Diving Deeper into Consumer Interests

Part I in this series focused on the benefits of adding segmentation to the contacts stored in your JitterJam intelligent contact database and discussed segmenting by consumer interest. In Part II, we take a deeper dive into the broad category of consumer interests and cover that features of JitterJam that facilitate segmentation by interests—namely JitterJam Topics, Tags and Custom Fields.

Topics
“Topics” within the JitterJam platform allow you to segment your database and provide consumers the opportunity to specify their topics of interest when they opt-in to receive communications from you (via JitterJam’s Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system).

Expressed Consumer Interest(s): If you have a list of interests you would like to present to people for their consideration (in a form or a pick-list, for instance), you can designate these choices in a certain type of “Topic” called a “Consumer Interest”. In the Account / Administration area of JitterJam, you can quickly create new topics; clicking on the “Consumer Interest” check box will allow you to include it as one of the interests on the Make Me Happy subscription sign-up or customer preferences forms that you can easily create and customize within JitterJam. These expressed consumer interests are stored with each contact’s record in the JitterJam database.

Implied Consumer Interest(s): Here’s another use for JitterJam Topics…Because you assign each JitterJam social search to a Topic, the search results and their authors can be viewed/analyzed by the Topics (categories of conversations) that one or more social searches roll up into. Let’s say you sell health and beauty aid products and have set a goal to increase sales in your aromatherapy line, and you’ve created a number of social searches to find social conversations about your product and market. A consumer’s online chatter discovered by one of your JitterJam social searches is assigned to the Topic of “Aromatherapy.” Once this person is added to the JitterJam contact database, we’ll track this and any future conversation by this consumer which matches any of your social searches and count the number of times they posted a public comment on the various “Topics” you’re tracking. With this data, you can assume that this consumer may have an interest in one or more of your Aromatherapy products! By understanding the time frame and frequency that a contact converses about a Topic, you’ll be able to gauge their level of interest in your product category. This is what we refer to as implied consumer interest(s) instead of expressed consumer interest(s), as described earlier.

Combining these two uses of JitterJam Topics makes analysis and outreach very interesting! If you use a JitterJam Topic as both a consumer interest and have one or more of your JitterJam social searches assigned to it, you’ll be able to segment the contacts who have expressed an interest, implied an interest (complete with their degree of interest)—or both! This is powerful knowledge. Consider the people whose conversations about “Aromatherapy” are picked up a significant number of times by your social searches and who have also given permission to market and have checked a box expressing an interest in “Aromatherapy”—these could be your hot prospects!

Tags
A second way to store consumer interest information is by tagging all contacts for whom you discover specific interests, a particular role in your community (e.g. blogger) or a note-worthy affiliation. While the Topics feature automatically counts the number of times a contact has has conversed about a subject or has explicitly expressed interest in a topic, applying Tags to contacts is a bit more manual on the part of the JitterJam user but is incredibly valuable none-the-less.

While reading and analyzing discovered conversations, you will find people who are important to you in a number of different ways. You may discover a blogger in your industry, an expert in the field, or someone asking for product references. You may see communications by your competitors or from companies which have complimentary products to yours. You may find customers who love your product and some who are not very happy. You may discover new uses of your product or a way to customize it for a greater appeal. When you review all this important information, you can tag the contacts who authored the relevant content (click on their user name to open their profile) so this knowledge is at hand when you prepare future outbound marketing messages.

Additionally, you can automatically apply tags to all contacts who fill out a particular Make Me Happy form or whose conversations are picked up by a particular social search. You can import tags with contact information you might be pulling from another system or applied to a group of authors or contacts who share a set of common characteristics.

Custom Fields
A final way to represent consumer interests is with JitterJam Custom Fields. You can create up to ten custom fields in each JitterJam account to store any alphanumeric information at the contact level. Currently, these fields can be populated manually (data entry on contact edit form) and automatically by a programmatic call to the JitterJam API or by importing these values for your contacts. This data can indicate product and/or distribution channel preferences, sales volume or anything else that is meaningful to your business and that helps you market to and service your existing and expanding customer base.

Best Use Scenarios
Each of these distinct JitterJam segmentation features is capable of storing interest data, but each has their own strengths and best-use application.

