Day 9: Setting Up to Listen

Day 9 Video:

Welcome to Day 9! So glad to see you today :-)

Today’s Learning Points

Our goal today is to cover:

What is listening;
Why listening is important;
How to listen and learn;
and, what’s coming up.

Special Note: Today you’ll be learning about the why and what of listening, while tomorrow (Day 10) you’ll learn about how to track and analyze your “listening” to make smarter marketing decisions

What is Listening

Listening begins as a key part of Target in the Impact Marketing Formula. However, if you’ve truly learned the art of listening, it will become an extension of what you do within every aspect of your online marketing.

Listening is all about learning. Listening is about taking deliberate action to learn more about your audience, competitors, and industry. You’ll gain valuable insight that will help you market more effectively and efficiently. The trick to listening effectively lies in what and who you listen to — whether you’re paying attention to what really matters for your business.

As with everything in your online marketing, your plan and goals will determine the best tools and actions to take when setting up to listen and learn. Listening can involve everything from tracking conversations within social media and information from the blogosphere, to tracking keywords within Google Alerts. Listening also involves actions that allow you to keep up on what’s being said about you, your competitors, and your industry or niche.

Listening involves two areas of data and activity, internal and external. Internal listening involves data you collect and learning more about your audience by observing and making intelligent decisions. External listening involves purposeful action during your direct or indirect contact with your audience that allows you to learn from interacting and building relationships. Both are important in providing a detailed, panoramic view of your audience.

Examples of internal listening:

Monitoring what people are saying about you, your competitors, and your industry.
Monitoring keywords and conversations on Twitter and other social media networks.
Monitoring content on blogs and conversations across the blogosphere.
Monitoring your competition and industry using Google Alerts and Blog Search.
Monitoring threads within forums and communities using Board Tracker.
Monitoring RSS feeds and news sites using Google Reader as your information hub.
Watching important metrics within Google Analytics related to content, traffic behavior and traffic sources.

Examples of external listening:

Soliciting customer feedback/testimonials within your social media presence.
Searching customer review and Q&A opportunities to directly contact your customer or other audience members.
Creating a hash tag relevant to your audience that allows direct feedback, questions, and dicussions with your customer or potential customer.
Actively engaging customers and potentials customers through blog comments, paying attention to negative and positive feedback.
Engaging customer feedback and input when developing new products and services throughout your online presence.
Using polls and surveys to ask specific questions to gather information on your audience’s preferences, problems, etc.

What you listen to and how you listen will depend solely on your unique business, goals, and audience. Period. As always, understand there is no blueprint. But, there are some common sense strategies anyone can employ to get started.

Why Listening is Important

Listening and learning from the insights gained are fundamental to smart online marketing. You can not get found, unless you know how your audience will find you and what will make them love you. It’s fundamental to business and certainly not different within the world of online marketing.

I’m always amazed at how many smart business people toss out the rules when it comes to marketing online, as if the technology enables you to just wing it or play it by ear. Understanding your audience, their behaviors, and getting inside their head beyond demographics is what listening is all about.

Internal listening will help you track and watch trends, to spot opportunities and leverage successes in your online marketing strategies. Listening data will guide your decisions, increasing efficiency and ROI (return on your investment).

External listening with participation, may seem anecdotal, yet it is truly a powerful avenue of insight into the mind and being of your audience. Social media and related technology have granted you unprecedented access to a “live focus group” with your audience, as you build meaningful relationships and become a trusted authority in your niche. Your audience will tell you exactly what they want and need, the question is whether you are ready and willing to hear what they really have to say.

How to Listen and Learn

As I’ve said before, who and what you listen to will depend entirely on your unique business goals. With that said, there are standard listening tools and places to get started that are beneficial to most marketing online. The listening tools we’ll share are the tip of the iceberg and meant to get you started – in a way that is consistent and purposeful.

Note: Listening should be a daily activity that becomes a part of everything you do in marketing online. We use the IMPACT Marketing Calendar and IMPACT Action Guide to schedule and track daily listening time, to ensure this activity is taken seriously and done consistently. We will cover how we do this tomorrow in Day 10 of the program.

We prefer Google Reader as our listening tool and information hub. Today’s videos will focus on the use of Google Reader for listening as an extension of our preferences. We’d encourage you to use tools you are most comfortable and productive with.

Internal Listening with Google Analytics

Google Analytics will help you “listen” to your audience behaviors on your blog or website. You’ll learn about which content/resources they value most, which referral sites bring you the best traffic, how to optimize your conversions, and much more. Some important things to consider:

All numbers are not created equal. Relative importance will depend entirely on your specific blog objectives and how you’ve determined most appropriate to measure success (or lack thereof). Unless you have a team of traffic specialists, focus your efforts.
Benchmarking and trending are important. Most bloggers I’ve worked with tend to “spot” check their blog analytics, whenever it crosses their mind or they have a big launch. If you do this, you’re missing important trend information that can help you spot problems and opportunities in your traffic sources and more.
Keep everything in perspective. You won’t get the whole picture from any one metric alone. Understanding your audience and your blogging effectiveness will require that you use a set of numbers, comparing and making intelligent inferences from the group of metrics you choose to focus on.

