Getting Inside Your Customers Heads

When you are in business, your task is to meet the wants, desires and needs of your customers. Easy!

This is much harder than it sounds. Each person is totally unique and if you look at their individual wants, desires and needs you will never be able to satisfy them all and you will go broke trying.

This is where statistics comes into play. If you get a large enough group together they will begin to form a statistically coherent pattern. You can use this pattern to gain a little glimpse into what is going on in your customer's heads. That is the purpose of things like census data - to look at big enough groups of people to help governments make appropriate policies.

Back at the turn of the century the statisticians looked at things such as demographics. Businesses worked out their best customers were all of a certain age, spent a certain amount of money, lived in certain areas, had certain jobs and visited certain shops.

Demographics were a great start to help us to segment our customers and to help us work out where we should target our marketing. Even today you will find print media will provide you with demographic data on their readership to help you make a decision about whether or not to advertise in their publication.

The problem with demographics is they don't take into account large variances within groups and they don't take into account the changes in how people view the world. 30 years ago you could look at a demographic profile and make a decision that if you wanted to reach businessmen of a certain income and age you should advertise in the Financial Review or Wall Street Journal.

These days people gather their information in a more varied way. With the internet people search for precisely what they want - they hang out with like-minded people and exchange ideas and information.

Readership of newspapers and magazines are dramatically down. TV viewing is down. Radio listeners are down. People go to their clan or their group to find information. Using demographic data as your sole way of making your decisions is not helpful to your business.

So what has replaced demographics? In recent times we have started to look at psychographic profiles. We work out the common things our best customers think, value and believe in.

Psychographics are where you start to look at why people do what they do. To do this you ask questions such as:
* What needs are your best customers looking to fulfil?
* What beliefs about themselves and the world do they hold?
* What inspires them?
* What problems do they have?
* What is similar in how they view the world?
* Where do they hang out?

Psychologists have been doing something similar for years when they look at tools to help profile people such as Myers Briggs, Team Management Index, and Belbin. All of these are ways of categorising ways people view and interact with the world.

Let's make this a bit more practical so you can see what role this plays in business and getting inside your customer's heads.

One client I have specialised in kitchen and bathroom renovations. We started with demographic data and found that 95% of all their clients were over the age of 40. They lived in their own home, were employed in white collar jobs earning a reasonable but not excessive income.

We then started to dig a bit further to look for similarities in their lives and how they viewed the world. All of them had raised their families and finally as the kids were getting a bit older they had some discretionary income that they chose to spend on themselves. "It was their turn" was a common saying among these clients when talking about their renovation. "They had put up with things for years and now they deserved something nice."

The one interesting thing was every single house was extremely messy and the clients apologised about the mess to the tradespeople.

So how did this translate into our marketing? Well we placed an emphasis on it being their turn and deserving nice things. We also made mention of the fear of people looking down their nose at your house and how the tradespeople the company used were real people who understand if the rest of the house wasn't in show perfect condition.

We also used pictures and colours that reflected the taste of their customers (and not some over the top flash designers).

Is this manipulation? No. We just looked at what was already there with their customer base and sought to understand their needs better.

The business wanted more customers just like the ones they had, so by directing our marketing to the psychographic profile of their best customers made it easier for customers to feel right at home with the company from the marketing. This translates to more sales from the right customers.

Now it's your turn to get inside your customers heads. Go back to your best customers ... the ones you truly love working for. What makes them so great? How do they view the world? What problems are they trying to solve by coming to you? What do they value? Where do they hang out?

While you are at it have a look inside at yourself. What makes you so great? How do you view the world? What problems do you love to solve? What are your values? Where do you hang out?

When your profile and your customer's profile are congruent, then your business booms. If you are in a state of flux and you are not clear on your own profile, then business can be challenging as you attract the wrong type of customers to your business.

Getting clear on your own profile and the profile of your ideal client makes marketing easier, selling easier and your life easier.

About the Author

Ingrid Cliff is a Freelance Copywriter with her Brisbane Copywriting Business (Heart Harmony). Ingrid writes a free weekly small business newsletter packed full of articles and tips and Small Business Ideas blog for small businesses. www.heartharmony.com.au

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The 4 Levels of Link Building

SEO experts and internet marketing professionals know that the key to high search engine rankings is link building.They will also tell you that link building is not all that easy until you have done it for awhile, and that there are so many techniques for link building that It is hard to sort them all out.Here are the 4 levels of link building to take you from novice to expert.

1.Do It Yourself, Quick and Easy.The easiest links to build are those for which you do not have to rely on anyone but yourself.The easiest way to do this is to submit your site to directories.Simply submit your URL, the name of your company, and a short description of your company.Know before you begin that directories are managed by humans, so you may not see results right away.Also know that some directories require a small fee for your listing.

You should also use social media as a way to get links to your page.SEO experts do not find these crucial to success, but they are still a pretty simple and cheap way to target an audience that is going to be using the sites anyway.