• Spend a little time thinking about the scenarios presented in this post to help you determine the best configuration for you! Think about the types of subjects which people will talk about and/or be willing to express an interest in. JitterJam Topics is the best feature for this set of interests.
• Think about information garnered from your on-line sales or point-of-purchase systems and the data you’ve gathered from surveys. JitterJam Custom Fields might be the best feature for this set of interests/preferences/patterns.
• JitterJam Tags are the best feature if you are capturing a contact’s role in your industry (blogger, expert, analyst, competitor, complimentary product representative, etc.) or relationship to your company/brand/product (competitor, employee, season pass holder, etc.). Tags are also easily applied when you are mining sets of conversations or contacts in an attempt to find commonality among people as it relates to your product space. Once you hone in on the right set of people, you can quickly apply one or more tags to this group of authors or contacts.

Once you’ve started to use Topics, Tags and Custom Fields, the data gathered is readily available as segmentation tools so you can select and communicate with groups of contacts by any of the values stored in any of these numerous fields! The possibilities are immense, so jump in and get going!  As a word of advice, don’t let the decision of which JitterJam feature to use stop you from getting started. Tags can be removed, Custom Field values can be updated and Topics can be changed. Once you get started on an approach, the best configuration may become obvious; and we’re always here to help you think things through. Just email support@jitterjam.com with your rough thoughts and a structure you’ve been thinking about; we’ll get a dialog going to come up with a plan to meet your needs!

Be sure to tune in to Part III for additional segmentation options that are NOT related to consumer interests.  Promise!

What Do You Think?

Would you find it valuable to understand which activities, hobbies or past-times your consumers enjoy or participate in? If you knew this, what would you do differently?

As Client Success Director at JitterJam, I get the straight-up job of coming up with innovative, effective, creative and efficient ways to use our great feature set in the manner best fitting each unique business and situation. I want all JitterJam clients to be wildly successful; I hope the tips shared in this blog category will set you on that path.

Segmenting Your JitterJam Contacts (Part I)

This is part I in a series on segmentation and will cover benefits and how to get started. Part II will dive deeper into additional ways to segment and strategies to consider.

Why Segment?

If you’re a JitterJam client today, be sure to take full advantage of all the ways to segment your Twitter, Facebook, mobile, email and/or blogger contacts in your JitterJam intelligent contact database. Knowing who you are talking to can have a profound affect on your communication! Think about the categories of people who might be interested in your product or service. Is your ideal prospect an outdoorsy adventurer or a cuddle-up-with-a-good-book type? Who typically purchases your product/service—a caretaker of a senior, a medical doctor or a professor, a teacher or a technician, a HS or college age student, a parent of infants, toddlers or school age kids? Is this typically given as a gift or bought for personal consumption/use? Would a city-dweller or a suburbanite be a better fit—or doesn’t that matter? Is your product/service more popular with males or females?

These are all potential segmentation attributes that you can discover and store with each contact and utilize when creating focused messages to targeted populations to your database! Think about how different—and more effective—a communication that’s focused on the needs of a parent of school-age kids would be versus a generic message about the features of your product. Segmenting your contact database will help you define and reach the right people with the right message!

If your product/service can be used by a very diverse population, you may be thinking that you are out of the woods on segmentation.  Not so fast!  Think about all the types of people mentioned above; would you speak the exact same way to every one of those people if they walked into your showroom?  I didn’t think so. Applying segmentation allows you to customize your tone and language; lets you adjust the amount of slang, sarcasm or humor; it even enables you to present a customized special or promotion to match each segment you want to engage with!

Here’s an example of interests for people involved in home improvement projects. How can you utilize what you know (and learn) about your contacts to better segment your database?

How to Discover and Add Segmentation to Your JitterJam Contacts

Start with your contacts’ interests and where these intersect with your product or service. There are a variety of ways to learn about these interests.

1. Use keywords.

Listen to conversations your prospects are having. Pick up clues using keyword mentions of activities or interests they’re involved in. This can be done in a couple of ways:

• Use a new Social Search to find conversations and tag contacts. Create a new JitterJam Social Search to discover conversations containing key words or phrases that are frequently used by people talking about a specific topic of interest. Test this search (and tweak it if necessary) to eliminate non-relevant conversations and pick up a high percentage of good conversations. When you are creating the search, specify a tag for the search. This will act as an interest “flag”; when you review the social search results, if you add this person to your JitterJam database, JitterJam will automatically apply the appropriate tag to the contact!
• Analyze existing results for common keywords. Open your brand-specific social search and run the “Analyze Keywords” function to see if the conversations reveal the interests of the authors.  If they do, select all of the contacts with a specific interest and apply a tag to all the contacts at once (TIP: use the Gear icon at the upper left corner!)  Continue to work through any other interests which stood out while analyzing the conversations and tag each group of contacts with these interests.
2. Search through social profiles, bios and descriptions.
   • Most people on social networks provide key information in their public profiles. You can search through the profile descriptions of your JitterJam contacts and utilize the keywords and descriptions within those profiles to segment your contacts. Go to Develop/All in JitterJam. Open the “Advanced Filters” window (click on white bar below the sub-tabs). Find the Smart Search section and enter one or more key words.  Click on the “Update” button and all contacts who match your entered criteria are returned. From here, you can tag one, more or all of the contacts.  And just think—this is based on data your contacts have entered and made public about themselves!
3. Ask!
   • Our Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system enables you to ask your contacts how they would like to be contacted (Twitter, Facebook notification, email and/or SMS text message) and how frequently (once a week, once a month, etc.). Additionally, you can ask your contacts to specify their interests and even some demographic information. When you let your contacts know that you will use this data to create relevant offers in a way that adheres to their personal preferences, you will have made your contacts happy!

