Audience data: The best way to build relationships with your customers
January 02, 2025
Thanks to audience data businesses now have the ability to track and collect large amounts of consumer data. These can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns that can help businesses to increase their sales. But there’s another important ability that collecting big data affords businesses. This is the know-how related to building relationships with consumers.
All the information that is gathered can be used to create buyer personas that help you understand the consumer better. Moreover, audience data also shows us that it’s much cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Existing customers, once they become loyal to your brand, can also act as vocal ambassadors for your business, all by themselves. If they enjoy your products and services, they may tell their friends and family about them, leading to free marketing for you.
Using audience data for developing relationships with customers
Customer experience has become important when it comes to enabling business success and meeting sales targets. Research shows that nearly two-thirds of companies now compete based on their customer experience alone. In 2010, this number was just 36%. But what do big data and big data companies have to do with customer experience?
They hold the key to creating better, more targeted, and personalized messages that can help you convert leads to loyal customers. Moreover, nearly 74% of consumers say that they are somewhat likely, at the very least, to make purchases based on their customer experience alone.
To develop better customer experiences, you’ll need to understand their pain points, as well as what they are looking for from you and this is where audience data comes in handy.
The three kinds of audience data you can collect
There are three main kinds of data you can collect from your consumers. These include:
Big picture data
Big picture data is related to your target demographic, information about current trends, as well as what consumers are interested in. This type of audience data enables you to create projections regarding what the audience wants. You can then create a marketing campaign tailoring your findings to help your campaign resonate more with your audience.
Transactional data
This includes data related to any and all purchases made by a consumer. You can specifically track the products and services they are buying, as well as the number of times they are making that purchase. You can track a consumer’s buying habits, including how often they shop from you and what they usually look for. This can help you tailor recommendations to them or send them coupons and offers.
Granular data
This is the kind of data that is limited to a person and their buying attitudes and behaviors. You can collect such data from mobile apps, loyalty programs, and more. Granular is used to create tailored, personalized messages that can enable a consumer to feel special. Moreover, you have access to all the insight and information related to consumer behavior, as well as their buying patterns. This can enable you to improve your marketing campaigns.
Five ways you can use audience data to build relationships with consumers
By building relationships with your consumers, you’ll be able to create a loyal group of consumers, who you can expect to make regular purchases. Here is how you can go about building relationships with your customers with the help of audience data:
Personalize customer experiences
With the help of personal granular data, you can better tailor customer experiences catered to each customer. This can enable you to build strong relationships with your customers and provide them with experiences that make them want to make purchases. You’ll be able to refine your messaging to create targeted ads that make consumers want to buy your products or services.
Targeted promotions
Using audience data, you can keep track of everything that a consumer is buying from you. This will allow you to recommend items that are similar to what they normally buy, increasing their chances of purchasing them. You can also send coupons and offers pertinent to what the consumer regularly buys to get them to make a purchase. This is in contrast to sending random offers and coupons, which may or may not be items the consumer is interested in.
Provide useful and relevant content
Consider providing content that the consumer is likely to provide useful, as well. If you notice through your customer surveys, or social listening, that customers need help regarding a certain product, create an article or blog post about it. This can enable your audience to feel heard and help you provide information that can lead to them using your products or services better.
More importantly, the consumer will feel heard, and this can improve customer loyalty as well.
Providing products and services based on what consumers want
With the help of customer surveys, and in general, following what consumers are saying on social media, you can find out about products or services that they are interested in. Using this information, you can then provide them with products or services that they’ve been asking for. This provides you with information on products or services that will sell well and gives the consumers what they want as well.
Building customer experience
Customer experience is key to ensuring that you develop great relationships with consumers and that they, in turn, become loyal to your business. You can use data to ensure that consumers have an easy time once they enter the purchasing funnel. Make your website easier to navigate and use, and make the registration process simple. You can also make loyalty programs based on the data you’ve collected to ensure that you build trust among your consumers.
Conclusion
Audience data can be useful when it comes to building relationships with your consumers. By using the audience data you’ve collected, you can tailor personalized messages and optimize your marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to retain your customers better and develop loyalty among them as well.
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The cost of doing business every owner wished they knew earlier
January 02, 2025
Starting a business is not a piece of cake, and we know it, but it doesn’t have to be total chaos as well. Being realistic and aware of as many insights as possible will definitely be a big push when entering the business world.
You think you have done your research about the cost of doing business and you calculated the rent costs, buying equipment, paying salary, etc, but there are costs of doing business that don’t go by the book. That’s when asking business owners to share their experience comes in.
9 most (un)expected costs of doing business
In order to avoid any financial surprise, we’ve asked business owners who already went down that road to share the cost of doing business they wish they knew earlier.
