Music to enjoy while reading this post: We Know Something You Don't Know by DJ Format & Jurassic 5
You provide something specific: That might be a product, a service, a trustworthy source of information, a community space… And you know exactly what your audiences may be searching for to find your wares. But do you know what they really want out of you? Do you know how they really feel? Do you know what they want more of or less of in your industry? Do you know what they like or don’t like on your site or your competitor’s sites? Do you know what they think about your new product launch? If you knew this information, how could you use it to improve your products or services?
In this post we’ll look at a few ways in which you can gather insightful information to help you position your brand against your competitors, laser target the specific desires of your audiences, and dive into the psyche of the people you want to attract and convert, categorized by what they want out of your industry, you, and your site.
WHAT DO YOUR AUDIENCES WANT OUT OF YOUR INDUSTRY?
Let’s say you’re in the online car insurance industry. You are considering what steps need to be taken to avoid search engine algo disasters and provide unique, compelling content and services that your audiences want. You’ve done your keyword research, so you know what search terms people are using, but what do they really want from your industry? Here’s some ways to find out.
1) Industry Market Research
You can typically find a wealth of market research by industry from sites like the ones listed below, although oftentimes this research is not cheap.
What to look for:
- Market demand
- Market trends
- Market entry
- Market issues/obstacles
- Statistical details for your target audiences
Sources:
- eMarketer (paid reports + free articles)
- MarketResearch.com (paid reports)
- Forrester (paid + free reports)
- Hitwise (paid research + reports & webinars)
- Plunkett Research (paid reports)
- Valuation Resources (paid reports)
- International Business Strategies (paid reports)
- The Internet Time Machine (trend reporting software)
- Census.gov Statistical Abstract (US, Canada)
2) Social Industry Sentiment
Many people think of social media as a way to connect with your industry influencers and brand advocates. But social media data is also spectacular for simply passively gathering insights. There is a wealth of information online about your industry and how people feel about it, talk about it, interact with it, etc. This information can help you take a strategic approach at entering an industry, or refine your current positioning and offerings within an industry.
What to look for:
- Track industry terms as your topics, to find out what people are saying about the industry, what they want to see more of, what they don’t like or want to see less of, and potentially for spotting any industry trends through online conversations.
- Determine industry needs and sentiments in emerging markets before drawing up a product/service strategy.
Source A: Expensive, detailed (and mostly deep crawl) social media monitoring tools
There is still a major gap in social monitoring tools where the ones that provide the best crawl and interface for useful, actionable industry and/or brand health data can run you from $30,000/year to $30,000 month or more. For enterprise-level sites looking to harness conversations around the web, enterprise-level social monitoring solutions are the only answer (in this case, typically as an alternative or accompaniment to traditional survey-based brand health metrics). I’ve done audits on several of these solutions over the years and here are some worth looking into if you can throw the cash towards it.
- NetBase – Still one of (if not the) best and most useful tools for brand sentiment I’ve seen yet. Competitive sentiment, competitive liked/disliked attributes, passion index, conversation drivers, etc.
- Dow Jones Insight – Flexible sentiment, regional trends, large coverage on- and offline, measures not just what happened, but also what was impact?
- Nielsen Online – LSI-type algorithm, feeling & tone metrics, measure by language + lots more.
- Visible Technologies – Subtopic identification, management tools, highly drillable, sortable data + more.
- Radian6 – Share of conversation, demographics, location, influence, Salesforce & WebTrends integration, lots of charts.
- Converseon - Uses a combination of text analytics, machine learning, and human analysts to provide sentiment analysis.
Source B: Free and cheapish (but often not very deep crawl) sentiment tools
I want to have more faith in “tools for the people”, but in most cases, I’ve found search engines (see next section) to be more useful in finding good sentiment data than any of the free/cheap tools (and sometimes even the expensive tools). Try the software out and compare the insights you find with what you find in the next section using search engines to make the decision on whether it might be worth shelling out $200-$3000/mo or more towards these sentiment research tools.
- Social Mention (free) – Sentiment, strength, passion & reach scores around a topic + top keywords, users, hashtags and sources.
- HowSociable (free) - Brand visibility score in several social networks.
- Trackur (paid) – Sentiment and influence metrics and tracking (history).
- eCairn (paid) – Share of voice, mind and/or topic + additional social media tools.
- Alterian SM2 (paid) – Share of voice, themes, demographics, sentiment analysis, etc.
- Trendrr (paid) – Sentiment analysis & influencer identification, location & demographic filters.
- Position2 (paid) - Share of voice, share of media, demographics, sentiment analysis, etc.
