 Hello, good afternoon. My name is Philip Preston and I would like to welcome you to today's webinar express know your customer hosted by CIM East of England. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. Presentation will last for approximately 30 minutes, followed by a short 5 to 10 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the Ask Question chat box in the Q&A panel which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and I want to attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to share your thoughts on social media, we are using the hashtag CIM Events. The webinar is being recorded and we will share a link to the recording with you over the next few days. You'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which would love you to complete. It'll only take a few minutes or survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. Okay, I'd now like to hand over to Ian Miller from Crafted, who's our guest speaker today. Thank you much, Phil. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for taking some of your time out of your day and to come and see you listen to the webinar. And hopefully there will be a few things that may be able to be helpful to you as you're navigating these times. Very brief introduction. This is me. I'm the CEO of Crafted, a full service digital agency. In terms of how the hair is shorter and the beard is longer because of Covid, but we are obviously as an agency. So what do we do? Why am I here as an agency? There's just coming up six of us as an agency. We function across four disciplines. So whether that's strategy, marketing, design, technology, it's really about the mix of those things and what I'm going to cover today around how you can better understand your customer applies to all of these. But certainly when it comes to the times that we're in at the moment, quite often people are asking us more around how they work for marketing. In terms of what we do and how we do it as an agency, we are obviously focused very much in terms of large scale projects. We're looking at how we can be helping people and our size scaling capability. In terms of who we help, it is very, very different. It's whether it's large international organizations, small independent, but really what it really comes down to is people trying to say, I've got some customers, how can I talk to them better? How can I interact with them better? What can I get more out of the activity that I'm doing? So it's enough about me. One thing to give a little bit of a background just about what I'm going to cover. One thing that I want you to hopefully take away from this isn't, and I'll be going through some of the tools, but it's not about thinking all this tool will revolutionize what I know about customer. What I'm hoping that you take away from this talk is actually a bit of about a different way of thinking and how that can happen. So I'm going to try something. I usually do this in face-to-face presentations, but hopefully it may or may not work on a webinar, but let's see how it goes. If you had this stick of sugar from whatever your chosen favorite coffee shop of choice is, if you were to hold it up in front of you, if you were having that as though you just picked it up out of the bucket or whatever, and you're about to open it, what would you do? What action would you do? And if this was in front of you, would you just rip the top off? Well, actually the first thing we all do is we shake it. We make sure that that sugar is not so when we do open it, it doesn't go everywhere. And that's one of those things where as an assumption we just think, oh, we know how to open obviously the most benign of things are a stick of sugar. But actually when you take sort of almost like a data load approach and you just observe actually how people open it is that they shake it first. And when it comes to things in digital, that's one of those things that sometimes happens is that people just think, well, I know how my customers behave. I know what they do. But when you actually use some of the techniques and things objectively, you can see perhaps it might be slightly different. When we talk about knowing your customer, a lot of companies or organizations, they go down the persona route, which absolutely has value. This is the example from the National Archives. They have given each of their personas a name. They've sort of said what they typically are in terms of demographic, what they're interested in, what all the different platforms they may be. One of the problems with this is they're quite often incredibly detailed and arguably in my mind slightly too detailed very possibly. But what they don't do is they're very, how often when companies do these personas, do they revisit them? Do they revisit them every three months? Do they revisit them every year? Quite often it's sort of the next time they do a web build, it's three or five years between actually reviewing them. And the other thing being is we've got organizations that've got millions of visits a month. If you are trying to distill that down into, there's five people or eight people, however many people you have as your core personas. What you can miss is those education cases and increasingly now people are wanting to take their own path through digital experiences. So doing this persona work absolutely has a level of value, especially if perhaps you're not quite so certain just by going through the process, it has value. But it can also mean that you have two strong opinions. And this is really where quotes like this come in. It's about having strong opinions but make sure they're weekly held. So you have very strong opinions about who your customers are, what they do, how they behave, what they're at. But as soon as data or as soon as something challenges that, that you're listening to it. Too often, especially perhaps at sort of more enterprise level, people just go, people will say I have a very strong opinion of my customer and it's very strongly held and it takes quite a lot to change things. In terms of the times that we're in at the moment, obviously with things moving fast in many different industries, you need to have weekly held opinions. You need to be able to take a look at something and go, actually we need to review this and do