Inefficient employees
Running a business is challenging in so many ways and a successful business will adapt to needs and the changing landscape of the world. The biggest cost that a new business owner needs to be aware of is that of inefficient employees. Not only do they have economic impacts but they can be cancerous within the culture of a business. Not only would you waste money on paying that employee, but they can also contribute to poor morale that ultimately can be a detriment to the entire business and drive away from a great talent.
As a small business owner, I used an online resource to map out the cost of all of my expenses so that I knew what to budget for and how to plan overall. New business owners should be aware of the cost of having a website. In order to have your own domain and use important features that your service has, it is going to cost you monthly payments. If you’re not good with computers or technology, you might also have to hire someone to create your website for you.
The one cost that I would recommend any new business owner lookout for is taxes. If someone has never owned a company before, they might not be aware of all the different taxes and how much they can end up costing them from year to year. That being said, you should check with your respective state or country’s department of labor about all the tax matters related to your specific location and situation.
They will be able to provide detailed information about what kind of income tax concerns are relevant to your business situation. Entrepreneurs should also have an accountant that specializes in their field of business so that they know all of the rules to keep you legal and to save you the most money.
The simplest thing that new business owners can do to accurately calculate their cost of doing business is to create separate financial accounts for your business (checking account, credit card, etc.) and use them exclusively for all of their business expenses. This will take the essential first step of keeping all business expenses in one place.
My next piece of advice is to be aware of regulatory and insurance costs related to starting a new business. It can be easy to overlook these expenses in favor of focusing on supplies, rent, labor, and other more concrete costs, but these things are essential to starting a business and can be quite costly depending on your industry and regulatory environment.
Devon Fata, CEO at Pixoul
Small business loans
As an expert in debt consolidation, I can confidently say that the long-term costs of small business loans are an important expense for entrepreneurs to consider. Often, people have a vision for a business and will focus on making that vision a reality at the expense of doing it in a
financially sound way. It’s best to avoid small business loans as much as possible in favor of scaling up slowly, seeking investors, and keeping costs down until revenue starts coming in.
Carter Seuthe, CEO at Credit Summit
Marketing
I calculated my cost of doing business by determining what I would be willing to spend out of pocket before establishing a steady revenue stream. I would advise new business owners to be aware of marketing expenses.
Marketing can include social media advertising, website creation, graphic design platforms, and even apparel. Individually, each is not very expensive. However, when you use multiple advertising sources, the costs can add up and not provide the desired results, income generation. Therefore calculating these costs upfront and making sure you get the most out of the advertising budget is imperative.
I started by plotting out a hypothetical full month of operations. This made it easier to visualize all aspects of the business and helped me identify some costs of doing business I’d been ignoring in my initial operating budgets.
Hiring employees and training. That’s an easy one to ignore because it’s not a regular expense and it’s difficult to plan for, but it’s also one of the most significant employee-related expenses for a business. You should know what it will cost to replace each position in your company, even if you think your employees are committed for the long term. Even the best-run business has some amount of turnover so it’s unrealistic to expect you won’t need to hire.
Michael Moran, Owner of Green Lion Search Group
Equipment failure
I actually hired professionals to help me calculate the cost of doing business since I was still new in the process and unfamiliar with all of the expenses. The process took a while but I ended up with a rather realistic estimate. One of the most unexpected costs was equipment failure. So, when in doubt whether you should buy or lease equipment, I say you focus on being prepared for equipment failure.
I calculated how much it would cost me to initially purchase tech equipment but a lot of it needed repairs or replacements after a short period of time and this cost quite a bit of money. I would suggest to business owners to always set aside a small budget for these unexpected technical costs since they happen more often than not.
Navarre Trousselot, CEO at Navexa
License costs
I compartmentalize these as government or industry costs like business licenses, tax, or fixed operating costs such as working space lease. Businesses should especially be aware of their license costs. Some licenses are subjected to annual reviews to ensure businesses are still adhering to standards and best practices, which can sometimes mean incurring renewal and training expenses as part of the renewal process.
Don’t start your business before you make sure you analyzed all your costs. Determine what costs are possible to minimize, which costs are a must and which are potential costs that can harm your workflow. Being a good boss means being prepared to respond accordingly to every scenario. Therefore, the priceless but biggest cost of doing business is taking risks and always being awake to predict potential problems before they lead to a disaster.
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Clear, readable, straight-to-the-point structured data is indispensable to businesses across categories. You can use it to perform quantitative analysis in just a few clicks. Analyze tech market trends in an instant. Manage your inventory without a second thought.
