As an example I can offer this case study of a B-to-B audience segmentation initiative I conducted for the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce (shared with permission).  Enjoy!

Because I do audience segmentation research, I see lots of situations in which the “dog whistle” approach is the right one for a particular message and a particular audience.  One audience loves spicy food — another hates it — but both love your Mexican restaurant.  Once audience is very religious — another just wants a good education close to home — but both are considering your faith-based college.  In many of these cases, trying to be “all things to all people” only serves to make some audiences sure that you’re not for them.  Why risk it when technologies such as email segmentation and social media allow us to target our messages with such specificity?

Of course, using the dog whistle technique requires some work.  You can’t just decide that one groups likes says toMAto, the other says toMAHto, and that for each the difference is highly relevant to their purchase decision.  Attitudinal audience segmentation research is the only way I’ve seen to get to this insight — it defines audiences based on what’s both highly relevant to each, and different between them.  Armed with this information the dog whistle opportunities become clear.

Your audience is waiting for your call — are you ready to blow?

I am also proud to be regular contributor to AgencySide, the organization that presents the annual BOLO conference and a terrific resource for agencies “going digital”.

My posts for AgencySide offer my thoughts on:

• The importance of understanding customer motivation when crafting a relevant marketing strategy and messaging;
• How audience segmentation insights can help organizations build a valuable file of prospective customers;
• How learning from your current customers and reaching out to hear from non-customers are both critically important to understanding the value of your brand (and how you can spread the message to more likely prospects).

I hope you will enjoy these posts and the terrific content by best-in-class contributors on the AgencySide site.  And if you’re a digital agency, take a look at the great lineup at BOLO 2010 and consider joining us next year!

Now, I’m a marketing strategist. I believe a marketing plan should start at the beginning — with your audiences — and do a thorough job of integrating the needs of your customers (and potential customers) with your own goals, resources and realities to detail what you need to do, why you need to do it, when it needs to happen, what it will cost and how you will measure its effectiveness.

Sometimes, though, it’s nice to look at things a little differently. Sometimes you just need a quick check on a new initiative to make sure you’re covering all your bases. That’s when I whip out this little exercise, a simple checklist of key stages a prospect will go through in becoming a customer and, eventually, an advocate of your business to others. I wish I could come up with a catchy name for it, but I can’t, so we’ll just call it ATALA.

A = Awareness

Potential customers can’t evaluate you if they don’t know you exist. How are you getting in front of the people who are likely to find you the perfect solution to their needs? Do you even know what those needs are? Where do you need to be for them to see you? Sometimes this is easy — I sell audience research to digital agencies, so I love opportunities to speak to groups of agencies. Sometimes, it isn’t — I also need to reach out to small businesses looking for marketing strategy, and they can be harder to find since they’re not all attending big national conferences. Think about where your prospects are, and how best you can make your presence known there. Speaking opportunities, volunteering at or sponsoring events, keyword search, PPC advertising and traditional advertising are all possibilities.

T = Trust

This is a biggie. Whether someone is buying an ice cream cone or an enterprise network system from you, they have to trust that you can deliver. How are you working to generate that trust? There are all sorts of options here, from testimonials on your website to certification and licensing by appropriate agencies, to case studies or a blog in which you show your expertise. Even the photos of your team can exude professionalism or make you look like amateurs. What evidence do you provide to prospects to show them you can be trusted?

A = Adoption

Once they trust you, are you making it easy for prospects to come onboard? What kinds of barriers are you putting up that could discourage people from giving you a shot? Requiring answers to a long list of detailed questions on your “Contact Us” form is a barrier. So is asking customers to enter their credit card information, even if you’re not going to charge them until their free trial period is over. Allowing customers to apply the cost of their initial purchase to an upgrade (like a season pass) is a win.

L = Loyalty

What are you doing to ensure that customers keep using your product or service, or keep coming back for more? Benefits for repeat customers — from FourSquare mayor benefits, to frequency programs (ThinkGeek’s Geek Points is a favorite of mine), to a birthday club are all good ways to keep customers buying. Opportunities to engage with your company, like social media or blog commentary, are a great way to build loyalty. Even a customer insight panel participating in surveys and providing feedback on your products or services can cultivate loyal fans.