something differently. What am I not going to cover today? There's a few things. One is as an agency, we have access to all sorts of premium paid tools and paid data sources that give some level of this information. I'm not going to cover those because I appreciate across the wide range of marketers. Some people have that budget, some people have access, some people are doing it in a different way. What I'm not going to do is go, this is the tool that gives you all that information and because it doesn't, what I am going to cover is about saying, here's how you can self-serve some information, here's how you can look at things without trying to just amazingly go, old budget equals output. So what I'm also not going to cover too strong is about some of the things around psychology and sort of on-site analysis. It's about trying to say what the tools and tricks that you can do and really a viewpoint. If you come away from this talk with anything, I hope you come away with a view that you'll just say, actually I can think a bit differently about things now. So in terms of how you understand your customers better, what does it really come into? And it comes down to understanding what they care about. Now, when you talk about personas quite often, it's who they are. But who they are isn't necessarily two people who are identical. They care about the same things. So whether that is that they're the same age. So you think, oh, because they're a certain age, they must equal a certain type of person. Whereas what they care about should be common. So if they have interests, et cetera, then you should understand what they care about first, not just who they are. So this is sort of true for so many customers' lives and people that you wish to be part of and talk to, they have their whole lives. They have everything that they're interested in, everything that they're thinking about. And the bit that is going to interface with your business or your organization is actually a sliver. And what you might be talking about as a business or organization doesn't always even match that. And we've seen that in terms of the self-congratulatory press releases that are brilliant to straight people who really go, but the customer's like, oh, does it really affect me? It doesn't. And when you're looking at this and you're looking and you're saying what are the two things around what your customers are interested in and what your business is interested in and where does that match? One area that it always seems to fall down and I'm sure will resonate with some is about where businesses are talking about features versus benefits. So here's an example. White goods are awful for this. It's a print tag, nine kilogram washing machine, six kilogram drying capacity. I have never weighed any washing in my life. I have absolutely no idea what that means is that four pairs of jeans, three sweatshirts. What does it actually mean? But as a business, they have a product that has features. They've got a product that's got a capacity. So that's what they've led with. Whereas if you're using a washing machine you care about, can I do one load for a family of three or four? That's what you care about. They also overstate things in terms of is on the same edge. You've got four different different variants. The only difference is their different color. No feature differences. So why take up that space with talking to people about exactly the same thing across all four of them when the only difference is what's the color and will it match wherever whatever room it's going in. So how do you get some of that understanding? So the first thing that I would think is is who are they in sort of top line terms? And the single best way of doing that is actually using Facebook audience insights. It's put primarily through the ads side of things. You may not run Facebook ads, but you can upload your audiences and get the insights from that. So this will be things where what you're doing is you're uploading predominantly email lists. What Facebook does is it then matches that against known Facebook accounts. There's no PII shared, but what it does is it then says within the group and if you've got you've got 20,000 customers, it will have a match rate and of those customers that it matches, it will tell you things like is it over indexed male to female? Is it a certain age? Is it a location? What are some of those traits? Now the thing here is even if you have zero budget and you're not doing any Facebook ads, you can still get this information. You can still have these audience insights. You can do some of them through people who like your page, but actually when you're uploading and creating Facebook audiences, it's a really nice way of getting some sort of top level information. I wouldn't personally greet them immediately down into sort of individual personas, but it gives you that feeling of actually perhaps, is it different? And the thing there is compared different audiences. So if you're e-commerce, do you have a VIP audience that are repeat purchases, their high value, great lifetime value? Just upload those. So that might be a thousand of your 20,000. Just upload those. How do they look different to perhaps people that always purchase from you in a sale? So take your CRM data, take your customer data. If you have that group, then you can upload those and say, actually somebody who is going to purchase from me in a sale might look different to somebody who's going to be my high lifetime value. That allows you to then just think, not just obviously about Facebook and Facebook ads, but it just allows you to then look at all your other strategies and whether that resonates. The next thing is about what are they looking for? Now anybody that says, oh, what are they looking for online? Most people will start and sometimes finish, but start a keyword planner. It's, again, Google Ads Tools. The numbers can quite often be effectively made up. They're not terribly accurate in and of themselves, but they do give you quite reasonable, relative information. So if they say something has a thousand searches a month and something that has 10,000 searches, it's probably the reasonable order of magnitude difference. It does give you an element of time-based and trend over time. It's not perfect. It's good