feel of what people think about your website. Subscribe to the right feedback channels (Google alerts, blogsearch etc.) and track them daily. Either do it yourself or get someone to be the official feedback/community coordinator. Audience feedback is often unsolicited, although you can easily get more comments/emails by specifically asking for them. This provides you with clues on how to better cater to your target market.
While this isn’t an exhaustive list, some of these methods can be applied online and offline simultaneously. For polls and surveys, you should be able to find some plugins or software available for your site platform. Alternatively, you can always use external online services like SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy, 4Q and Wufoo.
After obtaining this data, setup a system which allows you to segment and compare your findings over a period of time. This can be a simple spreadsheet or something more sophisticated. When combined with the visitor statistics you already have, it’s easy to understand your audience, allowing you to to better accommodate their needs or interest.
Can you think of any other ways to get more audience data?
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How to Understand Your Audience: Data Collection & Analysis
The Fear of Losing: Using Competitive Instincts as an Advantage
The Winner’s Curse is a term used to describe auctions whereby the winner will overpay because he/she overestimates the item’s actual market value. This tendency to overbid is due to factors like incomplete information or other market participants. Recent research show that people also overbid because of the fear of losing in a social competition.
A team of NYU neuroscientists and economists conducted brain imaging studies and discovered that the striatum, a part of the brain’s reward circuitry showed an exaggerated response to losses during an auction game. When a group was told that they would lose $15 if they failed to win an auction, they consistently bid higher than others who were told they would win $15.
The difference lies in way the auction was framed. When simply reminded of what they had to lose instead of what they stand to gain, participants responded with higher bids.
While there have been investigations of overbidding which have attributed the phenomenon to either risk aversion or the ‘joy of winning,’ it was the use of imaging data which allowed us to distinguish between these conflicting explanations and actually arrive at a new and different one, the ‘fear of losing.’…We were able to use neuroimaging results to highlight the importance of framing, and specifically the contemplated loss, as an explanation for overbidding during experimental auctions.”
This ‘fear of losing’ seems to be triggered by competition with others and perhaps, attachment to the value of the item. A interesting takeaway point: instead of only highlighting the benefits or promise for a product/service, it would be beneficial to indicate what the buyer might potentially lose by not making a purchase or taking action.
People implicitly understand that they’re dealing with other consumers because of factors like exclusivity and scarcity. The one who acts swiftly will get to purchase and enjoy the benefits of the product, while others may not. The call-to-action is much intense in an auction, because the actions of others occur in noticeable real-time. Competition is in the forefront of the mind.
This study reminds me of how much competition is almost intrinsic to human society. You see competition between individuals, groups and countries in business or sports. It is perhaps, both an evolutionary necessity and a learned behavior that one develops in order to survive or thrive within a social environment.
We are all familiar with the pleasure of competition. Many of you have bought items from Ebay, an online auction marketplace. Often, your decision to make or abandon a purchase is rushed along on a subtle but tangible undercurrent of excitement during the process and a feeling of minor elation for having won an item at a favorable price.
Could there be a way to transplant the fear of losing and the pleasure of winning into a non-auction scenario? Perhaps the use of a competition as a backdrop where each consumer’s individual drive can play out against others. Make them interact and challenge one another within a superstructure that helps YOU fulfill specific end goals.
Let the Competitive Instinct Flourish Within a Social Environment
Image Credit: Swamibu
Businesses or marketers should think about how to create a social environment which encourages the natural competitive instincts of their audience. Interaction within this sphere motivates each individual consumer/participant. This helps to increase the level of audience engagement and automatically enhances the value of the product/service/site.
Social news sites like Mixx.com proudly highlight their top users by displaying them on a leaderboard or giving them specific awards/badges. This symbolic segregation of a group of users from others and the conferring of exclusive emblems of acknowledgment enhances the visibility/reputation of these individuals. This becomes something others can strive towards.
Not everyone will lust after awards or a higher user ranking. In fact, most casual users won’t care or bother to go after greater recognition. But owners of these communities know that there will always be a segment of hardcore users (the more competitive or goal-oriented ones) that will work extra hard so they can improve their score or rank higher on the leaderboard.
This addicted 1% of users enjoy a sense of achievement and are often enough to generate enough activity to make your site grow. This effect is even more prominent when the community itself is the main attraction. Take the example of video games with online features: players will gladly pay for a monthly Xbox Live subscription or WOW account so they virtually cooperate or compete with other individuals. Inter-user competition becomes an value add-on.
Such a social environment is not very difficult to create: there are a few fundamental elements involved. For starters, users should be able to interact freely with one another, through the site’s main features or separately in an standalone environment. Also, bind user profiles and on-site activity to awards, rankings, points, recognition, rewards and achievements.
Allow people to form sub-groups to pursue a diverse level of interests. Facilitate inter-user contact and interaction by organizing open competitions or one-off events that everyone can join. These special events can be plotted on an established calendar of regular activities which involve the community or its sub-groups.
The general theory is simple enough: Think about creating social environments that are conducive for your overall business objectives. Apart from simply marketing your site, we should look at giving our audience the ability to connect (and compete) with each other.
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The Fear of Losing: Using Competitive Instincts as an Advantage
What Every Shrewd Marketer Should Know About Selling Their Product
This is equally as important as creating your product. You can create the best, most useful product in the world but that doesn’t do you much good if you don’t know how to sell it, does it? Your product doesn’t make you any money sitting on your hard drive.