A = Advocacy

Word of mouth is one of the most valuable marketing tactics out there. How are you going to make it easy for your customers to pass along the good word? Are you actively promoting your Yelp reviews? Do you include “share with a friend” promotional opportunities in your emails? Are there referral benefits for bringing you a new customer? Social media plays a part here as well — are you actively monitoring and responding to comments about your brand? And remember our first step, Awareness? How can you ensure that the advocacy of your brand champions are reaching the ears (or eyes) of the audiences you most want to reach?

Every marketing decision you make — new product introductions, pricing, distribution, etc. — is going to affect at least one of these areas. While this exercise can’t replace the benefit of a well-researched, exhaustive marketing plan, if you do a quick run-through of this list before you make your move, you’ll go a long way in ensuring that you don’t accidentally miss a key component in turning prospects into brand advocates.

Image by levork via Flicker

This is one of a series of posts about a real-life attitudinal audience segmentation project.  See other posts in this series.

One of the biggest challenges I find companies have with market research is how to make it actionable.  The fact is, you can have a lot of great data about your customers and prospects and what they want, but many organizations don’t really know how to use it in their day-to-day operations without completely turning their business upside down.

Actually, this is one of the main reasons I believe in marketers learning to do market research.  Without the insight of a marketer before, during and after the actual analysis, companies are often left with great information that no one — not they and not their often very capable research providers — can figure out how to use.

Any researcher will tell you that there are always options in terms of how much detail you seek in a research project — they call it the “level of granularity”.  In no case is this more evident than in audience segmentation work.  The fact is, the math doesn’t care — it can differentiate your audiences into 3 segments, or 30 — and, depending on how many respondents you have, even that many can offer statistically significant insights.

The problem is, there aren’t many organizations that can adapt their marketing and operations to 30 different segments.  At the same time, only looking at two or three probably doesn’t offer much in the way of insight that will actually make a difference in people’s purchase decisions.

The spectrum of “how far do we go with this” is wide indeed.  I have had clients who invested a great deal of time and money to gain incredible insights into the desires and motivations of their audiences — and then continued to run advertising creative that the research had proven was motivating to none of them.  Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, organizations like Best Buy have spent millions of dollars to completely revamp store interiors and train their personnel to identify and cater to different segments.

In truth, most organizations should probably start somewhere in the middle — especially if it’s the first time they’ve really thought about dividing up their messaging to different audiences.  But there are many impactful changes that can be made that won’t require a raze and rebuild on your company:

1)  Email segmentation

The nice thing about an audience segmentation survey is that you will know virtually every respondent’s segment when you’re done.  Assuming you’ve asked for (and been granted) the approval to email them about your company, product or service (something you can incorporate into the segmentation survey design), you have a beautifully segmented email list just waiting for some targeted messaging.

Once you know what your segments are, it can be fairly straightforward to ask your incoming email registrants which one best fits them.  While this isn’t as sophisticated as running everybody through a full segmentation analysis, it’s a lot more practical.  And in my experience customers are happy to tell you which shoe fits if you let them know it will lead to more relevant messages and offers.

Segmenting your email messaging can be as simple as setting up a few different versions of your standard email communications, ensuring that all of them contain the universal “umbrella” messages that appeal to all segments and adding a space on your template for segment-specific information — a recent case study that will resonate with their segment in particular, or a special offer based on their interests and priorities.  You might also consider adding emails that are only sent to certain segments about news that will be relevant to them — a new product introduction, an article they might find interesting or company news that would resonate with them.  If you have customers who like spicy food and some who don’t, the fact that you won the state salsa competition is great for the former, but not something you’d necessarily want the latter to receive.

2)  Website content

My friend Jason Baer of Convince & Convert argues effectively in this post for the value of the two-click rule: ensure that your site visitors can find the content they want within two clicks.

