You learn a lot sitting at the dinner table and listening. You learn even more when most of the people at the table are women. I have to say, I love women. Not just for their physical attributes – nope, I love them for their minds.
Really.
The ideas I laid down with market funneling are part of a larger shift away from trying to figure out “what am I going to sell them?” and instead focusing on “who am I selling to?” Along the way there’s a mental shift away from selling and toward engaging one to one with your visitor. Creating a relationship. Gaining trust and authority in their eyes. Becoming a destination online and not just a rest room on the side of the digital highway.
Now, do not get me wrong. I haven’t become all soft and new age-y on you. The goal here is to still market products and services. But the focus is on value even when we’re using direct marketing techniques. Another way to think of this is that we’re taking the best practices of consultative selling face to face and applying them online.
OK, I know – that was a little deep. Let’s get back to women….
(and honestly this advice applies equally well to men)
So here I was sitting at a dinner table surrounded by women and their significant others. The men here were not really part of the conversations going on. And that’s fine. It gave me a chance to listen and detect some patterns. Here are some of the words I heard over and over
authentic
pashmina
simple
one kings lane
etsy
(I’m of course leaving out some NSFW and other phrases out – plus, they don’t help me make my point)
The women at the table didn’t all know one another. They weren’t all friends on Facebook. But everyone knew “someone” at the table. And it turned out everyone had common acquaintances and friends. Introductions sounded like “Dave, this is John and Donna… they’re good friends with Brian and Jodie.” This was a cross-segment of a number of social circles. Everyone related in one fashion or another but nobody part of the “same” circle.
Yet these five phrases kept coming up throughout conversations with the group and within small pockets of “side” chats. Why?
Collectively these women represent a demographic in the same way that Cosmo or Women’s Health has a defined readership.
As a marketer, finding these kind of common interests and patterns is gold. It helps develop not only the empathy map of a potential audience but it helps defines the “voice” you should use.
Micro Tribes
Most marketers struggle with defining “who” they want to engage with. They struggle with the voice to use and they especially struggle with finding where these kind of people hang out. The “usual” advice is to look for forums. This is great advice, but sometimes it can be hard to find a forum that targets your specific micro niche.
That’s ok really. Even if you can’t find a forum for shy, divorced 30-40 year old men that want to get back into the dating world you can find a “bigger” forum and then proceed to get people to self-select themselves into your microniche based on your own posts and others.
You can carry this idea of going for the “next higher” niche with paid traffic as well and then get people to sub-list themselves.
But there are two other places that are excellent for identifying “micro tribes” and they are right in front of our eyes:
- online magazines / media companies
- blogs
To do this you need to actually spend a little time researching things (and listening at those dinner parties and get togethers). This isn’t the kind of stuff you’ll easily find in the Google Keyword Tool.
So curl up with your iPad or get comfy with the laptop and start surfing the web. Have a notebook in hand (online or actual, physical paper) and start writing down blogs that relate to the persona you are trying to engage with. To get started you can look up blogs using the initial interests you found listening at the dinner table.
Rachel Meeks of SmallNotebook.org
You really only need to find one blog to get you started. For example, after that dinner get together I started surfing the net trying to find women with blogs that are interested in those half dozen or so terms. And before I knew it I found Rachel Meeks and her Small Notebook blog.
Rachel is the kind of women that could have been at this dinner party. One look at her blog posts and you can see that it just “fits” — and the fact that she got 216 comments from a post on minimum wardrobes, classic style, and scarves sealed the deal.
In fact, that one post was my “seed.” From there I scrolled through the comments and started visiting the OTHER women with blogs – you can tell because they leave their website information in the comment form. From this surfing and list gathering I get a lot of things:
- potential reviewers, guest posters, and JV partners
- potential blogs to write a guest post on
- curated content to source from
- a “feel” for the voice this micro tribe of people use, their (other) interests, etc.
Media Networks
Along the way you may notice some of these websites are part of a larger network owned by common media company.
Click on the image to enlarge
It could be a small network like Simple Media LLC and their sites like SimpleOrganic when looking for posts mentioning emerging social juggernaut pinterest. It could be a larger network like Federated Media. When you find one of these networks, start paying special attention and look for how to advertise…
The nice thing about most networks (big and small) is that they have a VERY good handle on who their audience is. Just like Rodale Press and other print large magazine publishers, the online magazine and blog publishing networks are highly niched around tribes and micro tribes of people.
Knowing that a website has 98% female visitors, half of the visitors making more than $75k and 40% of all visitors having their own blog really helps identify places to target advertising, social marketing and link building.
And if you’re curating content (and you should be) then finding web properties like this helps differentiate you from the usual IM crowd that’ll be jumping on the bandwagon but restricting their “search” for content to keyword based blog searches with Google Alerts.