Need an Extra Nudge?

Consider this: As a consumer, aren’t you so much more willing to receive a marketing message offering a discount on something you’re definitely interested in than on, say, a product you would notice only if you physically tripped over it?! I know I am!  For instance, if you were listening on the social web and heard me mention that I have two sons who have both outgrown their ski equipment (uugghhh!) and were to toss me a 20% off promo code to use at your ski shop, I’d love you—truly!  Remember, just as easily as your prospects opted in to receive marketing communications from you, they can opt out. Don’t give them a reason to; instead, give them every opportunity and reason to stay!

What Do You Think?

Do you have any particular segmentation by which you would like to craft communications or offerings? How do you accomplish this today? Is this data stored in systems or lists within your company? Are you using this valuable data to reach your contacts?

In addition to my work at JitterJam, I teach creative writing at Lesley University. And one of the principles I harp on in my lectures there is the concept of the ideal reader. The ideal reader is the person who we are trying most to reach and to please every time we sit down to write. We can’t have a million ideal readers, I tell my students. We have to pick just one.

Too often, we blast messages out with too general an audience in mind. We do it because it’s easier, and because we don’t always know who among our audience is interested in what. But, in today’s world of personalization and customization, that approach just doesn’t cut it. As marketers, we need to identify an ideal reader for each and every message we send.

This is where database-driven social media platforms like JitterJam can help. Database-driven applications allow us to capture and continuously update details on when and where customers are willing to be contacted, and, most importantly, on what they’re interested in being contacted about. This is the key to deploying content tailored to specific groups within your larger audience.

Here’s a game plan:

1. Gather preferences. Whether you enter the preferences into the system yourself or you implement a public-facing customer preferences panel (like the Make Me Happy™ page found in JitterJam), make a point to gather information on customer interests and preferences as soon as possible after your initial contact. Then establish a customer communications schedule (where you’ll ask your contacts to update their records) to help keep that data up-to-date.

2. Write/speak with a specific audience in mind. Identify the ideal reader or recipient of your message early, and shape your content accordingly. If a group of contacts loves your widgets but doesn’t want to hear anything about your gizmos, be sure to scrub your message of any gizmo-related promotions. If you’re sending a video out to a group of contacts who prefer to be reached by Twitter, embrace their appreciation of brevity and make it short. Or, if you are speaking with a group of your staunchest advocates, take care to avoid the introductory verbiage they may have heard or read a thousand times before.

3. Customize even the standard messages. Every company has templates for standard communications like welcome messages and monthly newsletters. And while the bulk of the text of those messages isn’t customizable, I think it’s almost always possible to throw a little personal attention into the mix. Even if all you do is add a sentence or two at the top of the message, acknowledging the recipient’s business or field of interest, you’ve gone a long way toward proving to that person that they are more to you than just a name and an e-mail address on a long list of other names and e-mail addresses.

When you track your social media relationships in an intelligent contact database like the one that’s at the heart of JitterJam, it’s important to periodically clean up your database to make developing legitimate prospects into customers a more efficient process. Here are three tips:

Identify Spammers. Any good contact database that’s pulling data from Twitter is going to bring in both the contacts you are following and the contacts who are following you. This maximizes the number of potential customers you have to work with, but it also introduces the possibility of spammers making their way into your database. Identify them by querying the database to create a list of contacts who you don’t follow and who don’t follow you. Among this list, you are likely to find spammers who unfollowed you at a certain point, once they determined you weren’t going to reciprocate. Confirm that they’re spammers in a couple of ways. First, look at their profile pictures. If they haven’t bothered to upload a profile photo, delete them. Second, if they’re constantly retweeting things without providing any insight or context, and posting very little else, delete them. And third, if the content they’re posting isn’t relevant to your business, delete them. Cut out the noise!