Of course, this is tough to do if your website is set up under the assumption that all of your visitors are interested in everything about your organization and its products or services.  Inevitably customers looking for something that speaks to their needs is going to be buried in content that tries to speak to somebody else’s needs, too — especially if your site navigation has generic tabs such as “Products” and “FAQ’s”.

Imagine the power of having your spice-loving audience arrive at your website to find a tab named “Love It Hot?”.  What if your B-to-B prospect sees something called “Realtor Tools”?  One of my clients, a tourist destination, reorganized their site to provide a section for those visitors interested in relaxing spa weekends, vs. a section for those seeking outdoor activities (which features a large weather widget front and center).

And, of course, understanding how your customers use your products, and what need they fulfill, is a huge benefit when crafting copy that is optimized for search engines.  Inevitably clients discover new topics they can use to improve their search rankings in key areas and generate new visitors.

3)  Traditional Media

Like digital marketing, traditional marketing works better if it’s relevant.  Items such as brochures, advertisements, direct mail and other traditional media can benefit from the insights of segmentation in many of the same ways that digital media can.  In the case of SCU, they were preparing to redevelop new collateral pieces when they began the segmentation research project; its completion provided them with specific guidelines regarding the types of different audiences that needed information, the kind of information they would be looking for and the messages that would be most relevant and compelling to them.  The insight allowed them to eliminate some pieces they had planned, consolidate some efforts, and develop new recruiting tools to reach the groups they most wanted to reach.

4)  Social Media

Social media is particularly well-suited to helping people find information that matches their interests.  Ensuring that your key prospects can find you through social media requires that your SM content is relevant to them.  And the wonderful thing about SM is that you can set up multiple touchpoints so that each of your audiences can get the information they want, without having to sort through a bunch of information they don’t.  Segmentation shows you who your audiences are, what’s important to them and the kinds of questions they want answered about your product or service and your brand.  Who says you should only have one Twitter feed?  Or one Facebook Fan page?  There are successful companies out there doing amazing things with segmented social media profiles to help their audiences get just the information they want to hear.  Take one of my favorites, ThinkGeek:  Want to join in their super-geeky celebration of geek culture?  Follow their @thinkgeek Twitter feed for “Today In Geek History” and other entertaining tidbits.  Rather get their new product announcements and promotions?  Follow their @thinkgeekspam account.  Want both?  Perfect!  There couldn’t be a better roadmap than segmentation research for understanding where to reach out to each of your audience types and what kind of content to offer them.

5)  Customer Service

Customer service is one area that’s often overlooked when considering how your segmentation insights can help your company connect with your customers.  When a customer or prospect contacts your organization, you have one more opportunity to build your relationship with them — or break it.  If you add segment information to your customer database and can access it when a customer calls, terrific.  If you don’t have a caller’s segment information it can be a matter of a few short questions to quickly identify their likely segment and ensure that their concern, information request or other issue is handled as effectively as possible.

6)  Branding

The fact is, YOU don’t decide what your brand represents — the marketplace does.  Your brand identity is an amalgamation of customer opinions, prospect assessments, former customer complaints, competitor messages and your own marketing efforts.  Understanding how your customers and prospects see your product or service offering, against whom they measure you, and where they find your greatest strengths is terrific fodder for looking at your own branding efforts.  The simple fact is, you can’t MAKE your brand anything — you have to convince the market that you deliver on your promises in order to gain brand recognition for a particular feature or benefit.  Understanding how your key audiences feel about your brand can help you understand the kind of changes you need to make to your product or messaging to move that brand identity in the direction you want it to go.