for some obvious things like Black Friday or Christmas, but some of the things which might change intent over time. So that might be when people book a holiday because they might look in a certain month, but they might book in a different month. It can be a bit willy, but it's an okay start. And when companies and organizations are using keyword planner and agencies, quite often we're going to do some keyword research. It may well start with some of this information, but it's worth understanding how that search demand really looks like. So here's an example where, when you're looking at search demand, quite often people say, what's the highest search for phrase? What am I wanting to go for? Notwithstanding, obviously, issues of competition around that. Actually, what does that really mean? And when you've got the types of search terms that are on the left, which have got a huge monthly search volume, actually, quite often, they are relatively navigational queries. For a long time, the highest search for term on Google was Facebook because people just didn't put .com in the address bar. But that's not going to be something you can come into that conversation. That person is looking for something. They just aren't as, they're lazy and that's what they want to do it. Therefore, when you are looking at a topic that you're in, then you need to think actually that we've got this sort of middle of search volume which have got keywords that have got a decent amount of search volume and there's quite a lot of them. And then you do have, I'm sure everybody's heard that kind of long tail of searches which are incredibly arbitrary. Those stat, which I think still holds true that hasn't been updated for a couple of years now, is 15% of searches every day on Google and new because there's a news event or there's something so they're not completely repetitive. But the point being is people will, there'll just be this millions and millions of long tail search volumes. I just wanted to sort of look at this and give you an example. So if you look at, take weight loss as an example as a sort of if you're doing keyword research. There's a few things in this that this shows. So one is actually shorter terms don't always just equal higher search volume. Quite often people might think, you know, what's the shortest term, one or two keywords must mean it's a higher search volume and it isn't quite often. So in here how to lose weight has a higher search volume, three times lose weight. So if you're not doing this and just trying to understand what that search volume is, you're going to miss out and you might be using assumption rather than some data. Keyword planner, et cetera, these data points are good but how can you sort of use other third party ones to just sort of validate them? One resource that is quite often overlooked is actually Wikipedia. So Wikipedia, QVU and Wiximedia, Vanishing Labs they give you historical data about page views for any of their pages. So obviously Wikipedia ranks incredibly highly for a vast number of search terms. There's relatively few verticals where Wikipedia doesn't have any representation. To give you an example, we work with British Library and so obviously we could use Wikipedia to talk about relative search volumes and relatively interest in lots of different authors because the author page of Wikipedia ranks quite well so therefore it's good and proxy. Here you can see distinct spikes around Stephen King. Actually it's nothing to do with him as an author, it's to do with the release of the IT films. Those are ways where you can try and say oh actually because something's happened I can see the impact. The other thing that the labs tool does is it gives you more information. It doesn't do it, it's not easy to extract everything and we've got a tool in-house that we can extract or mass all the page views from the previous slide. But on this one of the things they do do, and especially if you're any sort of entertainment or so it can also give you some information around not just a number of page views but things like the number of edits. Is it something that is very topical? People are talking about it and obviously edits on Wikipedia will happen if it's like a news event. But also the interesting one is the percentage of mobile traffic. Is it something that is people are second screening when they're watching something and obviously things around series or films that quite often happens. But is your industry or is your topic that your business or organisation is involved in? If you can use this Wikipedia and something like that actually a really high percentage is made by mobile maybe that would change your strategy around how you talk to them what the landing page experience is what you're trying to learn from them. If you've ever done this answer the public there's a free and a paid version the free version is absolutely fine if you just want to get an initial starter for 10. But what that does is you give it a topic in this case it's river cruises and it gives you the questions people are asking. So when I come back to what are people care about it's not just who they are and are you the Miriam or whatever in the persona but what are they trying to find and what's the thing that they care about. So if you're in travel and take river cruises that might be things around what actually happens how long will I be on the boat what do I need to take what do I wear what's the length of stay questions which you might as being in the industry just assume people know but they perhaps don't and they want that comfort and they want that ability to not look stupid when they turn up and we have it in sort of luxury goods with some of the high end clients we have and actually by making sure people are answering those questions everybody is in the luxury sector everybody is a customer for the first time. So are they getting that information that's just breaking down that barrier to going actually do you know I'm going to spend my money at this level of products and purchase. So answer the public is really good there's a way of sort of starting that visualisation of what people are searching for that have those kind of Q&A and obviously from a content point of view allows you to match your content with what people are searching