Let\u2019s stop for a minute and think about the golden rule of copywriting…<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not “Be creative.”<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not “Be witty.”<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not even “Be super persuasive.”<\/p>\n
All of these areas are important, yes, but being able to implement them effectively depends on the golden rule:\u00a0Know your target audience<\/a><\/b>.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not just talking the basics of names, email addresses and locations. You need to know their likes, dislikes, what sort of content they enjoy and the products they use. If you don\u2019t know the answers to these questions, you\u2019re not going to have much luck when it comes to selling to them.<\/p>\n You need a clear understanding of your audience so you can clearly identify where their needs overlap with what you\u2019re offering. Without this knowledge, you could end up trying to sell kindergarten services to seniors, or rogaine to adolescent females (I pray there\u2019s no market there).<\/p>\n Understanding your audience is the first and most important aspect of gaining higher conversions.<\/p>\n With that in mind, here\u2019s a quick little guide to how you can get a better understanding of the age, gender, interests and opinions of your audience so you can better tailor your marketing and products to attract the right kind of customers.<\/p>\n [Tweet “Understanding your audience is the first and most important aspect of gaining higher conversions.”]<\/p>\n The first area we\u2019re going to take a look at is the age-old gem of review mining. It\u2019s a method whose efficiency has been known for decades and was once carried out through user surveys and questionnaires.<\/p>\n Of course you can still go the way of surveys if you want\u2014there are plenty of great services like Survey Monkey and Google Consumer Surveys to help you out\u2014but we\u2019re not interested in what your customers will say to your face. We want to know what they\u2019re going to say to other existing and potential customers.<\/p>\n Thanks to review sites like Yelp and independent retailers like Amazon, it\u2019s never been easier to check out what your customers really think of the product you\u2019re offering and its competitors.<\/p>\n Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers has written not one<\/a>, but two incredible articles on review mining<\/a> which are definitely worth your time. Using this method, she not only managed to get a better understanding of her audience but also managed to completely lift a new headline from a review which resulted in a >400% rise in CTR!<\/p>\n The short version for effective review mining is to sift through as many reviews as possible for your own product and those related to it to find common themes, both positive and negative.<\/p>\n Whilst going through the reviews you\u2019ll want to record the highest recurring opinions in three core areas:<\/p>\n Once you\u2019ve got your table, it\u2019s time to further reduce the options into only the most frequent and shared opinions. By grouping together similar opinions and boiling them down to simpler overviews, you\u2019ll have a great starting point for creating some killer customer personas based solely on desires.<\/p>\n [Tweet “3 Tools and Smart Tactics to Understand Your Audience”]<\/p>\n As long as you\u2019re exceeding certain traffic thresholds<\/a>, Google Analytics provides some awesome reports about the kind folk who visit your site.<\/p>\n The problem with Analytics is that it can be quite complicated. The sheer scope of information provided leaves many chasing their own tail and not making any progress in understanding what\u2019s going wrong.<\/p>\n I\u2019d love to give a huge overview of how amazing Google Analytics can be, but I\u2019m going to focus on what I believe to be the most important areas for a good overview of your audience. You can of course build on this information with advanced segments<\/a> and custom dashboards to monitor specifics, but that\u2019s a story for another day.<\/p>\n Gender and Age<\/b><\/p>\n Who makes up the main portion of your site visitors? Is 80% of your traffic made up of 18\u201324 year old females, or have you attracted the 55\u201364-year-old male market? You wouldn\u2019t market to these two demographics in the same way, would you? Please tell me you wouldn\u2019t!<\/p>\n Location<\/b><\/p>\n I\u2019m taking a risk and making an assumption that most readers run websites and businesses aimed at the English-speaking market. Whilst the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand all share a common language, there are a number of different cultural aspects to take into consideration.<\/p>\n Copy that works well in converting in one country may not have the best effect overseas<\/a>. It\u2019s worth knowing where your primary purchasers are located so you know how best to customize your copy.<\/p>\n Interests<\/b><\/p>\n This is a great feature that\u00a0helps round off the general image you\u2019ll have of your audience. Generally speaking, you want to focus on Affinity Categories<\/i> and In-Market Segments<\/i>.<\/p>\n Affinity Categories<\/i> are useful in reaching new prospects to make them aware of your brand. They\u2019re broad categories like TV Lovers or Technophiles. These are the kind of prospects who would be at the start of your funnel.<\/p>\n In-Market Categories <\/i>are a little more specific and often include people\u00a0who are focusing on a specific product or service. These folk are closer to the end of your funnel and may be ready to purchase.<\/p>\n If you use these insights with your PPC advertising plan, you\u2019ll be able to better customize your advert copy to appeal to the right demographic or, for content creators, you\u2019ll know what content your users want to see.<\/p>\n Acquisition > Referral Traffic<\/b><\/p>\n Finally I like to look into the primary sources of referral traffic. Partly because I want to know who\u2019s mentioning the site (gotta feed that ego!), partly because it tells me a lot about the audience.<\/p>\n If someone is referring a lot of traffic it\u2019s a safe bet that they\u2019re doing something right. They\u2019re not only attracting high traffic themselves, but they\u2019ve also managed to get that audience to trust them.