- And 195 more: https://www.salesrescueteam.com/social-media-measurement-tools/
Source C: Search Engines
If you don’t have a social listening tool or you’re just not getting good info from it, use the tool we all know and love: Search! Search engines still crawl much farther and deeper than most social media tools, so you can find more information if you know how to look. Search for any variation of things like:
- “like” + [your brand name]
- “love” + [a feature you provide]
- “I wish” + [a feature you provide]
- “sucks” + [an author or blogger on your site or your competitor sites]
- “hate” + [your competitors’ brand names or features]
Additionally, search Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo! Answers or other social networks for the same type of information. I typically find the best feedback in this manner (using search + searching social networks), although it is more time consuming than the social media monitoring tools.
WHAT DO YOUR AUDIENCES WANT OUT OF YOU?
3) Social Brand Asset Sentiment
In addition to what people want out of your industry, it is important to know what people want out of you and your brand assets. Your brand assets could include your services, products, product features, executives at the company, editorial personalities, and the brand name in general.
What to Look for + Sources
Test brand asset topics out in the social media monitoring tools mentioned above (including search engines) to gather insights on what people around the web are saying about your brand. Each tool may provide different types of information, like:
- Positive and negative sentiment around brand assets and competitors
- Share of voice
- Specific likes and dislikes (deeper dig into sentiment)
- Campaign reach/brand visibility
- Localized share of voice and sentiment trends
4) Traditional Brand Sentiment
These survey-based reports typically show similar types of insights as the expensive social monitoring tools, only they are derived from surveys rather than scraped from the web.
What to Look for
- Brand health
- Brand sentiment
- Brand awareness/share of voice
- Brand penetration
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)
- Same measurements online for competitor brands
Sources:
- Nielsen
- Synovate
- Forrester
WHAT DO YOUR AUDIENCES WANT OUT OF YOUR SITE?
Lastly, you’ll want to gather insights on the site experience that your audiences are having, and how it can be streamlined and improved. Don’t forget, search engines want to see sites that people find valuable, so make sure you’re doing what you can to attract your audiences and keep them engaged, as well as prompting the sharing of your content in social spaces.
5) Solicited Site Feedback
If you ask your visitors for feedback you can use that data as well. Although soliciting feedback is not as unobtrusive as just using your site analytics data to determine where there are problems, it may be useful in getting a more human response to the potential issues on your site. Consider small incentives in return for feedback, like discounts, being entered into a contest, access to survey results (when appropriate), or other types of special recognition.
Sources:
- GetSatisfaction
- Kampyle
- UserVoice
- On-site feedback surveys, collections or feedback forms
6) On-Site Search Queries
Looking at what people are searching for on your site, and what they are or aren’t finding, can be very useful site feedback. For sites with large databases like music or movies, site search may be the simplest way to get to the destination. See what is searched for the most to provide that content up front. For other sites, look at what people are searching for, which may be an indication of what they expect to find but can’t. Determine how your site can better meet those needs.
What to Look for:
- What people want or expect to find on the site.
- What people can’t find on the site.
- Searches on your site that return no results.
- Searches on your site that end in an exit rather than a click on search results.
Sources:
- Your own on-site search analytics platform.
7) Click-tracking & heat maps
These colorful displays are probably the coolest ways of gathering site feedback. Use these tools to determine whether people are seeing your most important content and calls to action on each page.
What to Look for:
- Are your primary calls to action getting clicks? Are they in view?
- Are you funneling visitors to the pages you want to?
- Are there links that are not getting any clicks?
- Is there content that isn’t getting eyeballs?
- What is the performance from search vs. the rest of the site?
Sources:
8) Focus Groups and User Groups
Set up some objectives for a focus group to try to accomplish with your site and watch how they try to get there, what obstacles they come across along the way, how they think and feel about the experience, and more. This can be useful feedback from people who are not familiar with the site the way you and your team that are building the site are.
What to Look for:
- How people feel towards planned new features or content
- Ways to improve existing features and content
- Whether your users want or need new features or content
- Whether there are features and content you can change, improve, or get rid of
- How people attempt to perform a task, and with what level of ease or difficulty
Sources:
- Search for focus group companies in your area.
- Do research on how to conduct your own focus group.
- Psychster (usability)
Have any additional methods or tools not listed here? Please share! :)
Haven't read the article yet... just the first sentence... Gotta love Jurassic 5!
