For those of you who were at this year's MozCon, this post is the punch line to my presentation (download it here). If you did not attend, here’s what happened: I spoke for about an hour about Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn targeting. I worked to explain that research using paid social ad creation tools (including FB Ads) matters to organic social (community management) - the same way that the AdWords keyword research tool matters to organic search (SEO). After my talk, something like 800 people in the audience sort of looked up as if to say, “WTF is Marty talking about!?” Thankfully, Rand came out at the end and asked some smart questions that helped clarify. Then, we had a fireside chat.
Rand said he sensed that what we’d been discussing was really important and, by way of a live interview, totally brought the room to the heart of the matter. It was a remarkable experience, and why that needed to happen makes so much sense to me. This stuff is hard to explain and, honestly, I’ve had mixed results when presenting it. Rand was right. It really got me thinking.
By the end of the impromptu session, nearly all of those incredibly beautiful Mozzers raised their hands to say they seemed to understand. What blew my mind is that since then, I’ve received at least 20 tweets, calls, emails, and LinkedIn direct messages in which MozCon attendees expressed that the presentation changed their outlook on marketing forever. That has been confusing and exciting all at once. Thus, this post.
Upon reflection, we at aimClear put our collective heads together and brainstormed a way to express the concept of the “whole” user, targeted by Psychographics. “Psychographics” is a means of identifying users by interests, occupations, roles in life, predilections, and other personal characteristics. It’s like demographic research and persona modeling on to the Nth degree… hence the “psycho.” I decided to use myself as an example. Keep the following types of Facebook interest/product associations in mind as you peruse the infographic below, and use them as jumping boards for your own psychographic targeting explorations.
- I (Marty) am susceptible to buy Ben Taylor songs, because I have loved his dad’s (James Taylor) music since I was a boy.
- Marketers have a great shot at selling me exclusive foodie experiences because my social graph indicates I’m interested in James Beard award winning restaurants.
- I’m a terrific target for Chanukah candles in November, because I love the old City of Jerusalem.
- Rand can pique my interests with one of Joanna’s great ads, because I like Danny Sullivan.
- Republicans should not spew-market content in my direction. Instead, they should work to subtly subvert my instincts. I like Barack Obama.
- Hotels, airport transportation, and Broadway shows may interest me, because of my Javits Convention Center proclivity. It’s worth testing.
- You might be able to get me to buy self-help books, because I sometimes suck my thumb when I sleep.
Anyway, you get the picture. We chose Facebook for this study because it has the most complete social graph (best data) in all of publically available social. While all interests below were pulled as actual inventory in Facebook, there are likely a number of permutations for each interest to round out each interest bucket. Also, what you see below can easily be mapped to YouTube and LinkedIn. Grab my MozCon slidedeck and this all might just make a bit more sense.
Key Takeaways from the Infographic
- There has been a radical top-of-the-funnel shift. People can be sliced and targeted many different ways in social channels.
- Social intent can be often gleaned. Sometimes it works in amazing ways, like search.
- The “data” on the table is publically available via Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube or Google. Leverage the tools made for marketers (native keyword tools, ads creators, etc.) to assess inventory for your segments.
- On that note: keyword research (using AdWords KW Tool) is to SEO as social PPC research is to community management. You would never do SEO without having a look at Google’s KW tool. It makes sense as AdWords is one of the places we can find out about Google’s inventory. You would also never do community management without looking at associated paid inventory.
- The psychographic research artist adds value to raw channel-of-origin data by curation. In other words, if you’re the marketer who can target all the molecular biologists in the United States who work for Fortune 500 companies, you’ve added a lot of value to the raw data. Now your team can target these users for social PPC ads and organic social interaction.
- Use the correct tagging, and marketers can capture social data to associate with known-users’ profiles. Pretty much the best way to bust your privacy is to click on one of my tagged ads and convert. Count on the fact that we grabbed the data and associated it with your profile.