I had a client whose segmentation research showed that their prospects believed they could buy comparable products at major big-box discounts stores.  This was particularly upsetting given that my client’s products were of a far superior quality and a great deal more expensive.  While his first instinct was to complain that people were idiots and discard the insight as ridiculous, he came to understand that, like it or not, the perception was out there among his key target groups.  He had three options:  1)  Abandon the audience completely, assuming that they were too “cheap” to buy his product; 2)  Significantly discount his product to reach the same price range as those competitive products; or 3)  Help the audience understand the significant (and real) difference between his products and those they were comparing it to.  Since the research clearly showed that the target audience wasn’t price-focused but quality-focused, he knew that there was an opportunity to make his case and convince them his product was worth the money.  They just didn’t have the information they needed to understand how his product was a better choice for them.  In the end, he was able to effectively message to and convert these prospects and drive new revenue without forfeiting his brand’s luxury positioning and price.

These are just a few of the options for making segmentation insights actionable in your organization.  In reality, well-executed and well-communicated segmentation data can touch all aspects of your organization and help build your relationships with your customers and prospects in every way you contact them.

Do you have questions about how to improve your customer relationships, about attitudinal segmentation or whether it might make sense for your company?  Let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!

In 2007, Glynis and Eric Legrand fulfilled their dream of opening a world-class tea joint – the Urban Tea Loft in historic Downtown Chandler.

Today, they’re in danger of losing all they’ve worked for.

If you haven’t visited UTL, you’ve missed a truly embracing experience.  Glynis and Eric serve wonderful food (including some of the best soul food I’ve ever had), an amazing assortment of teas, and have a full bar specializing in their own creation, the miraculous and varied Teatini.

They have live music every Friday night.  They host book clubs, meetings and classes in tea (and Teatini’s!)  They have scheduled an incredible Mother’s Day brunch for next weekend, including live music.  Their Tuesday-Friday happy hours are a sure bet.  They sell gift cards too, so you can share the love.

But best of all, they support their community.  Glynis and Eric are involved in supporting many community efforts, not least of all the recent LaidOffCamp.  If you’ve ever met them, you know they’re good people.

The story of Glynis’s struggle with breast cancer and how she and Eric came to open Urban Tea Loft is offered in detail on their site.  They are one of the only places in the downtown Chandler area where you can sit, relax, enjoy incredible tea and food and get to know the owners as if they were your next-door neighbors.

And you know what?  They are.  At least for those of us who love Chandler and the incredible community that lives, works, creates and plays there.

We talk a lot about supporting local business, about supporting small business, about supporting the people in our community working so hard to achieve their dreams, about businesses that “get it” when it comes to building community and helping lift each other up.

Now Glynis and Eric need our help.  Stop by, say hi, and enjoy the incredible little place they’ve created.  Do it soon.  Do it this week.  Otherwise, you’ll wish you had — and you may not have the chance.

It’s been a long time coming.  In late 2005, our dear friend Mike Welch, who had survived life as a police officer in south L.A., as a Marine, and as a security guard for U.S. contractors in the Balkans and in Iraq, returned home to the U.S. to finally enjoy the quiet life — and died of a heart attack only weeks after arriving.  He was 48 years old.

Ron, who had loved Mike as a brother, was heartbroken.  And we both realized how short life can be.

Ron was in the middle of working a desk job he hated, in order to help support the family.  I had just left my Fortune 500 job to start my own business and spend more time with my kids.  While Ron worked hard and was very successful at work, I could see the spirit draining out of him every day he returned home after dark, tired and more frustrated than the night before.

And then Mike died.

And we decided that Ron needed to pursue the one dream he’d held in his heart since he was 8 years old — to fly helicopters.

It wasn’t going to be easy.  Our research suggested it would take nearly two years, full-time, and cost more money than we had any chance of saving up.  People thought we were crazy, and said so.

But we did it anyway, thanks to a home equity loan, Sallie Mae, and some very supportive families behind us.

And then the recession hit.  And I was laid off.  And his school became more and more strapped and time with instructors became harder and harder to come by.  Nearly four years later and he was still “almost done”.

Finally, he left for Texas to work with a school that could get him through his program.  We anticipated he might be gone for a month or more.

And now, he’s done.

Of course, he still hopes to find work as an instructor.  And we’re hoping it won’t require him to leave us for long stretches at a time to work in another state.

But he’s done.  And he’s happy.  And despite the ups and downs, the stress and frustrations, nearly 20 years after our wedding we’re still going strong.