There are numerous ways to sell an information product online and you may end up choosing to use several of them.
Adwords are the advertising links that you see in blue on the right side of Google Search pages.
If you had a dog training ebook you would bid to have your adwords ad appear when people typed in relevant search phrases like “Dog Training” or “How To Teach My Dog To Sit”.
Some people make their living entirely by selling information products through adwords, so that is certainly an option. If you want to learn about adwords, read through all of Google’s own tutorials on the subject, and then buy some books on Adwords as well.
Another place to sell an information product is on The Warrior Forum, a popular internet marketing forum.
Then, you can go to the section of the site titled “Warrior Special Offers” and start out selling your information product there, if it is appropriate.
This works better if your product is related to internet marketing. Also, you need to offer the product at a price better than is offered to the general public, which is why it’s called a “special offers” section.
It currently costs $20 to post a Warrior Special Offer.
Another very popular way to sell your product is through Clickbank.
Clickbank only (at time of writing) specializes in downloadable products.
Then, you can encourage affiliates to sell your product for you, in exchange for a generous commission.
To entice affiliates you are going to have to offer a really large percentage of the product price, at least 50 percent and preferably 70 percent.
The affiliates will do all of the hard work for you, paying for adwords to drive traffic to your sales page, writing articles for article marketing directories that link to their pre sell page or to your sales page, creating pre-sell pages that link to your sales page…and the more you pay them, the more incentive they have to work hard to sell your product.
Never undersell your affiliates. Do not offer your product for $25 if you have set the price they will promote it at $37.
Offer good affiliate support. Offer them artwork to put on their sales page, showing your product; several different product pictures would be ideal.
Offer them a free squeeze page that they can put their affiliate link on.
Offer a cash bonus for every 100 copies of your product sold.
Make sure that the terms and conditions of your affiliate offer are clear and specify what the affiliates can and can’t do: no misleading ads, etc.
So you know know how to create an information product, how to price it, and where to sell it. The only thing left for you to do is get cracking and start building your profitable information product empire!
What Every Marketer Should Know About Pricing Their Info Products
Pricing is always a delicate issue, because if you charge too much people won’t buy, but if you charge too little, people might perceive that what you are selling has no value.
Every good info product must first having a pricing strategy.
You should start out by looking at other information products that are similar to yours and examine their sales pages thoroughly to get an idea of what they offer and how much they charge for their product.
You don’t want to charge too much more than the other people in your field.
However you want to see what they have to offer versus what you have to offer.
If they are just selling a 20 page ebook on puppy training and you are selling a 100 page ebook on dog training (easy to do with a compilation of resell rights products) from puppyhood through adulthood, along with a set of step by step videos…then of course you should charge significantly more.
The puppy ebook might sell for anywhere up to $17. The dog training ebook plus videos might sell for up to $67.
Or, you could offer the ebook at a cheaper price, say $37, and then offer the videos as an “upsell”. They might cost and additional $30 or so.
You may have noticed that the prices quote here end in seven. There have been numerous internet marketing studies on this and oddly, prices ending in seven outsell other prices ending in the traditional .95 - $9.95, for instance.
That holds true even if the number ending in 5 is several dollars cheaper.
A product that sells for $19.97 has been shown (in some instances) to outsell a product that sells for $15.95.
The Amazing Secrets of Reselling High Quality Products For Next to Nothing
So Why Should You Sell Your Quality Products on the Cheap? You should know that by selling your products at low prices that you will create a sense of value in your products. Also, you’ll find out that those small sales quickly add up (and I do mean quickly).
By selling your product at a low price you will quickly grow a loyal fan base that will happily buy higher backend products in the future. This article should help you grow your list rapidly and create an eager base of loyal customers.
Making a living online is different from a regular brick and mortar business. Most businesses sell physical objects that you can walk in and test for yourself. Most internet marketers, however, don’t actually have a tangible object for the customer to see. This difference makes it difficult to sell high priced items because people don’t see the value in buying an expensive product that they can’t actually hold.
People are more likely to buy something for $20 or under than they are for $100. Also the buyer will be astounding at the amount of info and helpfulness of the ebook or other medium and how cheap the product was.
To put it simply you want to Under Price and Over Deliver in your product.
Don’t be put off by setting a low price for your product that either bought resell rights for or sweated long and hard over. Just think
$7 [product price] x (5% of 6,000 subscribers: 300 buyers) = $2,100
$27 x (<1% of 6,000 subscribers: 60 buyers or less) = “only” $1620*
$2,100 > $1620
*Beware, that there are more returns on higher priced items than there are for low priced objects.
By selling info products cheaply you greatly reduce the amounts of headaches you have after the purchase.
If you still are having trouble setting the selling price low then let me give you a little example to help you see the picture a little better. Do you happen to know of a fellow named Sam Walton? He build the whole Lowes and Walmart empire based on selling quality objects en masse for affordable prices and he was once one of the wealthiest men alive.
The Next big benefit of selling your high quality product for next to nothing is backend sales. By selling your product cheaply you will quickly add to your mailing list and will set up a sense of trust and value with your fans that will place you in a better position to sell them higher priced objects in the future.
Now that you see the value in selling High Quality Products On The Cheap, you’ll probably see internet marketing in a whole new light.
Remember, selling quality info products cheaply creates a higher sense of perceived value, many small sales equals one Large PROFIT, and the trust you established with your initial “cheap” product will help sell your higher priced backend product. So put this valuable info to use and you too will see the benefits of selling low priced objects.
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