for. Also ask.com is another free tool it gives you the ability you put in search terms now people are probably familiar you put in a search term and there's now there's a people also asked box PAA box where it's an accordion and it shows for the topic that you search for quite often what are some similar similar topics. This tool basically goes through that and says you know if you were to ask that question and you go on to the next one you can see some threads of what that happens. Certainly if you do it at the moment now you're seeing prominence of things such as online and think people wanting to do things digitally. So how do I book online how can I do something online etc. So this is a good tool and do find that sometimes I think this is actually more a problem of Google is that if you look to three levels deep without resetting the information it starts getting a little bit sort of US centric so depending on where in the world you are and your organization operates perhaps it may be more or less relevant but it's a brilliant just way of just starting to think about how these things work and put themselves together. One of the things and we are in changing times for all marketers it's about saying how do things change over time. Absolutely the first port of call for nearly everybody will be Google Trends. This is one of my favorite examples of where what we're looking at we don't want to plan ahead for what we're doing on the weekend it's very immediate things to do near me rather than this weekend but actually it can also give you a way of trying to understand not just you know is something more popular than something else but are we changing behaviors? Very few people don't live in a flat anymore they're marketed as apartments. So if you are a company that's still marketing flats but obviously people are looking for apartments you're going to have that mismatch and if you you can use Google Trends not just for what's happening today and there's absolutely interesting things there but what you're really trying to do is say is my market moving away from me? Is it moving for me? So at the moment there's a lot of if you are doing this in your market then there's a lot of things around people wanting more flexibility whether that's in their work environment whether it's in at least in their office like they're looking for flexibility and they're looking for things because there's a level of uncertainty so if you look at that trend you can see it may not be a topic but it's just changing within what people are doing another thing to think about and this is really where you need to look at your own old data this is an example for a client they were launching a product they were getting lots of information out there and they're getting lots of talk about it but even though they were getting clicks until that product was near a launch they really weren't going to purchase and what this is is you might know you've got a product that matches what they're searching for but until you actually get to the point of perhaps being able to push that button or they feel it's real then they may will not actually be in that place but if you have got a full spectrum strategy they may be people that are perhaps two or three months ahead of themselves they're in that remarketing list they're in that social ads that are you've got those audiences set up so when something does come online this really plays out we see is within property or in travel where quite often they trail things like new for 2021 but the photos are quite clearly stock that's where we find that the business might be saying that we've got this it's new for next year we need to get people interested in it but actually until perhaps more things like stock photography are replaced with real and something that people think is more meaningful there's not that interaction thing that I think is unused as much as it really should be and in terms of information about your own customers for most organizations it's about site search site search you can track it in analytics I do it but basically you can track it in analytics which I'll go into in a minute but if you nail site search you've really got to take a step back and say what is somebody doing a site search who are they they're engaged enough to bother which is one thing they're not just dangerously clicking I can't really see anything I like I'm just clicking on so they're engaged enough to bother they're also their onwards journey needs to be as clean as possible because if they maybe have clicked three or four pages they haven't found what they wanted the navigation isn't clear and then they're using site search if you don't have a really good site search response afterwards where literally you're showing them what they're wanting I think Oliver will then have a bad response because they're investing in you by all of us our attention spans are in measuring seconds no more so if you are getting somebody who's on your site and they're investing if you take those terms and you are doing site search terms monitoring analytics you can get some really good insight out of the information that you had so here's an example for a client in a week 111 transactions that was being strongly because people are doing a site search 21% e-commerce conversion rate that's brilliant but that also is a red flag that perhaps that product or what they were searching for isn't high enough in the hierarchy isn't visible enough isn't it's not obvious enough because people who use site search are taking that time to do that search that they're invested enough however what about people that just clicked category couldn't see the thing they thought should be in there and they could just click away you've also got things that you can then look at and things such as average order value so further down the page you've got things that have got how how much people are paying in terms of order value if they're doing that search so if you've got people who are perhaps 20, 30, 40% higher average order values you want to be caretaking them really, really strongly so can you do things like can the site search be narrowed down so it forces if somebody does a certain search it lands them directly to the page rather than even a search page just to shorten that journey you need