How to define and engage your online audience
- Stuart Ridley
- 11 March 2010
According to Calli Brown and Linda Anderson, co-founders of service directory Yummy Mummy Guide, new mothers want to keep up to date with their health and beauty regime after they've had a baby.
So they started the Yummy Mummy guide
, an online directory to help web literate young mums find parent and baby friendly businesses.
How do we better define our audience?
Linda: The Yummy Mummy Guide audience is predominantly mothers, and parents, with children under one-year-old and living in Sydney. They are internet savvy; they want to be able to continue to do the things they want to do.
Calli: The age bracket is 25 to 45. The Gen Y mums are much more media savvy and online savvy: they go to the net rather than pick up a magazine.
Linda: It's not about aspiring to be the gorgeous, slim, overnight ‘lost-all-my-baby-fat' kind of yummy mummy. For us, the concept of a yummy mummy is to feel good in your skin.
Stuart: Well, feeling good in your skin is part of what makes someone attractive. Did you also look into whether other businesses use the phrase?
Calli: Yeah, but they're very specific: beauty parlours and things like that; they're not an all-encompassing business directory.
'Think of every possible way you can promote it; experiment and keep track of your results'
Jonathan Crossfield (Netregistry): That may be so, but when you think about your brand recognition - the name that you want people to remember - if you go and type ‘yummy mummy' into Google, you find that you have competition. Your brand recognition and your ability to differentiate yourself could be that bit harder because you've named yourself the same as the people around you.
Linda: So how would you, if you stood in our shoes, knowing that we've now chosen that name, how would you then avoid that?
Stuart: Emphasise the ‘guide' part. So, Yummy Mummy Guide (YMG). Like ‘Nett Magazine'. If you just type ‘Nett' into Google, well it's one of the most common phrases on the internet, with or without two Ts. Enter ‘Nett Magazine' and you'll get us at the top and multiple more times on the front page of search.
Linda: The other problem we have is that a lot of our competitors out there are actually parenting sites and we are not a parenting site, we are for services that can help the mums and dads ...
Calli: ... for their requirements that aren't necessarily parenting. I actually think that 90% of our audience are mums, and dads will hear about the guide through their partners. I imagine they'll be perfectly fine to find where nappy changing rooms are when they're going out. I don't think my husband would feel his masculinity dented by going to the Yummy Mummy Guide.
What are some smart ways to engage and track our target market online?
Stuart: Considering the audience you're going after, what do we know about their internet behaviour? Is this something that they visit for a minute at a time or has it got stickiness?
Stephanie: It does, it has stickiness. I did some research and then spoke with my sister-in-law. She has three kids, all under five at the moment, and her social connection, her professional connection, her research, and where she's going to go to the dentist, are all dependent on being online. So, for mums, definitely, it's a social connection, it's a self-empowering connection, and it's great for peer networking as well.
Jonathan: People are using social media more for recommendations or answers than just Google. They are going into Twitter or they're going into Facebook and saying, "Does anyone know ... ?"
Kate Conroy (Google): Online directories came before search engines. Search engines grew because it was getting to the stage where there was such a large volume of information that they wanted to get down deeper faster.. You guys have heard of SEO? So search engine optimisation is obviously going to be a big part of what you do. SEM is my specialty, online advertising, though also think of every other possible way that you can promote it. Experiment and keep track of your results. I have friends who started their own businesses and have found Facebook to be a useful way to do that. If you start a Facebook group, reply, reply, reply! Have dialogue. To get a lot of visits, you want it to be sticky and the easiest way to drive stickiness is not necessarily creating a community, but taping into existing communities and bringing them to the site, connecting their community. They'll find you through search, whether that's through natural listings or through paid listings. And they'll find you through other forms of advertising you may do online, as well as email newsletters.
Stuart: How do they track performance?
Kate: When you start any website, you need to look at an analytics package. Quick spruik: Google has a free one called Google Analytics, or there are others you can pay for. Right from the get-go you should be tracking things, because that's going to help you differentiate all of your online methods of contact. It's going to tell you how many people you got through your Adwords advertising and how much it cost. And how many people you got through your natural search listings and how much it cost and which search engines they came from; it may not have been from Google. You can set it up to see how your email marketing is working, which pages on the site are stickiest, and then make decisions on whether you want to change a particular message, page or ad if people are bailing really quickly. It's important to compare. Having numbers is one thing, using the numbers is something else.#