Analyze One-Way Relationships. Are there people who are following you, who you haven’t followed back, but who you should be following? And what about the people you’re following who aren’t following you back? Are they worth continuing to follow? If they are worth following, is there anything you can do to get them to finally reciprocate? Analyze all of the one-way relationships in your database, and scrub the list accordingly.

Tag Contacts for Follow-Up. Are there contacts who you don’t feel comfortable deleting right now, but who might be worth getting rid of in the future? Use your database’s tagging system and create a group of contacts to pay closer attention to in the coming months. Then review this group first-thing, the next time you clean your database.

Have you cleaned your social media lists and databases yet this spring? Is it something you plan on doing this year? Drop us a note in the comments, and let us know what you did, and how it’s working out for you.

The ability to segment your contact list is critical when you’re trying to convert social media followers and friends into true prospects and customers. And while Twitter and Facebook do allow you to break down your list into groups, their options are severely limited. Yes, you can add all of your active customers to one group, and you can add all those customers interested in self-help books to another, but there’s no built-in way to produce a list of contacts who are both active customers and interested in self-help books (without manually creating a third list).

That’s where the Tags and Topics features in JitterJam come in handy. Topics will, of course, vary depending on your industry. But when it comes to tags, there are three basic kinds of tags that will be useful regardless of what kind of product or service you’re selling.

Type of Relationship: Customer, Competitor, Partner, Investor, Press

Relationship Status: Target, Active, Inactive

Level of Influence: Major, Minor, Insignificant

JitterJam can help you get your contact list in order. And it can help you do so much more. Sign up for a one month free trial, or click here to request more information.

And if you’ve got tips of your own to share, please do leave a comment below.

According to five separate surveys cited by eMarketer.com, site traffic was the number one metric that marketers used to measure social media marketing success in 2009. But, as eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey wrote in his company’s report “Seven Guidelines for Achieving ROI from Social Media,” site traffic “on its own it cannot justify heavier investment in social media.”

So, what other ways are there to measure success in social media marketing? What about contact growth? A contact means more than an IP address in Google Analytics, after all.

I’m not just talking about a growth in Twitter followers or Facebook friends here, however (though that’s part of it). What you really want when it comes to contact growth is a growth in your contact database. Whether you manually input intelligence on your social media contacts or you use a marketing platform that ties directly into a database (like JitterJam), it’s essential that you’re bringing data on your customers into a place where you’re in control, and where data can be stored for the long term (something Facebook and Twitter themselves aren’t particularly good at).  You need to able to add communication channels, to add intelligence, and to segment your contact list. Only then will you be able to effectively turn those followers and fans into customers. And a high conversion rate, of course, is a metric that would certainly justify a heavier investment in social media.

What do you think? How are you measuring your success? Leave a comment below to let us know.

In order to deliver a true return on your investment in social media, you need to turn your Twitter followers and Facebook fans into prospects and customers. And the best way to develop those relationships is to tie all of your social media interactions into a contact database that will help you add intelligence, segmentation factors, and channels through which you can connect with your contacts.

Adding Channels. Both you and your contacts should be able to add and modify the channels that are available to you for potential communications. Of course you should be able to enter information you collect from a business card, but your efforts can’t stop there. A customer-facing preferences panel is a must, if for no other reason than to reassure your contacts that they are participants in a conversation and not just the audience for your monologues and sales pitches. Let them decide how they wish to be contacted. Don’t be afraid of empowering your contacts. They just might thank you for that with a sale later on down the road.

Adding Intelligence. Your customer-facing preferences panel should also allow contacts to tell you what they want to be contacted about. It’s rare that every potential customer is interested in every widget you have on offer. Don’t clog their inboxes with irrelevant messages or soon they may deem your entire operation irrelevant to their increasingly busy lives.

Your system should also have the flexibility to allow you to enter intelligence that you uncover on contacts indirectly. If you see @So-and-So tweeting a lot about cupcakes one day, you might want to sign him up to receive notices on your new baking widget, something he might not have even known was available yet.

Adding Segmentation. On the most basic level, you should be segmenting your contact list into four categories: prospects, contacts, customers, and advocates. The goal, once those basic categories are in place, is to further segment to help you best determine how to turn contacts into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into advocates. To that end, you should implement tags to refine your list.  Who are the bloggers? Who’s local? Who is reposting or retweeting your content the most? Tag them, and keep track!

Are you doing other things to develop your contact list? If you have any secrets you want to share, please leave them in the comments below.