I’ve decided I need at least two useless post on this blog – so here’s another.
So, on an old auto-blog, I got the following comment (surprisingly, not being stopped by Akismet):
This guy surely has ambition – attending both Princeton and Harvard. 
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While everyone else decides to post useless pictures from the event, I’ll post about some of the new marketing ideas that I’ve learned.*
Affiliate Summit 2010 had the most useful keynote I’ve ever been to. It was the one by Dr. Robert Cialdini about persuasion. Since fairly everyone that reads this blog is a direct response advertiser or a performance marketer, scientifically proven persuasion techniques are a must to understand. If you know what ad copy performs best, you can automatically test that in your advertisements and instantly increase conversions.
Here is what I learned from that keynote:
Learn more about using negatives in copywriting.
If you’re interested, here is a snippet of the description of the keynote, Influence During Times of Uncertainty:
…Dr. Robert Cialdini briefly reviews six research-based universal principles of influence, but focuses on those principles that are most effective during conditions of uncertainty and that leaders can employ to bring about positive and lasting change among individuals located both inside and outside their organizations.
Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the ground-breaking book, Influence, and co-author of the New York Times best-seller, Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Persuasive, is your guide in translating highly relevant but poorly-understood scientific research into practical business applications. His books have sold more than 2 million copies worldwide. Dr. Cialdini is the world’s leading authority on influence and his widely acclaimed studies are highly instructive to those who want to be more influential.
There were actually quite a few other useful things I wrote down, but many are private and I really don’t have the time to organize and post them. Honestly, time’s the reason why I try not to post more than once a month anyway.
Below, are some other posts about ASW10:
*I actually enjoy to read what others in the industry post. I just don’t like carrying around a camera – so I don’t have any pictures to post.
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There’s a post by Jamie Bernard at WalletPop, titled Ad Rant: The 10 Worst Ads of the Decade. Now, calling these ads the worst just because they’re a bit grotesque is quite ridiculous. Excerpt from Bernard’s post:
The decade was awash in such truly awful commercials that we were hard pressed to choose just 10…
If they weren’t so “awful” (Bernard’s wording – not mine) they would have never been noticed. From a direct response marketer’s point of view, an “awful” ad is an advertisement that’s not noticed and ineffective at driving sales.
Anyway, thanks to Bernard for pointing these ads out. Hopefully, the commercials might give you some ideas for your own campaigns.
*Yeah, these are not the most awesome commercials, but I still needed to pick an effective headline for this post.
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“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” – Antoine De Saint-Expiry
The basic premise behind Nielsen’s PRIZM is that similar people live in the same type of neighborhood. This system groups 62 different neighborhood types. These neighborhoods types are categorized according to six different aspects (Advertising campaign strategy: A guide to marketing communication plans. By Parente, D. on p. 72):
Additionally, these neighborhoods are labeled according to lifestyle preferences. These preferences extend from favorite television shows and networks, vehicles, magazines, and hobbies.
Now, in order for PRIZM to help you in an online media buying, you’re going to have to get your hands on Nielsen’s PRIZM. The second problem is going to be targeting these demographics online. The easiest way to target these demos at the moment is going to be through zip code targeting.
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If you’re big on media buys offline or online, you can find significant demographic data online for those marketing campaigns. Here are few tools that I’ll walk you through. In this tutorial, I’ll be using the example product, Rock Band – to gather our demographic data for.
I’m going to quickly cover Quantcast since it’s so widely recommended to lookup demographic data about a given domain name. Quantcast is very precise but can be quite inaccurate. Many times, I’ll use them as a starting point as they seem to be right about 45-55% of the time. They’re best with older, popular sites (better than 10,000 ranking). I’ve also found their traffic data to be comparable to Alexa’s analysis.
Rock Band is quite popular with kids and young adults (as most PlayStation games are). Here’s a screenshot from Quantcast:
From the data above, we can tell the audience is fairly young and most traffic is from families. It strangely predicts mostly Hispanics are most likely to visit the website; this is probably inaccurate. You shouldn’t blindly take in its analysis.
AdPlanner will help us essentially double check Quantcast’s data. If they both correlate, then our demographic analysis is most likely correct. I ran a site search for rockband.com and it had a high correlation with Quantcast.
However, it does not have race information like Quantcast does. It does have some other information about possible related search phrases that can be very helpful in search marketing.
For media buys, it allows you to narrow down websites that have your desired demographic. This would be helpful mostly in direct buys.
This is one of my favorite tools. Google insights gives accurate information on where search phrases are searched from. For example, if we decided to buy billboard space, we would want to know where most of our potential customers would be located. You can target by city, state or country. I chose state in this example. Here are the exact configurations I chose, under “Filter”:
Here are the results:
As the results indicate, Utah has our target audience. Utah is highly Mormon and highly family centered – which means they also have lots of kids.
This tool allows you to type a search term your target audience would type and find their demographics. This tool is fairly accurate. If Microsoft’s tool is consistent with Quantcast, the phrase “Rock Band 2″ should tell us our audience is young male:
The results appear to be consistent in this case. It’s always best to check multiple tools to make sure you’re getting consistent and reliable demographic data.
The tools I went over are free tools to use to find demographic data. There are other tools that cost significantly more and can get you much more accurate data. Google Insights is the most accurate regarding regional interest and trends – free or paid.
This target audience can be found and researched through multiple demographic and personality databases—including:
You can buy any of the above databases or you can go to your local library. Your local university would be your best option to check at.
Through these databases, marketers are able to make sales predictions and determine which medium they should market through. Many of these predictions are based on past purchasing habits of consumers.
Knowing your exact target’s demographic, personality-type, and spending habits ahead of time gives you an advantage above all of your competitors. This will minimize testing time and “wasted” advertising funds.
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