Thanks, Mozzers. It was a pleasure to meet you in Seattle. I saw plenty of old friends and made new ones. See ya in the comment threads!
Infographic designed by Quentin Oliver, co-produced by Lauren Litwinka, additional research by Gretchen Egeberg.
Fireside chat image by Rudy Lopez.
Social targeting has come a long way. I remember removing my gender from my Facebook settings because every. single. ad. they showed me was about weight loss and fashion. As long as Facebook knew I was a woman, it figured those ads were relevant for me. Now, it's sophisticated enough to know that I am the kind of woman who is likely to click on an ad for Firefly t-shirts or an ad for a book about education reform.
@ Claire J. Vannette: Yeah, targeting has come so far that finding and segmenting the right audiences is more about knowing who we say what to. We always say that "targeting is not the problem. Marketing is the problem."
When it comes to paid, It's a fantastic time to be a contextual marketer. things get even deeper when you consider that these buckets can be driven into sweet retargeting lists. Think about what it means to:
Hey, we've faced the diet pill thing
We helped sell some weight loss supplements in .au, and were able to sell with positive messages
What made me sad is that, having looked at what the client did before, the negative messages resonated more with young woman. The client did not keep us because the ROI of being nice did not work. :(. You are SO right.
Word. I remember marking the weight loss ads as offensive.
So, true, and you bring up a great point about how to do psychographics right, Claire! The problem with demographics is that the categories -age, race, gender - make it far too easy for marketers to fall back on stereotypes.
It's really a lazy way of marketing, isn't it. HARK. WOMAN. MAKE THE PRODUCT PINK.
At least now with psychographics marketers are focusing a bit more on the individual, and not just the categories we belong to.
Love this post, Marty.
Your talk was one of my favorites at MozCon as I loved how much it pushed us to rethink about community management and how to connect with our audiences. And I love being challenged to think about how I can revolutionize what I do and learn some new skills.
Thank makes me happy. We have seen some radical data which says that an understanding of psychographics makes building organic communities (by paid/organic mashups) realistic. I'm glad it impacted. Thanks for being so super cool with me as I hid under the sound board table for a half hour after that session :). I feel great about it now.
You're welcome. Always glad to provide a safe space. :) I'm glad to hear that you feel great about how your presentation.
Nice post Marty, I like your post and i think it was truly great experience for you. It might be really challenging to target our users as your psychographics way. Your example is perfect to understand this concept because facebook is one of the growing social media site. So thanks for the sharing your experience with us, i am looking for more interesting stuff from you.
Sanket, I'm glad the post resonated with you. Yes, it's a hard concept to explain :).
Marty, your talk was my favorite from MozCon. I "knew" all of this was going on, but I didn't really know how everything was put together. Your slides and examples opened my eyes.Targeting and re-targeting is something I really want to learn more about.
For anyone else that is wanting more information, start reading the aimClear blog. Here's a post to get you started.
@George Andrews: So happy to hear that. The experience was transformational for me and really was inspiring. Thanks for taking the time to comment here.
Hey Marty you Forget to link your Mozcon slidedeck! Will you please link it so we can understand what actually your presentation all about and gain more points form it.
While playing with Google Queries to find Marty Slidedeck I found whole mozcon slide decks. Have a look at https://www.seomoz.org/mozcon-live/agenda
Think we will have to buy the Moz Con Dvd to be honest, the slides are mostly images :( still worth having a look but =)
Often seen canoeing the Great Barrier Reef, listening to Tony Bennet whilst enjoying some fine creme brulee & watching Mad Men on his latest gadget.
Nice post Marty - entertaining & enlightening :)
Marty, i was at MozCon and i would have to say your presentation was great! Hysterical, passonate, and packed with information. Then best of all you wrapped it up with this blog post. Good stuff!
Thanks so much. Yep, I thought about this post long and hard. I was in NYC walking and saw myself as a walking psychographic. The idea for this came from that moment.