2.Do It Yourself, Not So Quick and Easy.Before you start on Level 2, make sure you have started a business blog.This is crucial if you want to have good content to which others can link.And the way you are going to get these links is through press release optimization and article marketing.

When you are writing your articles and your press releases, always keep your keyword strategy at the front of your mind.Links should coincide with your strategy.Before you send your press releases and articles into the ether, use a press release grader to see if they pass muster.

3.Networking Plus Significant Time.Networking is by far the most effective way to get links to your site.It is time consuming and it can be frustrating, but it can also get you results that you never dreamed of.There are many ways to go about this type of networking, but the key is putting yourself amongst those who are potentially interested in what you have to say.

The best way to do this is to establish yourself as an expert in your niche.But never make people feel like they would be lost without your presence.Engage them.Show compassion.Share your own opinions and ideas and vulnerabilities.Start by reading industry-related blogs and commenting on them.Eventually you will want to establish a one-on-one relationship with bloggers, probably by casually mentioning third-party content that they might find interesting.

Ideally you will soon be asked to be a guest blogger on blogs that are related to your niche.In the process, you can link to yourself and let others in your niche know that you know what you are talking about.If all goes well, they will start following you as well, which leads to the final level.

4.Links Resulting From Good Content.Once you have reached this level, you have established yourself as a knowledgeable resource within your field.Although you can probably never afford to abandon the strategies mentioned above, you are now generating most of your links from people who respect you and enjoy reading your excellent content.This kind of success does not happen immediately.It takes a lot of time and effort, including effort in providing your followers with an array of high-quality, interesting, and relevant content.You may do his through your blog, through hosting webinars, or through publishing white papers.
The key to keep in mind as you are starting out is that, while content is crucial, you are going to have to start out doing more than creating great content.You are going to have to go out and find followers, and then give them a reason to stick around.It is not easy, but it will pay off in the end.

About the Author

Seomul Evans is a SEO expert with a leading Dallas Internet Marketing company specializing in Next Generation Search Engines and a contributor of Entrepreneurship articles

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3 Ways To Keep MS Word From Killing Your SEO Strategy

Most of us type our content in Microsoft Word before publishing our articles, blog posts, and web content.But did you know that Microsoft Word can actually hurt the SEO strategy of your site?

If Microsoft Word is set up incorrectly, it can cause major issues when transferring the content to the web.Before writing any document, it is important to make a few changes to your Word settings to eliminate these issues.

Smart Quotes, Apostrophes, and Dashes

Microsoft Word automatically converts straight quotation marks and apostrophes into "smart" quotes and apostrophes for a more pleasant look.

It will also automatically convert single and double dashes into an elongated dash.While these might look nice on the Microsoft Word document, these modified characters cause a lot of trouble on the web.If you've ever seen something on the web with "??" where quotes should be or strange jargon in place of a dash, you've seen the embarrassment these can cause.

The good news is that it only takes changing a few settings once to eliminate this problem for every future document you write.This is important because your SEO strategy is only good if your content is good as well.

1.Go the "Tools" menu and select "Auto Correct"
2.
Select the "Format as You Type" Tab.
3.Under the "Replace As You Type" heading uncheck: "Straight Quotes" with "Smart Quotes" and "Symbol Characters (--) with symbols"

Style Formatting

The style formatting toolbar looks innocent enough - but choosing certain settings here can cause hours of additional work over time for the person who is converting your text to the web.

Always choose NORMAL when using Word!

I've noticed that many freelance writers choose something other than normal - or add additional spaces after lines, or double spaces after single returns.While this might look good in Word, all of that formatting disappears once it is put into an HTML editor and then must be completely reformatted in order for your SEO strategy to be effective.If you highlight the text and see extra spaces around the line breaks, then there is something off with the settings.

To ensure that your document does not have any extra Word Doc formatting:
1.
Select "Format" and "Paragraph" from your toolbar:
2.
The "Indents and Spacing" tab should be set to single spacing with 0 spacing before and after lines.
3.The "Line and Page Breaks" tab should have nothing checked other than "window/orphan control"

Pasting Content into Your Website Software from Word

When pasting content into your website software such as Wordpress, Joomla, or other type of website software with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, it's important to paste the content into the HTML tab - NOT the visual editor.

The reason is that Microsoft Word adds a ton of HTML code "behind the scenes" when you paste directly into the editor.

Pasting into the HTML tab eliminates all of this sloppy extra code that can severely dilute your keyword density and make it more difficult for search engine spiders to crawl your content and decipher the primary topic of the article.And if the search engines cannot determine the focus of your content, your SEO strategy is not efficient.

Taking these few extra steps before you start typing, can eliminate hours of reformatting and ensure that your content is properly read and ranked by search engines.Creating an effective SEO marketing campaign means that you sometimes have to take into consideration all of the small changes you can make as well as the big ones -- every bit counts towards higher rankings!

About the Author

Christine O'Kelly is co-owner of SEO Content Solutions, a leading SEO copywriting firm.

The company provides SEO press releases, articles, blog content and web content to resellers and end users alike.

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