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It is the Holy Grail of digital marketing to have a complete understanding of the buyer. You want to know everything about the buyers in your domain of business. It is important to gather that info because it opens up your eyes to a whole new range of parameters that you have probably not ticked yet. Studying the competition and the competitors achieve that result to an extent but ultimately it is the buyers you need to study. Every domain in the digital marketing arena is dynamic and if you want to stay ahead of the competition curve, you cannot follow the competition and then think of surging ahead.
A trusted and tested way to move ahead is by stalking your customers and the target demographic. If you have an idea of how these buyers spend their time online, you will be in a better position to reach them. Your marketing efforts will be more targeted and specific. It will cut down on wastage and become more effective. Thanks to a clutch of online tools, you can actually get all the info you need to build up an online persona for a small sample of potential buyers. Of course, you cannot do that for a group of 100, but surely you can track the online footprints of a group of 5. Once you do that, you can use the lessons to tailor your marketing overtures for better penetration.
Track Social Media Presence
The ideal way to do that is to identify buyers in your domain of business. Pick up a group of 5 from your list of buyers or from the social media pages of your competitors. Once you have 5 names, track their online footprints. Find out what kind of social media networks they frequent, what kind of content they share, which websites they like and what they usually talk about. This is not a breach of privacy because all of this info is available in the public domain. You need to dig it out and use to your advantage. For example, a tool like Followerwonk on Twitter will give you enough about a user’s Twitter presence to build up their online profile.
Track Search Engines
The next logical step in this process is to look at search engine data. When these users search for content online, what kind of keywords they use. You can use a bit of hypothesis in guessing the keywords, based on the persona that you have developed from their social media data. Digital marketing is a lot of psychology as well, so you have to do some mind-reading at some point! Once you have a list of keywords, find out the domain names that these searches head for. You will get some domain names which are consistently present across the keywords. These are websites that are popular among your potential buyers.
Carry out Surveys
Now that you have gathered everything you want through public domain investigations, it is time to approach some of them individually and ask for their ideas. Surveys carried out on your sample group will be useful. You can broaden up your sample for this purpose. Use forms that are simple, like the ones you find on Typeform. These have a higher completion rate and more people are likely to participate when the form is easy to fill up. You can pick up some email ids in the process and use them for networking with them later on.
Look for Marketing Openings
With all the popular websites and online haunts of your potential buyers identified, you need a presence in these places to be noticed. You have to look out for marketing openings and possibilities in these popular zones. Can you place ads on those popular websites or publish a guest blog post in a blog that is a rage these days? You need to figure out a way in which you can strike marketing gold by being visible at the very places where your preferred online crowd hangs out. If the people are not coming to you, you have to go out to them!
Learning the online graphs of consumers will put you in a better position to earning their trust. And business.
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