to be looking at site search if you have it and is a thing about how do you know your customer they're already on your site and if they're trying to find something and you're not listening to that it's a mismatch another thing to think about is like actually how do they convert and one of the first things because you know I'll talk about some things that are e-commerce talk about things that are obviously very online but a lot of businesses a lot of businesses are lead gen they're trying to get people into a sales funnel we've got clients especially in legal sectors and some commercial sectors where they might be nine to 18 months lead time from an initial lead through to transaction if you was to say what did my ad to do today without knowing what that lead source was all the way through you're missing the trick so if you can that is about working with your agency or internal teams to say have we got CRM have we got something that gives us either a single customer view or gives us the ability to push through not just what that first interaction was how we can do that end to end so there's other things that you can do there we on paid search you can do a footfall activity that will determine yes it's digital activity but you can then have that offline outputs of somebody walking into store you can also look at marrying up from audience data so while I've talked about Facebook audience is obviously a bit more enterprise you might have got more information there but how do you get into that perhaps this online transaction which might be quite easy and perhaps the offline transaction which isn't i.e. tracking phone calls in order to be able to show the marketing activity phone calls even if it didn't drive online activity and one of the last ways it's like me driving online I don't know and too many businesses don't actually just go out and ask so Google consumer surveys are really strong really easy really cheap relatively there if a couple of 3,000 pounds you can ask a lot of questions from a lot of people that will give you really good insight that you just wouldn't know otherwise for those that do know quite often things like for example newspapers might use it as a bit of a app just as monetization for the app but the user gets asked a question they're super customizable they're really quick you can define your audience down to basically the Google audiences so whether that's age demographics and tech etc but we've used it from everything from asking people about if you saw a product with this name would you think it's used for PR pieces so 46% of people think X or Y the point about the surveys is if you think I wish I knew this question then you can just dive into consumer surveys set up a survey and get some information back and especially in this piece you're trying to get the information for the business to move on if you're not doing on-site information I would really recommend you look at it hot jar we use extensively ask people questions to give you an example of how we've used this is client in finance and credit credit cards they we use hot jar on their conversion page it was why would you not sign up you know what is preventing you from signing up and when we ask those questions there is a trend for people to say about how they wanted to know more about the fees they wanted to know more about actually most businesses especially financially like they'll hide that we'll put that behind something like you don't really want to be too upfront about that whereas actually that was what people wanted so we change the page put fees front and centre and actually conversion rate really strongly so if you ask people literally just ask them is there something else on this page that would be helpful to you you will get an answer you won't get an answer from everybody but you will get some there's a few times it goes wrong because obviously it's all great with this but I love this quote it's what it claims to be but it's not what I expected it to be if you are going out there and you're putting yourself out there as something and therefore you raise an expectation even if underneath there's like there's asterisks and there's that caveat of it may or may not be doing something else you aren't going to have that match with the customer experience and it's actually trying to say what does my customer expect of my product that's what counts it's not actually whether you claim it does or doesn't do something it's what they expected to do and if you can use some of these tools and thought processes to just go I'm just going to ask that question I'm just going to get that bit of information then that is how you will get it obviously there's an awful lot of information that you could get from all of these different tools and obviously the paid ones that we would have access to as an agency or any other sources because the knowledge is the tomato is a fruit whereas wisdom is that you don't put it in a fruit salad if you are getting all this information you still need to have a view on it and go actually that just doesn't ring true I need to question that I need to think strong opinions but weekly help look at something you know what just doesn't make sense that somebody's doing that so it is about having that difference between the knowledge and the data because that is actually quite easy to get and you can have that wisdom and saying I need to take a step back and what does it really tell me so I'm going to leave you before we get into Q&A just with one thought and I think it really applies to where we're at at the moment in sort of the wider world and that is that obviously in this environment it is really easy to say everything's new and it is in many cases and there's lots of things that people are responding to about some of the sort of trends but one of the things is that quite often we see is you know what in another three or four months people are just going to go back to what they were doing and the outlook calendar thing will pop up on a Friday saying need to send out newsletter if you're going through that if it is just this crank the handle marketing where this day I'm doing this for half an hour this day I'm doing that for an hour there's loads of information out there you can go and do this in our moments but actually the difficulty