The Technology Symposium at PRSA’s ICON 2020 virtual conference featured Dan Grech, Founder and CEO of BizHack, with his session “Free Tools to Find Your Ideal Customer Online.”
During his nearly 50-minute presentation, Grech applied the marketing concepts of audience segmentation and targeting to the digital realm. He showed how to use Facebook and Google’s free online tools to find the ideal customer (the kind who buys, tells friends, and comes back wanting more), to analyze product-market fit, and to attract new customers.
Digital: the ideal medium to find your ideal customer
According to Grech, audiences should be definable, findable, actionable, profitable, and have a growth potential. He introduced four key questions to research your audience online:
- “Where are they?”
- “Who are they?”
- “What do they like?”
- “What are their connections?”
He then used a series of examples to explain the full background of the process and how brands can have successful results doing this.
From Key Demos to Taste Clusters
He gave the example of Netflix viewing habits segmentation, remarking on how reliable a predictor it is of future video requests. Instead of relying on the traditional TV “key demos” (key demographics) approach, Netflix uses taste “clusters,” which uses data to analyze what shows people with similar tastes tend to watch. Grech said that they “have not only created a very personalized viewing experience through the use of taste clusters, but they have also become a powerhouse in content creation through the use of clusters.”
Another example was the infamous Cambridge Analytica’s “constellation of interests” method, which used Facebook insights to find people sympathetic to the alt-right through correlated interests.
Grech explained how similar this process is to market your agency or your brand. “You're going to look for the constellation of interests that are more likely to drive your ideal customer to click on that ad to make that purchase. That's really the core of finding your ideal target audience.”
However, he stated that if you define a segment but have no way to find them online, it’s worthless to you: “It does not help if your ideal customer is not findable through online data.”
The Goldilocks Targeting Principle
One of Grech’s recommendations is to apply the Goldilocks Targeting Principle. It is based on finding audience attributes at the right specificity level. The right level is “not too specific, not too broad, but right in the middle.” To segment at this level, he said to use the “But No One Else Would” trick: “A [your industry] enthusiast will know what [superfan term] is, but no one else would.”
The value of Facebook and Google
Grech recommended Facebook Business Manager as a great tool to start researching your audience online. He showed how to use Facebook’s Audience Insights feature on a pet shop to explain how to apply the Goldilocks Principle. “If you're running an ad targeting dog owners, your targeting is not specific enough if you use the same message for both Chihuahua owners and Rottweiler owners. You might sell them the same product, but you're going to target them differently with a different video messaging. For example, you know that one of them might be soft and fluffy, and the other one is dark and foreboding,” Grech explained.
Grech also recommended a series of free Google tools to uncover additional audience information though search behaviors. The first was Google Trends. Grech provided five ways to use it: measuring brand popularity, communicating more profitably, identifying new markets, tracking tech trends, and preparing a client proposal. The second tool was Google Keyword Planner, which he defined as an amazing way to see the search terms related to a term that you're using for a client or for your brand. Third, he also talked about using Google Search predictions, the list of options that appear under your search term when using Google.
Some of these tools may require an account but are free to use.
Seize the Opportunity
To conclude the session, Grech quoted John F. Kennedy regarding the word "crisis" in Chinese: “When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”
He highlighted that “the danger to our businesses into our livelihoods has never been more manifest, but the part that we sometimes forget to focus on or to recognize is the opportunity that comes in crisis.”
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