However, structured data only represents a small fraction as over 33 zettabytes data that has been created so far. To unlock the full potential of data, you’ll need to give your unstructured data your undivided attention.
Stored in its original format – text, video, audio, image, etc. – unstructured data is challenging to extract, organize, and analyze, but it’s an irreplaceable source of information for any organization.
See what you stand to gain from shifting your focus to raw, unstructured data.
Companies need to understand both sides of data
When it comes to data, it’s not a matter of choosingstructured vs. unstructured data. Both are necessary for the success of your company. They’re not two disparate concepts but, rather, different sides of the same coin.
Organized data that seamlessly integrates with your relational databases helps you access and analyze essential information and gather valuable business intelligence. It gives you clear and concise quantitative information that you can understand at a glance.
Without structured data, you wouldn’t be able to perform accurate financial analysis, measure your KPIs, or even use simple services such as online booking.
On the other hand, unstructured data expands your data pool and offers you qualitative information. It’s necessary for predictive analytics, data mining, and even the creation of AI-driven chatbots.
Examples of unstructured data
Virtually any data type without a recognizable structure is unstructured data. Instead of giving you clear-cut information that you can extract to your Excel sheets, such as names, addresses, or numbers, it gives you broader concepts and ideas. Some ofthe most common examples of unstructured data include:
–Text Files: Emails, survey results, customer reviews, chatbot interactions;
–Image and video files: Video testimonials, product images, employee presentations;
–Audio files: Voice mails, customer service calls, sales calls;
–Social media data: Comments, hashtags, mentions, group posts;
–Webpage data: Blogs, updates, reviews;
–Public data: Press releases, marketing materials, job ads;
–ESG data: Sustainability reports and predictions, case studies, social responsibility policies.
It’s the versatility of unstructured data that makes it so difficult to manage. You’ll need a powerful AI solution to go through the information, extract valuable insights, and receive a relevant and accurate analysis.
Almost 80% of enterprise data is unstructured
It’s estimated that by 2025, over80% of all available data will be unstructured, making it clear just how essential it is to start gathering and analyzing it as soon as possible.
Unstructured data contains vital information regarding your brand’s performance, your competitors, the market trends, and the overall customer sentiment. Neglecting unstructured data will only deprive you of valuable insights that can help you make better data-driven business decisions.
Better insights
Although it’s unorganized and difficult to access, unstructured data offers much more detailed insights than structured data ever could.
Whereas structured data can tell you that your customers are buying a specific product or spending most of their time on a specific page on your site, for example, unstructured data can tell you why. You’ll gain deeper insights into their purchasing habits, ways of thinking, personal preferences, likes, wants, and needs.
You’ll receive comprehensive answers to any question you have – who are your customers, what goals are your competitors achieving, which businesses are your industry’s leaders, and why?
New innovation opportunities
Better insights can’t but lead to greater innovation opportunities. When you have the full picture of what your clients want, their pain points, what you’re doing well, and what you can improve on, you’ll find it easier to meet and exceed customer expectations.
Moreover, you’ll get the opportunity to identify any potential market gaps and fill them with unique products or services.
Improved customer experience
Your structured data will give you the facts about your demographics – the age of your target audiences, their location, even their income brackets. However, it’s the unstructured data that will tell you how you can improve the customer experience.
By gathering social media data, examining the comments and reviews you receive, looking into your customer support tickets, you’ll learn straight from the source about what your customers expect from you. Then, you can work on exceeding those expectations.
Conclusion
Unstructured data is invaluable to your company’s success, but so is structured data. They’re best when they work in tandem – only then can they give you a broader perspective on where your enterprise is heading.
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When I started running my business, I undertook various projects after a verbal go ahead. I would execute my design and branding work and send off my designs to the clients. When it came to paying my invoice, some clients did not pay! Once they had the work they needed, they did not respond to my demand for payment; emails and telephone calls were ignored. I quickly learnt to have a professionally drafted contract in place and ask for 50% payment upfront and the 50% balance before handing over my files and artwork. These agreements need to be in place to avoid nasty surprises.
Not spending enough time ON your business
As an entrepreneur, it is very easy to get too involved in the day to day operations of your business, getting involved in tasks that are time consuming and not strategically important, which is what I did in the first few years. Now 20 years in, I work on my business – I work on the strategy and goals of the business, I prioritise and I delegate where appropriate. I devote more time on my business rather than in my business.
Find your own niche/path I spent almost the first 4 years of my business agreeing to everything and marketing to everyone. I ended up taking on cakes that I didn’t like, didn’t charge appropriately for and ultimately resented. Over the last 12-18 months, I have worked hard on finding my niche, the designs that really make me feel happy. The result has been I am now attracting my ideal clients who love my designs and am becoming known for my particular style. I suppose it was a right of passage but I wish I had found my niche sooner.