of applying it isn't that is about saying this is this is something I'm going to pursue and then moving away from perhaps something you did before so thank you very much for listening I hope that that gave you some ideas and some tools but some thought processes that have been beneficial to you before we just get into the Q&A we're going to be following up with a sort of more in-depth and we'll be able to send that out please do get in touch if there's any questions obviously depending on how many you receive we'll just try and respond to those in more sort of themes but yeah hopefully that was helpful thank you we're in thank you Ian obviously there's no shortage of really good analytics and information out there so we're now going to have a short Q&A session as a reminder you can still submit your questions via the chat box on the Q&A panel which you'll see on the right-hand side of your screen so first of all Ian there was a couple of questions around Facebook audience insights one was actually how do you upload data to that system and the other question was around GDPR are there any GDPR implications because you're obviously trying to you're processing people's personal data including email addresses so in terms of how you do it it is as you go through the Facebook as a business interface then you have the option to basically upload an audience what actually happens is you don't actually upload the data what happens is that locally it gets hashed out and then the hash is what Facebook use in terms of GDPR then it would depend on your own businesses view and what you have so whether as in B2B quite often it's legitimate interest there's PEC legislation as well but they take a view that quite often that's okay under the legitimate interest because they are you obviously don't get that information unless somebody is already a customer so for most of our customers obviously that's been commissioned during the process of actually getting the information so we have obviously commissioned databases so it will depend there isn't that isn't it's depends one obviously please don't just go out and sort of scrape large amounts of email lists and sort of using unfairly but if you have got a robust data strategy and you know what your information is we haven't had obviously we've got massive organizations as clients and even going through that with all of their legal teams as long as they have one minute okay great there's a couple of people asking are these tools free I think they are I think just to start there are some paid versions but yeah there's all of these a couple of them have got a paid version of that tool but I've tried to do things where you can basically do all this yourself so go to also ask go to answer the public the one thing that's slightly different is the keyword planner that you need to have an ads account that you're running against but you don't actually have live ads so there's some that have kind of got an Facebook audience is similar you've kind of got a little bit of manager entry but there's an element of sort of signing up but not putting credit card in but yeah in terms of this I deliberately haven't focused on the more kind of you know premium enterprise tools okay great okay well then hopefully do you have the ability to target second screeners in real time it depends you can do so we have got so to give an example we work with medicines on they have their main campaigns they will have as part of their campaigns obviously TV advertising so we run campaigns and have certain tools and things that allow us to optimise based on people who are at the same time watching an ad on the channel for news so therefore that may either be blanket coverage of search results so if there's it's the sort of thing that you may have a timeliness to something you know when it's going to happen so you then just flood the market in a shorter space of time that starts getting into more sort of complicated you know display programmatic situations but yes broadly it's mainly kind of you're thinking why are they second screen are they just are they doing general research while they happen to be watching TV or is it because they're watching a travel programme on TV that you know is going to France and you're a French travel company that you want to be doing ads relative to that so there's the different ways but yeah you can there's absolutely the ability to do it Okay, great there's one two questions around some market research like so this is called a lengthy one but it's quite specific but here we go what's the better way of approaching a particular target segment if I want to do market research I'll tell you my current experience I need to know more about chef's purchase behaviour in Australia I'm not Australian and I would like to interview them so I've joined some Facebook groups what would you advise me to start this content that is quite specific chefs in Australia I'm sure the principle applies to others I think they're starting the right way joining some Facebook groups depending on perhaps not with chefs LinkedIn groups can be quite good and for a couple of clients you've actually started LinkedIn groups where they've almost got like user groups so or Facebook groups so actually you're trying to engage the audience for what you're doing in terms of targeting you would then look at also again you're trying to go back right to the very beginning of what I said about what they're interested in so are they watching I don't know certain YouTube channels are they watching certain things and in terms of some of the digital ad inventory you can target people that are watching things where you've got a layered audience they have to A, B in Australia they then have to B, B a chef and presumably C have some kind of interest in whatever the product is it won't be perfect but what you can do it's a slide I actually took out is if you layer all of your different audiences from an ad point of view or from a research you can then entice them if we're trying to talk to them just be genuine quite often we've had it where you just literally say that I need 15 minutes of your time I'll give you a £50 Amazon voucher I need to ask you 10 questions have you got it Twitter's really quite personal it's quite you once one and so doing Twitter searches