We’ve covered Google Analytics extensively in a recent blog post, you can check out the video walk-through to get acquainted

WebSuccessDiva prefers QuickTime, to view our videos you’ll need the free QuickTime player!

Internal Listening with Google Blog Search

It does not matter what industry you are in, someone somewhere is talking about something related to it. Blogs are a standard and staple online. Blog readership and engagement has skyrocketed across all audience groups, making it virtually impossible that you’ll never find any relevant information within the blogosphere.

Google Blog Search, much like Google search, indexes blogs from across the Internet. Blog Search includes any blog that has a standard RSS feed, across all industries. You can search by topic (politics, news, business, sports, etc), as well as by keyword. The great thing about Blog Search, and most Google tools, is that you can subscribe via RSS Feed (using our favorite Google Reader) and by email alert.

To start out, subscribe to alerts for the 3 major keywords related to your industry, business or brand, and competitors. Make sure to also include your business name as a search. This will update you on every blog that mentions those keywords and give you a good idea of what’s happening within the blogosphere. As you become more efficient in “listening” you can add searches accordingly. Start with small steps so you can remain consistent.

Blog Search results will keep you up-to-date on blog content being published, comments and discussions, competitor mentions, as well as mentions of you and your business. Here’s a look at ways we use this information:

WebSuccessDiva brand name search: We track mentions of our brand names and company names. This helps us stay on top of conversations centered around our content, as well as blog content that links to our resources.
Niche related keyword searches: We track several main niche keywords related to our blog content. As part of our link building strategy, we publish content and link externally to related resources found within our Google Blog Search results.
Niche related competition searches: We compare much of our data to comparable competition to have a measure of where we are at in comparison to our industry. We watch updates from our 3 main competitors, including mentions and comments being posted about them.

WebSuccessDiva prefers QuickTime, to view our videos you’ll need the free QuickTime player!

Internal Listening with Google Alerts

Google Alerts will keep you up to date on searches related to all websites indexed in Google. Google Alerts are email or RSS feed updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Much like Blog Search, Google Alerts can keep you up to date on any keyword, topic, person, and event. Results include content, images, videos, news, and most any other form of media being indexed.

You can subscribe via email updates (sent as things happen, daily or weekly) and RSS feed (another reason to love Google Reader). You can also select to isolate results from a particular area of Google’s index – from news only, from videos only, from web only and from groups only.

WebSuccessDiva prefers QuickTime, to view our videos you’ll need the free QuickTime player!

Internal Listening with Twitter

Twitter is a great tool to listen to the pulse of your niche or industry, heard from collective groups of individuals. Most, if not all industries are being discussed on Twitter, including feedback, complaints, related resources, and much more. Viral videos tend to make a big splash on Twitter. Trends and breaking news are also big on Twitter.

WebSuccessDiva prefers QuickTime, to view our videos you’ll need the free QuickTime player!

Other Internal Listening Sources

Internal Listening with YouTube

Online video watching has skyrocketed, almost every industry that exists is now using video as a means for marketing and communicating with audiences. Youtube is by far the largest video network on the Internet and worth listening to. You can subscribe to updates (via RSS feed or from within your account) related to keywords, specific users, and channels related to any niche or industry.

Internal Listening with BoardTracker

Contrary to popular belief, forums and discussion groups are not dead. BoardTracker is a service that allows you to track keywords, people, events, and discussions related to any topic across most, if not all, forums and discussion groups. While not relevant to all industries, forums and discussions are particularly useful for marketing, business, technology, and latest news discussions. You can subscribe to alerts via RSS feed and email.

Listening Services and Programs

Of course, you always have the option of using services (free and paid) to help you listen across the Internet. Many of these programs, named Online Reputation Management Tools, can help you streamline your listening by pulling results from across blogs, social media, search, video, and more. Our top pick among these tools is Trackur from Andy Beal (creator of Marketing Pilgrim).

What’s coming ahead…

Day 10: Target Step 2 Tracking & Learning
Day 11: Target Getting Found with SEO
Day 12: Target Getting Found with Blogging
Day 13: Target Getting Found with Social Media
Day 14: Target Getting Found with Content Marketing

See you tomorrow!

Maria Reyes-McDavis

and WebSuccessDiva Team

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About the Author...

Maria Reyes-McDavis is a colossal geek brainiac, certified genius IQ with university degrees in Finance, Economics, Business Management and an MBA. Maria has served over 300 pro-level, digital marketing clients as founder of online marketing firm Digital Peas & Carrots. Maria is Founder and Editor of Hyphenated Americans, a conservative politics blog and Proverbs 31 Project an online women's ministry. Most importantly, Maria is a wife to her king, mother of 3, lover of basketball (Go Lakers & Clippers!), classic cars and is currently training for professional women's roller derby!