I know people think we’re crazy to have done this.  I know people think I’m nuts to be building my own business again, when my husband’s unemployed.

But I don’t care.  We believed.  Continue to believe.  It can happen.

It can happen for you, too.

Believe.

Source: BusinessWeek

Now we get to the fun part.  They survey’s been fielded and the data’s in — now it’s time to get the stats involved and see what segments the data gives us.

This is the part where clients get nervous — especially when they’ve got previous research that has led them to believe they’ve got a handle on their segments.  Some have even suggested that we start with existing segment assumptions and use the data to gain more insight on them.

The problem is, that’s not segmentation — that’s profiling.  And they’re very different.

There are many approaches to looking at your target population.  You can use demographics to group people by gender, or age, or lifestage, or household income.  You can group them by the products they buy from you, or those they buy from someone else.

But attitudinal segmentation groups people on how they FEEL about things — which can have little or no correlation to any of those items.  Most of us don’t buy something PRIMARILY because of how much money we make, or where we live.  Many of us buy the same products as our neighbors or co-workers, although our demographics may be very different.

So if you start an attitudinal segmentation project by pre-establishing demographic or other bases for the segments, you’re missing the point.  If you do that then all the work that follows will provide you great insight into the groups you’ve established — but you may completely miss the underpinning reasons that people choose your product or category.

Some statistical approaches to segmentation have the same issue — they may require that you identify a “seed” in the data upon which to base the analysis.  Pick a different seed, get a different picture.

Factor analysis, on the other hand, takes all your data and allows respondents to sort of “clump” together based on the answers they’ve given you to attitudinal questions — “how important is this?” or “how interested are you in this?”.  There’s simply no external decision-making getting into the middle of the process and mucking it up.

So how does factor analysis work?

Well, first of all you determine which questions on the survey are going to form the basis of your analysis.  (In attitudinal segmentation, these will be the questions asking respondents’ opinions.)  All of the other questions, while not used for the factor analysis itself, will be used later to gain more insight into each of the segments once they’ve been established by the analysis.

Then you determine how many segments to shoot for.  This is based on a few considerations:

1)  Are you going to segment the entire respondent pool, or are you interested in determining the segments for predetermined groups (like customers vs. non-customers).  I’m a fan of the former — in part because of my issue with pre-segmenting, and also because segmenting everyone together ensures that you’ll identify any commonalities between the groups that you can later use to develop umbrella messaging and broad market strategies.

2)  How much data have you got?  There’s no point in having eight segments if they’re each too small to provide any statistical reliability.  I think it’s important to have confidence in this data for strategic planning, so if you have a small respondent pool to work with I prefer fewer, more reliable segments going with more segments that are less statistically viable.

3)  What are you going to do with the segments?  This becomes in part an issue of facing reality.  How sophisticated is the client — can they get their heads around the nuances between eight segments, or would they be better off with five segments that are more easily differentiated?  Are they really going to be able to follow through with marketing strategies and tactics for eight, or would defining their message for four audiences be a more achievable goal?  Again, my personal preference is to take the route of fewer segments with most clients, only because it’s their first time segmenting their marketing messaging and tactics in this way and I don’t want them to get overwhelmed — especially when they’re trying to communicate their audience segments to other departments within their organization and get everyone on the same page.  No matter which answer they choose, the segments won’t be wrong — but with more segments the differences between them become more granular.

For SCU the data revealed five clearly-defined, statistically significant segments from their current students, prospects and non-student respondents:

Segment 1:  Education-Focused. These respondents feel academic excellence is the most important aspect of choosing a school, and see elements like accreditation, faculty experience and graduation rate as key indicators of excellence.

Segment 2:  Location-Focused. This group is primarily looking for a good school that’s not far from home.  They are more likely to live near SCU and more likely to have friends and family that have attended the school.