finding the right people blogs again various searches you can do there's tools such as the moment things but there's searches you can do about is there a blog that happens to be from a chef again just approach them the thing with some of the tools if you take a Ugov survey or a more premium member there you're spending thousands whereas you could be quite guerrilla about it get an audience of 10 or 15 people that you've just literally reached out to paid £50 Amazon voucher to them that is useful for them and they'll give you they'll talk to you and quite often if you're if you're just honest about it we get a really good response right okay great do you have any online tools such as also ask that particularly good for B2B rather than B2C yeah the difference I would say I have a bit of a thing about this is B2B to B2C is increasingly a blurred line and still you are trying to even if you're in a B2B environment there's obviously ABM and things where people view it as a very B2B focused approach however actually you're still talking to a person and your sales or marketing is still probably coming from a person so you still really got to think what makes that person look good quite often to their superiors or reports what makes them shine to give you an example we did a piece it was a company that sells software to sort of mid-market companies about 2,000 staff and the best piece of content that was performed for years was literally it was a two-page PDF that was a finance director's guide to buying software and all it was was a series of questions so when they did the RFP and they went out and they got lots of different options they could just look okay by these are the questions of do you have this feature this feature and this feature obviously our client could answer yes to it so that's good but again you're really just trying to focus on what makes somebody not look bad so when we do answer the public or any of those you still find that people will ask quite similar questions and sometimes depending on what you're selling B2B the person looking may be more junior that has been sent out to get a short list and they're passing it on to somebody else so actually there might be quite a lot of research quite a more junior and even if it's quite a considered purchase that might need C-suite approval actually sometimes the initial gatekeeper might be quite junior or they might be in procurement who don't really know the first thing about something so they start googling so I would still use those I wouldn't just avoid sort of answer the public I know obviously the name implies that it's more B2C but if you put in even some B2B topics you will still get information and then the other thing is still site search if you do have a B2B site I would still recommend if possible if it's big enough the site search and then you can start saying oh okay that's what they're looking for first one is if I want to find out what kind of search terms are being used by a competitor's site which ranks high in search results what is the best ideally free tool to you some of the ones that are paid so things like SEM rush search metrics PI data metrics et cetera that we've got access to they will tell you so if you've got a friendly agency then they can probably give looking at their page so if you look at the page for their product or service it's equivalent to yours and actually think what are they using a title tag what are they using as their main header what are they used as the content are they talking about things a bit too much there are a few sort of page comparisons and things that will tell you this page is targeting a certain term they're not perfect but actually there's no they're just going to a page saying they seem to be talking about this sticking it into Google and seeing what Google thinks and whether they're ranking for it so if you've got a friendly agency then get them to use some of their paid tools that will do more of a whole of market view but you can do an element of it just look there and say okay they've got all these pages do a site map of their site and say they've got 10 pages on this topic we've got one showing off them and finally then in any specific tools best practices for modeling future short and long-term customer trends the only constant is change I think what we see is the best thing about this is if you have got the time like it's do a few of these things but do them regularly because then you'll see what that difference is over time you'll suddenly see do site search but you can do comparison because it's an analytics so you can do comparison so you can do this last week versus six months ago you can do what the site search output looks like and then what that can give you is it might be annual it might be obviously working around holidays or big events but it may also just be do you know what more people are starting to look at something and maybe I don't have a product or paid or service so I would in terms of looking future any they really aren't there are there are a few that purport to do it but I don't see that they're much better than an educated guess my view would be spend your time just getting familiar with a few tools that you are comfortable with that you like doing so when something starts happening you can see it in your toolset and you're saying okay right this feels different to me and we can adjust accordingly. Okay that's great thank you very much Ian so thanks all the time we have for our Q&A session today I'd like to say thank you to Ian for today's presentation to CIM East of England for hosting the event and a thank you to you for attending I hope you found interesting and worthwhile our next webinar express is on Thursday the 30th of July again at one o'clock the topic is driving consumer actions through brand interaction and experiences this time hosted by CIM Scott you'll find this on the CIM website where you can register for the session if you haven't already done so and we are adding further verbal express events to that events page day by day. Once again as a reminder you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and we would really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback so on behalf of CIM thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day thank you.