 Okay, our next speaker is here. Selena has some work of 10 years of experience in marketing and communications. She is also a global who writes about the growth of digital strategy and marketing. She also loves cats and stickers, but I think that she's not going to say much more about them today. And I think that she does that. Okay, cool. Hey, guys. That's one awesome screen, by the way. I feel that that's the biggest one I've presented in front of. I don't want you to think about anything else in that one. So, hi, my name is Basi. It's shorter, easier. Basilele is the official name that my mother uses when I've done something wrong. And today I'm going to talk to you about ways to understand your audience better and ways to understand what would they find truly valuable. So you can plan your strategy, plan your messaging, or help your clients in doing those same things. So what we usually do as marketers, because I'm one, when we get a question about, okay, what's your target audience? What most often happens is that a person sits down, possibly in front of the window, or staring at the wall if their desk is in a shitty position in the office, and they start thinking about, okay, what would my ideal customer be? And I'm going to tell you today that that's not the way of doing things, right? I think that what we can do is actually be more scientific about it, and if not looking at the Petri dish, actually looking at our users and talking to them, and in that way understanding better what they're all about, who our users are, who are potentially target audiences if you're writing a blog like me, or what you can offer in terms of features or in terms of messaging for your product if you're a product that comes with it. So I'm a big fan of data, and I think that the best way to get a grasp of your audience is to use data to your message. And there are a lot of ways you can do that, so I'm going to share a couple of my favorite ones. I'll be running through it fairly quickly. So if you're not up to speed, I'll share your links to the slides at the end of my talk, so don't worry about it. So the first thing that you can use is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a solution if you already have a site of its name, but it can give you a lot of interesting information in terms of what your audience composition is. It allows you to see all of these interesting things like personally gender, their age, their location, their interests, and the technical devices pattern on the people who come to your site. And I'll tell you why that matters a lot. So first off, obviously you will get these funky reports telling you that male audiences in the ages of 25 to 34 are your biggest potential market. But that's not the most interesting thing. The most interesting thing is looking not only at how many people from a specific group are coming to your website, but how they are interacting with your website and what's the quality of their audience. So here's an example. That's a screenshot from our analytics and the company I work for. It's a startup focused on creating a resume you'll be proud of and helping you show your true self in front of potential employers. So I can talk to you about that later. But what we see here is a disposition of the number of sessions. So I've blurred out the numbers here, but you can see, okay, we have like French people coming through the site at 9% and then Polish people here all the way to the bottom, other top than at 3.9%. But what we can see further there is that actually those three are our most lucrative potential clients in terms of people creating accounts on our platform. So you can see way over here that these people are converting much higher than the rest. So what we can do in this situation is say, okay, we're definitely going to focus on the French folks and draw an additional volume there. But what we also want to see is how we can get people from Poland and get more people from Poland coming to the website because they obviously derive value from our product. And that's some very helpful information if you're doing targeting or if you're doing your marketing. Then what we can also see is the same thing in terms of gender. You can look at the behavior of people. You can see that here female users are actually more engaged with the website. But you can see that the male audience is spending more. And that's because in this particular case that's an e-commerce shop focused on providing gift vouchers. I'm guessing that the guys have done a lot more bad stuff and they need to apologize with more expensive credit. But that's completely like a hypothesis based on my personal experience and not something I can derive from the date, of course. Then what we can also see are the interests of those people and you need to keep in mind that Google uses some pretty finicky ways of getting that information. They're basically looking at your behavior when you are logged into your Google account and what is the pattern of your behavior on other websites as well. And they can tell you first of all what you're interested in which are affinity categories and then what type of stuff you are looking to buy as a user. And then on the other hand side you can see that for your personal website. Just a word of caution here as I mentioned that's based on the behavior of the person. So in my personal Google account it says that I'm very interested in marketing and tech conferences. I'm very interested in cats. I mean every person needs a buddy. I'm very interested in all the girly stuff like makeup and fitness and whatever and I'm very interested in first person shooter games. I'm guessing you can spot the other one out. And the reason for that is because we have a tablet at home and the YouTube app is logged in with my personal account and my partner watches streams of Counter-Strike. When going to bed at night. So yeah, you know, just take that with a grain of salt. But what you can also see are devices used by the audience. And again that would be interesting to look at what's the different behavior of that in there. And we can see here that people on the desktop are much more active and they're buying much more of them. But people buying a mobile device have a higher average purchase cost. So what this tells us is that people in a hurry who need to buy on the go they're not so price sensitive for this particular case. So you can look at what the differences there are. The next favorite thing of mine is what we call Facebook audience insights. So that's a platform that you can use even if you're not actively advertising on Facebook to see what's the audience content position either of your own personal audience if you already have that channel and where it gets much more interesting. When you're still thinking about developing something or creating a product or creating a website focused on a specific territory. So here's an example. I took to survey what's the typical Bulgarian audience of