Thanks Marty,
Your presentation at MozCon blew me away. The guy sitting next to me said just before you started, "hold your hat this will be wild" and he was right!!
I have been tossing over these ideas since the conference, presented what little data I could remember/process to my team and this refresher has been fantastic.
Just sat with my team member and tried as best I could to recall elements of your presentation. Looked at the deck and my notes, we are trying to reconstruct the Transvestite example, very embarrassing when the buildings staff walked in to talk about knocking down a wall!!
Thanks again.
How funny is that. I guess the transvestite example was a little over the top. But, look at the bright side. Look at what you've done here: https://www.google.com/search?q=seomoz+transvestite&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a :).
Awesome Marty, thank you!
Since seeing you at Mozcon I've been racking my brains about how to best implement these great ideas. We're building the next generation of CMS's, initially the plan was to allow different page variations (both copy and layout) for plain A/B testing, but even using rudimentary psychographc data to tailor the browsing experience would be a great help for SMB ecommerce sites.
One of the challenges is getting as much data as possible, which is why I think Ian Lurie's Idea Graph is a great concept to tie into this as well. Essentially applying machine learning to buyer behaviour based on known (yet incomplete) psychographc data may allow a CMS to present a better buying experience for potential customers. Oh, and just thinking out loud, one could also try and tailor content for where an individual buyer is likely to be in the sales funnel.
Anyway, thanks again, your ideas are stunningly superb and give us mere implementers much food for thought :)
p.s. On an unrelated note, that Infographic outfit is something else! There aren't many people who could pull that off, hehe :)
@
bruce_werdschinski: Thank you so much. That means a lot to me. Yep, the infographic was put together by a team of 4 people and I've been thinking about it for about a month. It was actually really hard and I sought the input of those close to me for perspective. I recommend the process :).
I check out your website and I would have to say your demonstration was great! The one factor, I like the demonstration with pictures. It's an excellent Idea! I appreciate your way to discussing so informative weblogs. Really Awesome Post!! Thanks for discussing....!!
Kate, the picture seemed like the best way to handle the explanation. I'm glad it worked for you.
Amaizing post keep writing more ! thanks
Marty, do you have any thoughts on whether Google might leverage social data from Plus profiles for more contextualized ads, both for GDN and a future version of AdWords?
MSFT/Bing has a fantastic opportunity to use keyword-level psychographics... Their special relationship w/ FB also would even allow for "Facepiles" within PPC/SEM ads.
Thanks Marty! Proper Tagging has always helped me in achieving my SEO objectives But regarding Google Keyword tool, its not much helpful sometimes and instead looking at competitors is a good alternate.
My question is that mindset of a customer is more important or the social group he/she belongs to is important (Your emphasis), i mean do you think FB Ad would get you more sales or the Referral traffic from Shopzilla or Google product? In my case mindset and willingness to purchase has always worked. And personally i have never bought on a recommendation but other factors indeed e.g. price, specifications etc. Got my point?
As a person with a marketing degree, I love psychographics. When I learned about it in college, it was based on assessing a much different data set to form these segmentations. The ability of Facebook specifically to allow a look into people's wide range of preferences is really invaluable.
Knowing what type of music, beer, or political party someone leans toward is a great way to build psychographic segmentations and personas. This is gold to a data driven marketing initiative (which all marketing initiatives should be). The way Facebook is used by brands has really helped to make the data truly valuable because you get a great picture of a person's preferences.
Also, I love the infographic! It is a great visual representation of the information you were presenting and how valuable it can really be.
Well done sir!
Not just what they already like, but what they would probably like!
Nice perspective. It's interesting to think about the all the things that make a person...that person. Yep, it fascinates the hell out me. Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
No problem at all aimClear , I truly enjoyed the thoughtful article. I actually read the version in Search Marketing Standard when it came to the office as well. Good stuff.