Segment 3:  Experience-Focused. These respondents are primarily interested in experiencing traditional residential undergraduate college life.  They are more interested in issues like on-campus housing options and extracurricular programs, and actually prefer that a school NOT be close to their home.  Unlike the other segments, which included both undergrad and adult respondents, this segment was exclusively found among traditional undergraduate students and prospects.

Segment 4:  Career-Focused. This group wants a college that will help them advance in their chosen field.  A practical focus and career-skills development are more important to them than other groups, and they’re more like to be found among adult learners than among undergraduates.

Segment 5:  Faith-Focused. This segment is interesting in that it probably wouldn’t exist for a non-faith-based school.  These respondents are specifically interested in the ability of a school to support their practice of their faith, and a significant percentage of them list the growth of their relationship with Christ as a key reason for attending college.

Each respondent is assigned a number based on which segment they align with most closely.  (There’s always some gray area — some respondents will appear to straddle two main segments, in which case we will assign a primary and secondary segment to make future messaging decisions easier.)  Then, based on the respondents in each group, it’s a straightforward exercise to evaluate their responses to other items on the survey — demographics, purchase behavior, brand familiarity, etc. — and identify the additional elements which differentiate them from other groups, and those which all groups have in common.

Next: What We Can Do With All This Insight!

Know what?  Not everybody’s a web genius.  Not everyone has a family member who codes for a living.  And many small business and individuals have no idea how to get up on the web, and unfortunately have come to believe that it’s incredibly difficult and expensive.

Which is not to say that a custom, professional site created by people who really know what’s important on the web (search-engine visibility, relevant content written for web readers, design that puts function over “pretty”) aren’t worth their weight in gold — they are.

But spare gold is hard to come by for many of us just now.

I work with a lot of small businesses and individuals just trying to get the word out about what they offer and start to develop relationships with potential customers.  And the web needs to work for them, too.

My go-to recommendation is WordPress.

WordPress is a fast, easy, way to be up and running on the web.  Often thought of as solely a blogging platform, WordPress is actually my favorite startup website platform — even for companies (or individuals) without a blog.  It’s become my favorite content management system.

Why?

1)  It’s easy to manage yourself.

There’s nothing more frustrating to a small business operator than having to get in touch (and pay) a contractor or consultant every time they want to change a few words, add a new page, or update a price on their website.  Those things add up.  With a little training, anyone can learn to make additions and changes to their own WordPress website.

WordPress also has tons and tons of great “plugins” that add functionality to your website so you don’t have to learn how to code yourself.  You can link to your social media activity, add video, do your own search engine optimization, even add a shopping cart — all by yourself.

2)  It’s pretty

There are literally thousands of great themes for WordPress, and many of them are free.  They’re easy to choose and even easier to switch out if you want a different look.  Use one of the templates “as is” (here’s my husband’s personal job-search site we made together in about 2 hours), or build on a template with the help of a talented designer (here’s a client site developed with a little help from some creative friends).

3)  It’s inexpensive.

You can host your site on WordPress.org or WordPress.com, or use a full-service hosting service like Page.ly which charges a few bucks a month and offers domain name registration, training and support (read this post from Social Media DIY Workshops about which might be best for you).  Either way you’ve got a very economical approach to getting up on the web.

4)  It’s a great learning tool.

I didn’t even know what WordPress was when I was laid off in January 2009.  I needed a way to get a site up for my new business quickly and inexpensively, and a friend suggested WordPress.  Since I’ve never developed a website, it took a few rounds of working with people to do it for me before I started to get comfortable with managing it all by myself.  And trust me, if I can do it, ANYONE CAN.  I have friends I can tap when I need advice, and there’s lots of support on the web if you’re stuck or trying to figure out how to do something.  I’m even starting to pick up a little HTML on the side (and keep in mind that my only computer class in college was FORTRAN — on punch cards).

So if you’re a small business, and need a website, check out WordPress.  If you’re looking for a job and don’t have a personal site, get one — quick.  If you need help with it, there’s lots out there.  And even if you hire someone to help you build and maintain it, you’re going to find it’s a lot cheaper that trying to start from scratch with a customer site — and will be up and running much more quickly, too.