entrepreneurs and here's how that works. We tried that in the morning and it worked then but I'm guessing that my computer is getting a bit shy now. There we go. So here I'm putting in the location of Bulgaria and I'm also putting in interest entrepreneurship. Obviously for a real-life situation I would put more interest to just narrow down the audience. And you can see that it's more mail oriented than the average on Facebook. There's a lot of single people who are interested in entrepreneurship. They're better educated than the average on Facebook for Bulgaria. They're much more likely to be in IT and computation or computer science or whatever. And we can also sort that out based on the total composition of our own audience which shows that a lot of people are in sales and that's a good skill to have as an entrepreneur. What you can also see is what they like. For example, what medium they go after or anything else like what specific charity causes they're following and what they're focused on. Here you see in several areas or even what you should serve at a networking cocktail event when you're doing that or where you should stage that. And you can see a lot of interesting information here that will give you an idea of what your audience actually looks like. And what you can also see is how engaged that audience is if you already have your own personal Facebook page. What you see here in grey is the actual composition of your page and in blue you see what percentage of people who are actively engaging with your page so liking, commenting, sharing, clicking on photos of that kind of stuff. How different they are than the average composition in your page. So here you see we have a lot of people in 25 to 34 in terms of total audience size but they're much less likely to engage with the page than say the older demographics here. So again coming to that same topic of not just how big that specific target group is in terms of audience size but also how active they are and how interested they are in what you have to say. And I mentioned earlier that the technological profile can give us a bit of more insight in the audience. And the first thing was what I showed in terms of shopping on the go and shopping in front of the desktop computer. And here's something different. Giving me a basic idea of what's a disposable income based off on what mobile devices people are using. So I'm showing first here an example of a pretty ordinary page in terms of audience composition. That's our page for popular science events. I'm involved in organizing. And you see that the split is pretty even but there are a lot of people who are focusing on comfortable computers. And here's a second example of people who are interested in whatever design. And you see here how this proportionately huge the percentage of iPhone users is. And you can already believe that the fact that those people have much more money on average and are interested in... Well, I'm not going to say better design because there's great Android phones out there but better design. The same thing but if you're focused on in a B2B type of audience would be LinkedIn. What they have is something called LinkedIn website demographics which lets you put a tracking pixel on your website through a short snippet of code and then LinkedIn is trying to match the users coming to your website with the users who are currently logged in to their LinkedIn. So it gets a bit slower. It's not going to give you results right away but the information can be super valuable if you're focused on the B2B side. So if you're running, say, a website development agency you can see what types of companies come to your place and you can then better serve them and create solutions or case studies focused specifically on these audiences. So you can get all sorts of information from company names, specific company names, like spoilers it would show at the top like Microsoft and HP without variation or something like that so focused on bigger companies. But you can also look at company size, you can look at the industry and the role of the people within their company so you can see the people coming to... Again, we already did that example to a website development agency you can see if the marketing person is the first contact or the person doing the surveying of solutions or if it's a developer and you can vary your language based on that you can see their seniority and their location. So here's how that looks. So you can get from that drop-down menu the specific information you can choose like here is job seniority and I've split that here or you can use any of the other ones I showed you. But once we've looked at the general demographic information we can first of all get a lot more personal and then get much more under the skin of our potential users and what I'm going to show you here creeps me out a bit to be frank but it's a solution that you can use and you can check and you can try to use it for good to understand your users better and to understand how to communicate with them in a better way. So what we're going to talk about is psychographics. So how many people here are familiar with psychographics? Can I get a short answer? Okay, so psychographics is basically understanding your users from the viewpoint of their age location those like demographic factors but from the point of view of what they care about what motivates them, what they're trying to achieve how risk-averse they are and all these different psychological aspects that you might want to get a better understanding of. And there's a tool called crystal knows that you can test out and see that. It's here we go on a personal level so you need to a specific account of the person you want to survey so you can do it with current customers you have or you can do it with potential leads. So here's how that works. It's a Chrome extension so you install it it shows that view personality thing on the right-hand side and it gives you a complete profile of the person whose profile you're checking now. So it shows you what they enjoy doing and what comes naturally to them patient waiting in line here what language to use when speaking to them what motivation factors you can use and how to work with them there and then you can go into a full profile that will give you even more details on the same topics and information so seeing how to vary the messaging for example when you're talking to these people you can see what motivates them you can see what language to use in the meeting being rushed is for the person who's going to show you the most of it from my turn on and the most important thing from a communications perspective what I'm coming from is how to convince them so you can see what type of persuasion techniques to use on your landing page or when you're talking to them in an email or when you're doing a sales pitch or whatever that might be and you can get all the other information that we're showing you again, that is very creepy if you're on