<\/p>\n Listening to a referral is a sign of trust. You wouldn’t recommend a friend for a job if you didn\u2019t think they were capable, and am employer would\u2019t listen to your recommendation if they didn’t trust you. If someone is referring their traffic to you they\u2019ve noticed something worthwhile and their traffic trusts their judgement.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll backtrack to the referral source and pick apart their site to try to\u00a0discern what it is that our shared audience admires.<\/p>\n At this stage, you should have a strong image of your customer personas. Honestly speaking, review mining and analytics data might be enough for you to create some pretty accurate customer personae, I know of some who do it off analytics alone.<\/p>\n Instead of calling it a day and giving ourselves a pat on the back, let’s try to flesh out the last few parts of our audience with a little social media data.<\/p>\n You\u2019d be hard pressed to find someone not on social media nowadays. It seems that every man and his dog has an account<\/a>! Thankfully that\u2019s what makes it such a great place for a little audience research.<\/p>\n We\u2019re going to take a look at Twitter and Facebook, as they both have their own analytics services, which can help gain some valuable insights.<\/p>\n The Twitter Analytics<\/a> dashboard is beautiful. Behind this beautiful facade lie the details of your followers and their interests.<\/p>\n There are some great reports and insights under the Home, Tweets, Twitter Cards<\/i> and Tools<\/i> tabs that are definitely worth checking out but for now we\u2019re interested in the Followers<\/i> tab.<\/p>\n Ignore the lovely chart that details your follower growth and scroll down until you see something resembling the screen above.<\/p>\n On the left you\u2019ll notice a list of unique<\/i> and top interests <\/i>whilst on the right you\u2019ll see gender and other influencers with location displayed in the middle.<\/p>\n Personally I prefer to use the data from Google for devising future plans; however, it\u2019s still worth checking to see how well Twitter\u2019s data overlaps.<\/p>\n Most will see very similar data across the two platforms, but if there is a difference, you\u2019ll want to amend your Twitter activities accordingly.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say a Google report places most of your site visitors in the US, while your primary Twitter following is in the UK. Instead of tweeting links to a US optimized landing page, you\u2019d have better results sending out more links for a UK audience. The same fundamental approach applies for differing interests across the platforms.<\/p>\n After you\u2019ve played around a little with what you\u2019re sending out, it\u2019s time to see how it\u2019s resonating with your audience.<\/p>\n Under the Tweets <\/i>tab you\u2019ll find reports on how successful your tweets have been.<\/p>\n Key metrics to measure are\u00a0obviously impressions<\/em> and conversions<\/em> and, if you\u2019re paying for advertising on Twitter, how successful the campaign as been.<\/p>\n Unfortunately Twitter Analytics doesn\u2019t provide enough in the way of comparisons or the ability to drill down deeper into the demographics data. Whilst I still believe it\u2019s an incredibly useful service, I\u2019d love to see these additions made in the near future. For the time being we\u2019ll have to create our own tables to compare and take a more generalized approach.<\/p>\n No prizes for guessing what Facebook Insights does!<\/p>\n Whilst the primary service is the same as Twitter and Google Analytics, the difference lies in how the data is collected. You\u2019re not only able to check the personal data that Facebook users provide (both your own fans and Facebook wide), but can also check information collated from different national data collection agencies.<\/p>\n This awesome collection of data gives you a far better insight into the best area to spend your budget.<\/p>\n In my opinion, Facebook Insights is a far more comprehensive and easier to navigate platform than Twitter analytics.\u00a0You\u2019ll likely end up using Insights in the same way as Twitter Analytics by comparing data to your Google Analytics reports. However, the increased user functionality will make it far easier to focus in on different segments and highlight any areas where your Facebook audience differs to that for your main site.<\/p>\n Above is my\u00a0personal favorite option: to see when your fans are online. It\u2019s a relatively minor service, but knowing the top engagement times for your audience is something that shouldn’t be underestimated.<\/p>\nReview Mining<\/h2>\n
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![\"Copywriting](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-17-at-16.36.58-999x1024.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nGoogle Analytics<\/h2>\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-20-at-14.03.08-1024x388.png\")
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\nImage Source<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Google](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-20-at-14.06.28-1024x631.png\")
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\nImage Source<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Analytics](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-20-at-14.11.44-1024x358.png\")
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\nImage Source<\/a><\/p>\nSocial Media<\/h2>\n
Twitter Analytics<\/h3>\n
![\"Twitter](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-19-at-12.00.19-1024x599.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"twitter](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-20-at-11.44.55-1024x423.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFacebook Insights<\/h3>\n
![\"Facebook](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-20-at-12.31.20-1024x943.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"insights](\"https:\/\/ceblog.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/Screen-Shot-2015-04-20-at-14.17.41-1024x597.png\")
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\nImage Source<\/a><\/p>\nWhat\u2019s Next?<\/h2>\n