The NextStage CRO discusses how to match your marketing rhythm to your consumers' and capture their attention.
iMediaConnection's Executive Editor Brad Berens and many readers contacted me after "Localize Your Company's Website" appeared. They asked 1) about GeoFocusing, 2) how navigation styles differ from region to region and 3) how to make use of this information in marketing and advertising.
Let me start by thanking everyone for their interest. GeoFocusing is one aspect of getting visitors in focus, which is the subject of this week's column. First I'll need to explain a little about what NextStage does in order to explain GeoFocusing and how to get visitors in focus.
Do I have your attention?
Have you ever been talking to someone who's constantly distracted? You have to repeat statements, draw their attention back to important items, refocus them again and again and again. It's very frustrating, not only for you but for the person you're communicating with. You keep wondering "What can I do to get this person's attention?" and they keep wondering "What's this person trying to tell me?" You might even think to yourself, "If only I could get inside that person's head and figure out what makes them tick ..."
Well, that's a great idea. If you knew what made someone tick you could quickly decide if they were someone you wanted to be involved with on a personal, business, casual, whatever, level. You would know how to get, fix and keep their attention where you wanted it. You'd know how to convince them to do what you wanted and how to dissuade them from doing what you didn't want them to do.
What's very interesting (to me) about knowing how someone ticks is that everybody ticks a little differently, kind of "everyone marches to the beat of a different drummer." Most specifically, everybody marches to the beat of their own drummer.
It would be exhausting to learn the minutiae of everyone's different drum rhythms, so what most people do in their daily lives -- consciously or non-consciously -- is pay attention to what I'll call "super-rhythms." We interact with people in the hopes of achieving some outcome or goal by consciously or non-consciously matching our super-rhythms to their super-rhythms the best we can.
An obvious super-rhythm is language, and people use jargon to demonstrate their knowledge of some field or endeavor. People not knowing the proper jargon are quickly recognized as outsiders, neophytes or interlopers by the larger jargon-speaking community. That community polices itself by frequently modifying the jargon. If you can't keep up, you're out.
Marching to a super-rhythm
Super-rhythms are why many companies deal with personae in their marketing. It's easier to develop marketing campaigns and products for "Joe D. Farmer, JeepDriver" and assign five to 10 distinctive characteristics to Joe than it is to micro-segment the market along all possible people who, in addition to those five to 10 distinct but shared characteristics, might have several hundred more which are distinct and not shared.
The key to creating usable personae is determining which five to 10 distinctive characteristics are the most important -- the drivers, if you will -- that motivate the individual that persona represents to take action. These drivers and the super-rhythms behind them are revealed in any number of ways both before and after visitors act on a website. One such way in which these drivers and super-rhythms are revealed is through audience-specific navigation patterns.
Audience-specific navigation patterns are navigational elements common to a given group -- demographic, market segment, what-have-you -- and exist regardless of the interface being navigated. The goal of getting focus is to incorporate these audience-specific navigation patterns when designing in order to increase market share, ROI, brand awareness, et cetera.
Getting audience focus
Anyone who has traveled knows that culture, customs, beliefs, ideas, language, et cetera differ from place to place. No one is surprised when I tell them that New Englanders (I'm from New England) think differently from everybody else. Most people aren't surprised when I tell them that men and women think differently.
People start getting surprised when I share that different age groups think differently, or that how people make decisions in one market segment is different than how they make decisions in another market segment. Examples of marketing to different segments are everywhere, both good and bad:
- Everybody's familiar with the Chevy Nova fiasco in Hispanic countries. No va is Spanish for "It won't go." Anybody want to buy a Chevy It Won't Go?
- A Ford TV commercial in the Canadian Maritimes emphasizes the vehicle's family safety value and shows Mom, Dad and the kids safely driving down the road. Ford's TV commercials in nearby New England emphasize how macho and desirable you are when you drive a Ford.
- Hummer's recent "Nobody will bully you when you drive a Hummer" U.S. TV spots translate to "Hummer, for people with low self-esteem" (want to buy one now?) and won't play well beyond a limited market.
- A recent National Academy of Sciences article indicated that women will see a friend and men a foe when looking at the same person under similar circumstances.
I wrote in my last column how knowing the super-rhythms of different geographies -- GeoFocusing -- helped a New England-based company create a successful national online presence. It is also possible to know the super-rhythms and navigation styles of different ethnicities, markets, genders, age groups-- different super-rhythms and navigation styles show up because people respond to what's in front of them based on a sum of their experiences with similar information. Their summary experiences are based on native language, cultural integration, education, income, geographic location… NextStage currently monitors over 80 factors when making these market-focus determinations.
These super-rhythms and the navigation styles they affect also show up in how different populations search, make buying decisions-- quite a bit, actually. Changes in navigation styles often presage market and demographic changes. For example, some navigation pattern in your geographic market which was quite low is slowly gaining ground. Usually this indicates a change in the demographic of that geographic market and knowing this change is coming -- sometimes as much as a year in advance -- can give companies quite a leap in the coming market.