• Develop “buyer personas” or consumer profiles for each group that will visit your online space.
  • Gather information as if you were performing a consumer analysis
  • Focus on finding out about each groups information gathering habits:
  • How and where do they go to research products and services online?
  • Pay attention to the exact search terms and phrases they use.
  • What blogs or podcasts do they subscribe to? What social media are they using?
  • The key is to identify how each group is using the internet to recall information so that you can properly tag your content and create messaging that is created in a style that is both relevant and familiar to them.
  • Write content that is interesting to each reader. Once you’ve clearly identified your various buyer persons, you must develop messaging that resonates with each group.
    
    
  • Consider your organizational goals and then develop messaging that appeal to the buyer instead focusing on messaging that “sells” your product.

  Single Anxious Females: In the Clinton years, the target was soccer moms. In the Bush era, it switched to NASCAR dads. Now… She’s youngish (for the most part, between 18 and 44), white (64 percent), unanchored (36 percent move every two years), unaffluent (earning $30,000 or less a year), relatively uneducated (only 14 percent are college grads), and thoroughly pissed off about the direction of America (Iraq, health care, equal pay, and education are top issues). But she isn’t exactly politically engaged… [she is unmarried women watch 4.22 hours of TV every day (TNT and Discovery are favorites), rarely listen to talk radio (they prefer country music), and they tend to vote for change.

  -  from the article Single Anxious Females: a key interest group in ’08
  by Geoffrey Gray, New York Magazine.

  

  What types of content on www.barackobama.com might be appeal to the “Single Anxious Female” buyer persona?

  War in Iraq (www.barackobama.com)

  Healthcare Debate (www.barackobama.com)

  Technology (www.barrackobama.com)

  VIDEO: Why Health Insurance Reform Matters to Women

The Longtail by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson’s book, The Longtail (2006), provides critical information for marketers and public relations practitioners who wanted to create online spaces to connect with consumers.

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.

In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR

1. Marketing is more than just advertising

2. PR is for more than just mainstream media

3. You are what you publish

4. People want authenticity, not propaganda

5. Instead of causing one-way interruption, marketing is about delivering content at just the precise moment your audience needs it

6. Marketers must shift their thinking from mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of reaching vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web

7. PR is not about your company presence on the web but about your buyer seeing your company on the web

8.  Marketing is not about your agency winning awards. It is about your organization winning business

9. The internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on the media

10, Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great online content

11. Blogs, online video, e-books, news releases, and other forms of online content let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate

12. On the web, the lines between marketing and PR have blurred

There are so many David Scotts out there that it can be confusing which one of us you are communicating with. I run across other David Scotts often.

Learn more at www.davidmeermanscott.com

David Meerman Scott. Courtesy of davidmeermanscott.co

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, keynote speaker, seminar leader, and the author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR, an award-winning BusinessWeek bestseller published in 24 languages. David has lived and worked in New York, Tokyo, Boston, and Hong Kong and has presented at industry conferences and events in over twenty countries on four continents.

He’s written hundreds of magazine articles and five books:

• World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that get Millions of People to Spread your Ideas and Share your Stories (2009)

• The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly (Hardcover 2007 and revised paperback edition 2009)

• Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities that Lead to Business Breakthroughs (2008 with Craig Stull and Phil Myers)

• Cashing in with Content: How innovative marketers use digital information to turn browsers into buyers (2005)

• Eyeball Wars: A novel of dot-com intrigue (2001)