the receiving end of that thing and I have to say that it's pretty accurate I've tested it with a bunch of the people who are working in our team and it's... I would say it's very precise but that also helps me to know better when going into a meeting with my CEO or my CMO how to make sure that we both get the best out of that meeting and obviously you can use all that to be spammy and hacky and do bad, bad stuff to those people and we are trying to use that for selling purposes only but in the end of the day if you're not providing the value that you promised you're not getting anywhere so we need to keep in mind that whatever you promise you need to deliver otherwise you're going to be in a much bigger mess than what you're starting from the other thing that I want to talk to you about today is something that's really going again on a personal and much deeper level and it's called Jobs to be Done and it's a framework first presented by Clayton Christensen who's a Harvard Business Professor and he has all these titles and so on he wrote the innovators dilemma if anyone read it so that's the same guy and what he figured out was that whenever we're looking at those demographic factors and psychographic factors and so on we're not actually getting to the bottom of the situation there we have no clue on what the person coming to us is trying to achieve I'm going to tell you that my target customer is 26 years old female she's living in Sofia she has a potential income of whatever amount of Bulgarian land she likes to frequent these and these types of places she likes to buy these and these types of brands she would go to these and these media to get her information but at the end of the day I want to tell you you have no idea why they came to my website in the first place and what they're trying to do and Jobs to be Done gets to the bottom of that so it's a bit weird in terms of phrasing but what Christensen is getting at is that people hire us for a specific job they want to be done and there's a lot of different competitors that are coming that can solve the same job so applicants for the same job or there are a lot of different forces that are trying to get you to a new solution or keep you with your solution you're still using as a user and what it comes down to is this thing so we often focus when talking to people on the use so we tell people okay you're getting us through driver because you almost threw something on the wall but we're rarely getting at the actual outcome which can be putting stuff on the wall where that piece of paint is or putting something on the wall to express my creative side or putting something on the wall to make my tiny horrible office space feel a bit more pleasant and these can all be different jobs and when you understand that you can go after different messaging you can present your product in a different way or your service or your solution and you can even change features to make sure that your product fits with the end outcome that the person is trying to get at and here's a very classical example of what that looks like in a real life situation so we have Snickers on the one hand side and you have Milky Way and for the Bulgarians that Milky Way looks weird but that's what the Milky Way is in the US it's basically our region of the Mars bar so what the guys and Snickers who are trying to figure out was how to better present the product and they started evaluating it against competitors and at first you would feel that Milky Way is a pretty decent competitor to Snickers after all it's the same form factor it has basically almost the same ingredients it is presented at the same place in the retailer in the shopping mall and it's basically a chocolate dessert like what is there to think about it but what they found out during the interviews was that people consume Milky Way in a way that you would consume most desserts so you would go have it at the end of a rough day where in few you need some reward for surviving or you would get it at the end of the day for congratulating yourself on a big win or just when you need something sweet but people would go and buy Snickers for a totally different reason and the reason there would be to satisfy hunger when they're on the go and maybe they missed lunch and they're trying to rush off to their next meeting and they need something quick that's going to give them that boost of energy so if you look at it from that point Snickers and Milky Way are not competitors anymore Snickers can't look at competitors in terms of like a banana or roll nuts or burrito that's easy to eat while you're driving to your next meeting or something completely different than another dessert bar and what Snickers can then do is change their messaging to represent that and I'm guessing a couple of people are already smiling so they probably figured out what to show next which is their campaign you're not you and you're hungry which is getting at that same point and it started from that same insight and it's a way to get the bottom of what the person is trying to do when they're getting your product or they're looking at your solution what you need to do then is get that all information all in one place and make sure that you have an easy actionable way of reminding yourself who your persona is, who your buyer is who your entire user is and the easiest way to do that is use what we call buyer persona to get and these look something like this so you would have a fictional photo or a fictional name for that persona you would have all the demographic information that you've extracted you would have what their work looks like what their influences are what are the media they use the celebrities they follow, the brands they use and so on that you can extract from the tools I showed you at the beginning you would get some of the information about their personality and interests from psychographic research you can do that not only by stalking people online but also after talking to them there's very good solutions to get psychographic information based on actual surveys you can give me and what you can also do is add that job they're looking to succeed in and then marry the two bits so the quantified size and the qualitative information that you go from into using users if you're using the jobs with them framework and you can then I run real quickly through jobs to be done but there's also stuff there called hiring criteria so what types of benefits people are looking for and what things they have in mind before beginning their research for a new solution you can look at the benefits what exactly they have again coming from that same research like what's kind of bugging them when choosing your product or what might be an issue when they're looking to buy and you can then use that information to answer those questions in the landing page or in a blog post or whatever and you can then look at the comparison and you can look at the comparison and the comparison is following