The Second Step in Online Marketing: Assess
Last week we talked about developing a really strong listening foundation that can propel your online marketing efforts into something that is profitable and worth your time.
We discussed the five steps in online marketing we always recommend to new clients who are just beginning to branch out with their efforts:
- Listen
- Assess
- Engage
- Measure
- Refine/Improve
We're at the assess phase now, which means we need to look at where our customers and prospects are already participating online.
Remember, this not the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will not come. You need to figure out where your audience is participating in order to determine where you're going to spend your time. There are several tools you can use to begin to understand your audience's online preferences. Some are free and some are paid. We'll explore both.
Tools for Online Marketing
Fliptop. Fliptop is a tool that will let you upload email contacts from your computer, an email marketing platform, social media, or Salesforce. It will give you 100 free social profiles; anything beyond that is a paid option. It's an easy way to test the software to see if it's something you'd like to consider paying for and using. It returns demographics, title, company, all of the social platforms the person uses, and their Klout score.
Rapportive. Rapportive only works inside Gmail, but it gives you a ton of information about the people you email. Want to know what they're doing right this second? Rapportive will tell you that. It'll also give you their latest tweets, Facebook updates, or LinkedIn updates.
Xobni. Xobni is Batman of email. When installed in your email server, it returns so much information it's almost scary. It gives you the social platforms, just like the other tools, but it also shows you which attachments you've exchanged with that person, what time they're typically on email and responding, how many emails they've sent you or haven't responded to, and more.
The difference between Fliptop vs. Rappaport and Xobni is the first gives you a snapshot of the people in your customer relationship management database, and the latter two give you access to the people you are emailing at that moment in time.
Both groups are useful in assessing where your audience participates online. Once you have a good snapshot, you can begin to build your community where the majority of your customers and prospects are already participating.
Then you can use Rappaport or Xobni to enhance your community building as you proceed, which we'll discuss in more detail during the engage portion of this series.
