Here we get into the fun work of truly understanding your target market beyond traditional demographic and psychographic profiles. Tools like user personas and keyword analysis will help cement the concepts of search, user experience, network effects, and the importance of optimized content.
Goal: Learn how to empathize with your ideal user’s online habits.
Chapter 5: Getting to Know Your Customer
- How to think like your customer: The case for Design Thinking in digital
- A name and a face: An example User Persona
- Digging for dirt: Doing Secondary Market Research
Optional Hand out: Interview Starter Kit from OpenIDEO Voter Challenge
Chapter 6: Delighting Your Customer
- Who Are These People? Using User Persona
- Earning Their Attention: Content and Search
- Branding and Price: The Slippery Slope in the Digital Age
- Are Marketers Liars? Delightful Experiences. Who We Trust and Why
Chapter 7: Engaging With Your Customer
- Any Way You Slice It: A Third Way to Segment Customers
- Which One Are You? Social Media Users
- But Will They Care? Researching Social Media Engagement
Chapter 8: Introduction to Search
- How do they know? History of Web and Search Engines
- Webs, Spiders Oh My! How Search Engines Work
- Black magic: How Google Ranks Pages
Beginner’s Guide to SEO
- A free PDF from the good people at SEOmoz
Chapter 9: The Long Tail
- A tail of what? What the Long Tail is
- Why it exists: The 3 Forces of the Long Tail
- Really, there’s an audience? The Long Tail and Search Strategy
Chapter 10: Keyword Research
- Being in the Top 3: What Are the Search Engine Results Pages? (SERPs)
- Whiteboard + Post It notes: 10 Steps to Better Keyword Brainstorms
- You Autocomplete Me: Brand First Impressions on the SERPs
- The Writhing Long Tail: How to do Keyword Research
Chapter 11: Competitive Research
- The Rise and Fall of Keywords: Using Google Trends for SEO
- Keeping Up with the Joneses: Researching Competitors’ Traffic and Social Media Engagement
- Overwhelming Noise: A Framework for Online Marketing Research