that jobs to be done methodology so look at not just your direct same solution type of comparison but look at different types of comparison that might not come to mind straight away and the reason you do that is that those two slides will ideally sit at your desk and you'll go through them with your team every month or every couple months or with your client when deciding on when you design for their website or when creating a landing page or whatever that might be and you will try to put yourself in the shoes of that person and see if the information that they will see on your website or on your stand at WordCamp Sophie if you're a sponsor in the event or whatever will be information that will convince them that you're the right fit so that's how we get all this information in one much more actionable thing than just putting on pages and pages of long explanation and screenshots of solutions that I showed earlier so yeah, that's basically that's what we have to say first off you can find the slides at this link and over there you can find and download that same biopersonal template that I showed and the blog posts are out on the same topic that maybe you can go over in a couple of days when you've completely forgotten what you heard in this presentation and I would very much like any questions that you might have now or on Twitter and also since she already mentioned that I'm a huge fan of stickers I brought some from the office I stole them so even if you're not willing to raise the question now the coffee breaks you can come grab a steeper ask a question you would ever Thanks New slides are all these tools are really great but they can need something and the website what is your comments how would you proceed with coming to the test platform what I showed in terms of Facebook audience insights is just a solution you're looking for so what you saw there's an option to start with the audience that's already fans of your page but what I started with here was a button that's titled everyone on Facebook and then you select the potential criteria so for example if you're doing a coffee shop you can select interests around coffee or if you're looking to create like an entrepreneurship category you would select something like that and then Facebook allows you to look at users within that specific location that you chose and based on those interest criteria so you don't need an actual starting point like your own space or your own website so that's the first thing to get some basic idea about the qualitative side of stuff and then what you can also do is create surveys and try to get potential users to answer them so that's a whole different presentation in itself you can do that with a potential audience and once you get that information from Facebook you will be able to create a short like an ad or you can post it on Facebook groups that are posted in your audience and ask people ok here's a short survey he's like 5 questions that I really appreciate you answering try this out and that would be the best way of doing it the caveat there is that we usually go with a convenience sample so people we have easy access to and that's a very bad idea if your target group is more materially different from what you have access to so for example when we were starting InhanCiv we didn't look at the Bulgarian audience because our way of creating your CV is much different than what a US person would think when doing their CV at the US market because otherwise our product would be totally different than what would have served the same needs so make sure that those interviews are done with people who are as close as possible to your target segment the data is not sufficient just you see a couple because our market is very very small most of the services out there just don't capture so small audiences is there any turn around people who find a solution especially for Bulgarian market so the one thing that I want to point to you again is Facebook frankly they are huge and they have enough information on that to give you a pretty decent overview of Bulgaria that example I showed was done with Bulgaria specifically to illustrate what we have here in terms of information and the other thing would be if you already have a running platform you can do something like an overview of Google Analytics if the site is big enough or you can again do interviews and you can do that as pop-ups on your website if you already have a working platform so you can have like quick short surveys of one or two questions that a lot of people will feel it because it's almost no effort to do that when they show up on the website so there's a solution called Haltjar which is very convenient for this type of like with pop-up surveys or you can do something more substantial if you have the budget but yeah that's a big if question in case you don't think or Google for any other tool or social media how would you find which are the best channels and if you use Facebook of course you find always the people who doesn't pay for this but maybe there is more I mean for Google search organic or fake or something else how would you see which channels are the best ones are we working again without having your own websites still or okay so if we have we can look in Google analytics and see the referral sources so we can see what channels are people coming from we can see what channels people are coming from to get to our website another solution is tool called similar web they're like to get the full information you have to pay but it's it can give you a lot of information can even help you compare their sites so you can see what places they get their the book they're traveling from so that's also another solution the left hand on your and it's the right hand side and the audience is much more engaged a question regarding the price range of those tools that we mentioned is it more than a small product company we don't have too much money to spend on this analytics and information how are the price ranges in these three for example Google okay I'm happy you asked for these three specifically because they're all free so you don't need to pay anything you don't even need to have an active advertiser account and give say Facebook money to use Facebook audience insights completely on your own and the rest of the stuff there Google analytics and LinkedIn website demographics just requires a snippet of tracking code installed on your platform to work the tool that I showed for psychographic analysis they let you sign up and use like five credits so basically survey five profiles completely free and then you have to pay in profile on the survey so there are solutions that you can use for free and be smart about it we are in my day to day work kind of rarely using tools that are paid to do this type of research anyone on that side of this I guess you guys want to get your coffee and if you leave me for anything I'll be here and again come get some stickers they're super awesome I promise