Match personas, content changes and stages of the buying cycle to help you nurture your leads

In my last post, Personalisation 101- How to increase customer engagement and conversion rates, I introduced the main types of personalisation available to make your site more customer-focused. In this post I'll expand on this by recommending approaches to segmenting your audience and making sure that your website’s personalisation directly meets your overall business objectives. I will show how to: Use business objectives to define measurable actions Identify the weaknesses in your website Create personas for your core audience types Use a Digital Relevancy Map to plot specific actions to personas and buying stages Create a wireframe to translate this knowledge onto your webpages Test and measure personalisation.

Making actions meet your business objectives

The first step is to lay the foundations for personalisation. To make a business case for personalisation you need a clear map of what personalisation…

We're now in a constantly changing digital landscape

Did you see this Comscore report about "Digital Omnivores"?  I think it's really useful for marketers.  Not because the information is revolutionary in any way, but because it's offering some seriously hard facts that can be taken to management to support business cases, marketing planning and ideas generation for marketing. It may help to have this in light of your own analytics, maybe it can help inform decisions that you're thinking of making, or even realise that you need to make. Increased WiFi availability and mobile broadband adoption in countries like the U.S., Australia and the U.K. are driving connectivity. Mobile phones already drive digital traffic around the world, while tablets are gaining steam. Tablets traditionally required a WiFi connection to access the Internet, whereas now they're increasingly driving traffic using mobile broadband access…

Using segmentation to make your social media marketing relevant

We've mentioned the value of Forrester's technographics ladder before. It's a useful tool. Aimia, a Canadian company who specialise in loyalty management, have created a segmentation model that analyses the behavioral drivers of trust and control to identify six social media persona types – these are no shows, newcomers, onlookers, cliquers, mix-n-minglers and sparks. It's the behaviour angle which makes this worth a proper look. “Today’s approach to social media measurement – racing to rack up the most ‘likes,’ retweets, followers and recommendations – is the wrong approach. Marketers must define success not by social media activity, but rather by customer value and engagement,” Doug Rozen, Aimia senior VP, lead author of the report Naturally, Aimia argues that there's single social media channel can deliver a complete picture of customer behaviour, specific social media personas are identifiable which, if engaged directly, can reap benefits for…

Social media marketing gives new options for segmentation

Since the 1950s, when the practice of market segmentation began, it has been the cornerstone of any marketing strategy. Accurately define your market segments and then the follow on activities of targeting and positioning are much more effective. With the advent of social media marketing, many are asking whether social networks, and their ability to engage with individuals interactively and in real-time, made the practice of categorising people into groups redundant? The answer has to be a resounding “No!”, but the way brands categorise consumers is changing.

Towards ‘socialgraphics’

Consumers are considerably more socially mobile and transient than when demographic segmentation was first adopted by marketers. Also, as a result of the web and social media, consumers are much more informed and influenced, think 'Tripadvisor'. They have access to greater choice and their smartphones are…

Are you a Creator, Critic, Collector, Joiner or Spectator?

If you've not seen Forrester Technographics tool before you are missing a treat. Showcased in the book Groundswell, Technographics is Forrester Research's methodology for surveying customers. Its similar to segmenting by demographics or psychographics but segments based on degree of engagement with social media - so it's a behavioural segmentation for social media and related technology. Many reading will know this, but I thought it was worth flagging-up for those who don't, it's new to many in my classes. The tool can be really useful for setting realistic expectations of what social media can deliver amongst your non-marketing colleagues also  since it shows how degree of engagement with social media and blogs varies. Forrester divide people's online behaviour into six categories. You can see these below.

Its important for organisations to know…

The concept of segmentation, is of course, well-known to marketers but it is a term increasingly applied within web analytics. While analytics specialists may be up-to-speed on online segmentation options, most marketers won't have time to get-to-grips with the options. So, I'm pleased to be present this interview with analytics specialist Hugh Gage to enlighten us about the online segmentation options. For example segmentation is now a prominent tool within the latest versions of Google Analytics and Visual Sciences and it has always been easy to create granular segmentations in ClickTracks. In this interview, I talk to web analytics consultant Hugh Gage of Engage Digital who was previously a senior analyst at Logan Tod & Co and before that Head of Online Planning and Buying at Manning Gottlieb OMD.…