I liked in the print article how you talked about using retargeting to track the psychographics and gave a simplistic way to accomplish that best
Side note: is there a way to tag people on here or are you guys just hyperlinking as well? Lol
I've done some low-level psychographic targeting before, but I'm definitely looking forward to seeing your slidedeck. The amount of data that is available, especially through Facebook, allows for targeting that companies could only dream of, even in the not so distant past. There's plenty of opportunity for us to use that data, we just have to do it.
@
JasonManion: Coolio man. Have a look at the pilots/flight attendant targeting in YouTube, FB & LinkedIn. Nice to meet you here.
Nice post, I think advanced social targeting is just something which is only starting to kick off, Facebook really has so much data to play with but the thing is they are not currently using it to the full extent, I feel that when we see Facebook Search evolve their will be so many more advanced targeting methods rolled out ;) Google is playing catch up with G+ but it is only a matter of time ;)
@
James Norquay: "Facebook really has so much data to play with," Yep, that's for sure. Curating the data into targetable chunks is an amazing thing. It's an awesome time to be a marketer.
The average Facebook user willingly discloses so much valuable data that it would be a waste of marketing dollars not to use it. I'm sure the PDF presentation alone is not as informative as your live presentation was, wish I had been there. Very interested in seeing case studies on this topic of interest.
Igor, I hope our paths cross at a conference sometime :)
Are you speaking in Australia anytime soon? I see you "like" our great land!!
@ aimClear per our conversation & tweets back & forth at MOZcon - you know how much I dug your presentation - and this post is really well done and a great follow-up. However, I find that I easily get overwhelmed when looking at this data, even while taking part in Ian's project.
Do you have any advice to get started with this in small bite size pieces?
Yep, next time you start a marketing assignment ask:
That should be a great start. Chapters 5 & 6 of my book, Killer Facebook Ads take you through a checklist. Thanks a lot for the thoughtful comment.
Great post! (Love the infographic, too;)
This stuff IS very difficult to explain to people, and you do a great job! I've recently started to try my best to explain it in my new blog on psychographics and "affective" advertising: Blog.PsychographX.com
I would be so grateful to get your feedback on some of my posts!
You know I tried checking out your blog, Nicholas, but it seems to be stuck in a perpetual loop. Love the term 'affective advertising' though!
Wow, Marty that is some in-depth profiling! There were certainly a lot of positive tweets filling my stream during and after your preso at Mozcon. As a psychology and marketing major, I learned about psychographic profiling (for traditional outbound marketing) more than a decade ago. Used in the context of inbound marketing, it's truly powerful stuff. How in the world do you test with so many profile permutations? Do you use a tool for personal modeling? Keep the great posts coming.
Marty, we are preparing to do our first ever targeted Facebook campaign. We are trying to target a pretty tight niche - Church Tech Directors - for an upcoming live webinar we are doing together with PreSonus in October. Right now, we've got it set up to target USA males (most church tech directors are male), ages 24-unlimited,
who like:
music production, #Christian ministry, media ministry blog, music pastor, technical director, #Live sound mixing, #Production sound mixer, #Sound design, #Praise (band), #Southern Christian Leadership Conference, #Christian Church, #Audio-visual, #Audio engineering, music ministry, worship rock worship leaders musicians, live sound engineer, black church sourcecom, presonus audio electronics, #PreSonus, praise worship leader, zaneta whipple minister music, new media ministry, #Contemporary worship music, music minister, worship leader magazine, #Church music or praise worship team
who speak English (US)
who are in the category Christian & Gospel
This got us a pool of 278,000
Are we on the right track? Thanks! You are an inspiration.
The concept alone of using facebook advertising to identify potential target segments for a community is one of those face palm moments you wish you had thought of that sooner.
Great Idea, now all we need(maybe it exists?) is the capability to pull that kind of facebook data into other tools, similar to how it can be done with adwords.
Dude, and it's super easy to map them to YouTube and in professional circles to LinkedIn.
Great post. I was sure to share it on all of my social media profiles! Thanks Marty.
That is so interesting. I never looked at it this way before. Thanks for the enlightening post.
Nice post! :)