Hi Laura!Your article is great no doubt but what you are suggesting is not economical and hence not actionable for majority of us. Do you really think any small to medium size company will spend even £1000/month on market research or social media monitoring? Often a simple search on Google or bunch of Google Alerts are enough to find out what your target audience think about you. If you are regulary interacting with your clients through social media then you know what they want/desire. Also you have used dozens of metrics in your article without explaining what they meant. For e.g. You said in 'Tradition Brand Sentiment' we should look for 'Brand health' and 'Brand Penetration'. But how do you define them. What metrics you use to measure brand health? What is good and bad brand health? How do you measure the depth of brand penetration? It all makes sense, doesn't it ?
Thanks for the feedback seo-himanshu. As a new small business myself, I recommend some of the more expensive tools to my bigger clients, and I tend to use search to find sentiment for my own projects and that's what I recommend to smaller clients as well. It's time consuming, but it has the deepest crawl, the best information, and it's free.
As for brand health, brand penetration, brand loyalty, awareness, etc, these are typical brand marketing terms. They are not integrated into the SEO world as much as they should be today, so understandably may not make as much sense here. If you're practicing audience-driven SEO, that integrates into overall marketing, these terms will come into play more often, since a lot of marketing messaging (for any size established company) can/should start with looking at what people are saying about the brand and it's competitors as insight into how to shape the brand messaging that will penetrate various marketing channels including search and social.
Great article. The only real downside I see is that most of these solutions seem to be geared toward mid-high trafficked sites. How about some more info for the little guys. My clients are upstarts and the brand-challenged who don't get hardly any mentions on twitter per month.
Seriously great article, I just had thoughts on a follow up. Thanks!
I totally agree with you. Companies with money get all the breaks. I have been scouring affordable social media monitoring solutions to find any that do a great job of bringing in all of the upfront research data like brand asset sentiment, competitive sentiment, etc. Many provide it, but none of them are better than just using (free) search in my opinion. When you pay more for a tool (typically a *lot* more), you get much better data.
It's even harder to find any brand sentiment data for smaller companies, and in that case I recommend search over any tool - cheap or expensive. Search has the deepest crawl, so if there's anyone saying anything about your industry or your brand asset anywhere online you're more likely to find it through search than the tools. And if you dont find anything, consider how important search may or may not be as a marketing channel - maybe other channels (like email marketing or direct mail) are going to be more effective. You want to market to your audiences whre they are.
For instance, I was working with a marketing agency that specializes in biotech & life science marketing. We found that there is very little chatter (almost none) about life science marketing online that wasn't coming from them or their competitors. The audiences just arent talking about it. In addition, the search volume for life science marketing and topics related to it is very low. So the opportunity to reach these audiences online is not humungous. That company is optimizing the site and social networking for what online visibility they can get based on the demand (and especially for any demand they can generate), but their other marketing channels, especially marketing themselves at life science events where their audiences are, present a much better opportunity for them. Not to say that search & social arent important when there's low search volumes and low buzz, but definitely consider where your audiences are, especially for small biz.
Agree with search over a tool for smaller companies. A little common sense goes a long way in situations like this.
I think you have just written the Bible of Brand Marketing Forecasting, seriously.
About "Solicited Feedback", I suggest also KISSinsights: very easy to implement, with many features (for instance, it is available in several languages) and, not bad news at all, not expensive at all in its paid version.
Great toolset. Thanks!
Fascinating post many thanks [BOOKMARKED]
I find social tools are a nightmare and find many are just terrible. For smaller companies I like scanning through Google Alerts, this is also awesome as by design it also shows you citations Google cares about.
I will definitely be looking into the tools you have recommended!
:-)
Everyday, I read articles/blogs on this topic. I must say this is the most comprehensive list of brand marketing resources/tools I've seen, Laura. Thanks for the time and effort you put into pulling this together. Thanks, too, for including Visible Technologies in the list of SM monitoring tools.
You can really use social media well here, I personally use twitter alot to connect with my audience, great article
Really great article! I'll definitely take better advantage of some of the free tools you mentioned. But to add just one more to the list, check out Crimson Hexagon for opinion (or sentiment) analysis.
Absolutely fantastic article, thank you - I'm now reading through all your past blogs that I missed!
I find it intensely useful to be subscribed to a service that isn't afraid to talk about other SEO tools as well.
Fantastic article, however worth noting the new player on the market for 'Click-tracking & heat maps'- Decibel Insight, ft. and sponsors at MeasureFest in London this year
Very insightful article ;) As always, Google turns out to be among the most useful of tools when searching for customer feedback or reviews!
I highly recommend the Nielsen data specifically if you are looking in your region or DMA for consumer behavior data. The Nielsen database you buy into is pricey but well worth the cost when you can examine the depth and breadth of consumer behavior data it provides. Not a day goes by that I am not in the system for our clients across the Upstate NY DMAs. Here is a little more on syndicated research.
