Imagine being able to get other people’s opinions on a site you’re visiting, or their input on the content and even find a few links that other people have found important on the same aspect all with the click of your mouse. Well this type of social commentary exists! Google launched its Sidewiki on the 29^th September last year and it’s slowly starting to catch on...

These comments can be anything from reviews to blog post announcements to educational tips. Gain expert insights, a different perspective or even a bit of background history. Install it and have a look – Google’s Sidiwiki.

Over and above this Google has also launched the Sidewiki API! This allows you to play with any content generated regarding any particular page or even by a particular author. This is great for reputation management as it allows you to monitor what is being said about your company and its products or services.

Furthermore in the land of search engine optimisation the Sidiwiki holds a few interesting tricks in the new era where social media is now king... After publishing any new content a little Sidiwiki comment might point the Googebot towards your page, allowing it to be indexed quite quickly. Over and above this placing a link on certain “resource” pages with a link back to your associated page might lend you some credibility... For example once I post this blog I’ll run through my standard blog announcement routine, but now I’ll also make a quick comment in Sidiwiki on the actual page as well as positing a comment on the url above linking back to my blog... Hmmm... Thanks Google...

Market Segmentation is an invaluable aspect of most marketing plans, it allows you to target a receptive group of people within the population, thus avoiding the shotgun approach as far as possible and maximising your return on investment. The ideal individual to advertise to is one who will buy your product. So how do you work out who this is and how to target them? Well after reading and going through all the blogs I’ve posted on consumer analysis and giving it some thought you should have a vague idea of the demographics of your target market.

With classical press advertising you would merely target your demographics by choosing your channels carefully, skateboard magazines where a good place to market products designed for teenage boys etc. This has somewhat flowed over into online marketing, in the most basic form it can direct your placement of paid ads on 3^rd party websites or through Google’s Content Network especially when utilising the CPM option. Social media sites often allow for far more detailed and specific demographic advertising options. These can be utilised very efficiently if your product appeals to a neatly defined target market. Often the level of segmentation available with most social advertising platforms is quite mind-blowing. Facebook has a well evolved advertising system with a multitude of different dimensions to choose from ad can sometimes yield impressive ROI.

Of course pay-per-click (PPC) search, such as Google’s AdWords, advertising has revolutionarised market segmentation as we knew it as it allows you to only target those who are actually actively looking for your product – the ideal target market. Yet you need to know what you’re doing to squeeze every ounce of selectivity out of it, I’ll go into this at a later stage in another blog post.

For now let me give you a list of some of the commonly used segmentation strata:

• Geographic

• Demographic

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Marital Status
• Family Life Cycle
• Education
• Occupation
• Ethnicity
• Religion
• Language

• Psychographic

• Lifestyle – Interests and activities
• Personality

• Behavioural

• Usage (different target markets may use your products for completely different uses)
• Purchase Occasion
• Brand Loyalty
• Responsiveness to Price and Promotion

Obviously not all of the above would be applicable in every circumstance, but for every target market you have go through the list and narrow down your market segment. Each different market segment should then be analysed as to the viability of the advertising options available and the ROI that it promises. With online marketing you can often experiment inexpensively, which really takes a lot of the guess work out of it.

Wikipedia has a pretty elaborate entry on Market Segmentation if you'd like to read more.

Google launched its Latest Results search which brings real-time results right into your Google search results page in the latest results box. These results are fed in from various social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku,  Indenti.ca, Yahoo Answers, blogs and forums amongst others. Have a look at the screen shot below:

The results scroll within the box as they’re indexed in real-time. If you click on the Latest results link you’re navigated to a new, dedicated, latest results page. Here’s another screen shot:

The buying process has 6 steps; each one plays an important role in any marketing strategy. Most of these steps can be targeted with a cleverly designed online marketing plan.

1. Problem Recognition
2. Information Search
3. Evaluation of Alternatives
4. Purchase Decision
5. Purchase
6. Post-Purchase Evaluation

Before you can decide whether your product is a high or low involvement product you need to understand what a high or low involvement product actually is!

These definitions are taken from LEGAmedia:

High involvement products - products for which the buyer is prepared to spend considerable time and effort in searching.

Low involvement products - Products which are bought frequently and with a minimum of thought and effort because they are not of vital concern nor have any great impact on the consumer's lifestyle.

The marketing strategies for these products are very different. For a low involvement product all you need to do is merely make sure your product is available and easy to find, a perfect example is point of sale marketing – such as with gum, sure you might have your favourite gum, but if you can’t find it you’ll just by whatever’s right in front of you. No real point in spending vast amounts of your marketing budget trying to explain why yours is the only gum the client should by rather butter up the sellers to place yours at the top of the pile!

This aspect of a consumer analysis investigates who users your product and who buys your product, in some cases they’ll be the same person, yet in many instances it may be very different people. A classic example of this is babies clothing and even men’s clothing which are most often bought by females.

I suggest you make a list of the users and the corresponding possible buyers. These buyers will become your marketing targets! Here is a simple example for men’s clothing:

• Men
  • Men
  • Female partner
  • Parents
• Above average sized woman
  • Above average sized woman

As you can see we’ve expanded our marketing targets to far more than just the user opening up many more potential marketing avenues. By thinking outside the norm a bit here you can often drastically increase your sales!

This aspect of consumer analysis answers the following questions:

What does your product do? Why would a customer benefit from using your product? How does it improve your client’s life? What needs category does your product fall into?

So how do you start? Well ask yourself the questions above and write down the answers for each product or service... Our Silver Package is a reasonably holistic online marketing package; it offers AdWords account management, organic growth management, monthly stats analysis & reporting and amongst others it also includes 3 hours worth of website maintenance. Of course you can break each component down further to the exact details, but it’s not necessary for this article. At the end of the day, simply put, our packages do one thing: Bring our clients more clients!

Once you’ve got a good idea of your product’s customer benefit you can have a look at what needs category it falls into. Needs categories where first described by Maslow in 1943, there are 5 different hierarchical tiers: Physiological, Safety, Loving / belonging, Esteem and Self-actualisation. See the image below and read the wikipedia entry for more details.

Customer benefit

User and buyer

High or low involvement

Buying process

Market Segmentation

The aim of a consumer analysis is to assess who, what, when, how and why clients are buying your products, this allows you to plan your marketing much more successfully!