Also keep in mind custom research is viable. It doesn't always has to be costly. You can work with a market research vendor who won't charge an arm and a leg for custom insights.
George
You can also add Veooz.com . It provides sentiment trend over a period of time along with influential people talking about the topic.
Does anybody know of a good online focus group to use for website design and usability?
A really comprehensive source of tools for all wallets.
I plan on bookmarking and studying this post thoroughly, very useful. Thank you!
Another super post, Laura! Truly informative! Thank you..
In the hospitality industry - I look at Trip Advisor reviews to understand the customer better! Lots on information in there.
Cheers!
Arjun
Great article! Got a ton of great information from here as well as some new tools to add to the belt.
As you said earlier, search is number one. I feel you can just get so much information from just even the few tools like Analytics, AdWord Keyword Tool & Wonder Wheel to track what people are typing in to find you or your competitors brand.
I always knew there was huge value in 'beefing' up that social media account. Now its becoming more apparent than ever that you need to have a strong social media presence to really push that brand.
Again thanks for the great article Laura!
Crazy Egg is pretty good from our experience. Here's an SEO joke for Laura:
"What does an seo expert tell you the first time you meet him?
I like your blog, what you say is so smart. i just bookmarked it and will read it on a daily basis, as well as advice my friends and family to read it."
Thanks Vince. :)
I dont know, what does an SEO tell you the first time you meet him/her?
"... we should go on a date and I'll show you my long tail KWs."
Outstanding article -- and a valuable list of resources for targeting your industry's audience.
Nice post Laura. Its refreshing to see such a list which is really helpful. Superlike!
Wow, absolutely great article. Thanks.
This is a great article.
Can I suggest a potential improvement? Label your images with figure references, or caption them underneath.
For example the picture in Source A of the drawbacks etc - where is that from? I've checked a few of the link but I'm trying to use that tool itself and I can't find it easily. I ended up inspecting the element where I found that it was Netbase (and hosted on your website).
Thanks for the tip Benj25 - good idea. :) That screnshot is from a NetBase demo I looked at when it was still in beta. They have an even more detailed interface now, but I dont have a screenshot of today's product that showed exactly what I wanted to show there, so I used the one from the older interface.
Great tips, most tools I know of but 1 or 2 I will have a look at. I agree you always have to look for free ways to acquire some of the information listed yet when you deal in B2B markets for example it seems the likes of eMarketer and Forrester will never allow you to access those specific reports and information they might just give you one graph for free hehe, the rest they make you pay up.
Another way to get greay information is if you work in a global agency for example and you share competitive insights all over the globe ;)
Most of the paid social tools too you really need to look out for the hidden costs sure the data they can provide is pricessless but if you know how to use it ;)
Thanks Laura for sharing information.Intellegent article with lots of useful resources.
This will be very helpful to get into the user's mind and can be used to form more targeted search queries to rank for. Not only that, but also to create valuable content for the people once we know what they want, and also the placement of that content. I use heatmaps to see which parts can be used to promote the most important content, but hey, if the landing page doesn't offer what people want it's for nothing.
Anyway, got a few more resources from this article and I intend to use them fully :)
Knowing your audience is very much useful when you start SEO of any website. Methods mentioned in this post is very much useful. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the Trackur mention Laura!
Wow.. very great article.. I didn't know about all those sentiment tools... I'll give them a try (at least for the free ones, at first)... about clicktale, I don't recomment the free version.. they show you only 2 pages in visitor recording... crazyegg is the best for it's price
best set of tools, well written article ;) that's exacly what i've been searching for. Laura you're awesome, YOU KNOW SOMETHING THAT WE DIDN'T KNOW
Another tool to add to the list (if you have the bucks) is www.sysomos.com
This is great - so many helpful resources here, and a few I wasn't using yet. Thanks for sharing!
Some great tools here! The better you can understand your audience, the more your messaging strategy can be designed to meet their needs. You have to set your product/service up to be exactly what they are looking for. The only way to do that is to really dig into your audience's wants/needs/thoughts.
"The only way to do that is to really dig into your audience's wants/needs/thoughts." that's right but it's not easy for a small player to set-up a kind of reputation strategic plan and to me Laura should complete this post with practical advices on how analyse audience with these tools
Somehow I forgot to mention Yahoo Insights. Insights is one of my favorite groups at Yahoo - they gather so much information & research and it's free. You may be able to find insights on your specific audiences (ex: dads) and/or marketing channels (ex: mobile advertising) on their site: https://advertising.yahoo.com/industry-knowledge/research-trends
Woooow! It really gives me some new ideas. Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful article. But, as you said - "good ol' searh" is still number one. It all depenes of creativity which we all have in some doses :)