Determine what success looks like to you
I spent far too long listening to podcasts and business coaches who said that money was the indicator of success, so I needed to think about up scaling etc. The pressure led to feeling overwhelmed, loss of creativity and almost sounded the death knell for my business. I had to work out what MY success would look like, not someone else’s.
For me, it was to have a small business that attracted my ideal customers whose requests fulfilled me creatively. It would allow me a reasonable income but not at the expense of my work-life balance and mental health. I am now happier, more fulfilled in my work and have attracted greater success as my confidence grows.
Not creating a brand from the start and merely setting up a business.
I believe there is a big difference between ‘creating a brand’ and ‘setting up a business’ – the latter is what I did initially and saw me attracting the wrong client. When I set up I merely set up a blog, a company name and documented my floristry work. I didn’t give too much thought to a brand, a sustainable business model or narrow down exactly who my ideal client was. As a result, early on I was attracting the wrong sort of clients.
I re-branded a couple of years later and this is when my business truly elevated and I now get work from my dream ideal clients and I am getting the recognition I know I deserve and that I had hoped to achieve. My lesson learnt is to not rush into setting up a business, it’s not just about coming up with a cool business name, throwing up a website and randomly posting content and hoping for the best.
In the first 5 years of running my business, I fell into the trap of assuming I knew it all (or if I didn’t know something then the only person who could find the answers was me). Whilst this approach certainly saw me no harm as my business accelerated quite fast after turning the 2nd year in business, I look back now and think I could have avoided wasting a lot of time and preventing myself from much stress if I simply realised that whilst I am a PR expert, I don’t know it all when it comes to running a business and that its ok to ask for help.
In the last few years I can now recognise when it’s more effective to outsource or get an expert in to the business to help me, whether that’s for social media, accountancy, human resources etc. Just because you run your own business, you shouldn’t feel you are expected to know it all, it’s ok to admit your weaknesses and get help in those areas.
Not being a good communicator
I am a self confessed control freak, so it has taken me a while to learn that I cannot do it all, I need to delegate in my business in order to grow. But with delegation comes the need to be able to communicate with those you are delegating to, what you expect, what you need doing and when you need it doing by. I found for a while that the tasks being completed by those I was delegating to were not being completed in a way I had hoped.
After a bit of reflection and looking back at situations, I can see it wasn’t necessarily anyone’s fault, it was more the fact I hadn’t communicated exactly what my expectations were. I am excellent at communicating to my clients but when it came to communicating to my team, I noticed the ‘niggles’ were actually due to my inability to accurately communicate. Having worked on this with a consultant, I can see that actually the fear of not being in control was affecting my communication skills! If you need to communicate tasks with your team members, make sure you really are asking them what you truly are expecting in return!
In the early days of business, I hired my first member of the team and failed to consider looking into the necessary paperwork and contract in order to protect myself and my business if in the future I needed to make any changes to their position in the company. Having learnt the hard way was not ideal and caused much stress but the outcome is now I am very vigilant when it comes to entering into partnerships or agreements with anyone and I always have the correct paperwork. If I am unclear in an area that I know needs a contract, I know to consult a legal expert to ask for guidance.
Doubting myself and my abilities
Over the years I have wasted far too much time double guessing myself, doubting my abilities and comparing myself to other business owners. I would say this is mainly due to the significant rise we have seen over the past decade on social media where ‘imposter syndrome’ really does sneak in.
I have worked a lot on my mind-set as a result and whilst I still have times where I wobble (what human being doesn’t!), I can now confidently tell myself. “I AM good at what I do, I have nearly two decades of experience, a fantastic reputation, a leader in my field and that I will no longer allow others to make me doubt myself”.
SEO writing: Five foolproof tips to secure you the first page
January 02, 2025
Everyone wants to create content that ranks for a specific keyword perfectly. SEO writing is the only way that can help you produce content that people search for on Google.
But when it comes to SEO writing, things become harder to accomplish.
As you know, nobody enters on the second page of Google search. Each of us reviews the first ten results of the SERP only. Moreover, we tend to click on the links from the top five positions.
But what happens to the rest of the content?
This content falls at the edge of the earth and it will never get an opportunity to be read by your target audience.
Oppositely, writing SEO optimized content will help you boost your traffic and get more potential leads to your website.
To be able to create such well-optimized content, you might need a powerful team of professional writers. You can build your personal in-house content writers department or hire a freelancer who would satisfy your content objectives.
For instance, here is the progress of Visme blog for the past few years. We have grown our blog from ~800 to ~488K monthly visits.
To create SEO content you must understand what people are searching for on Google. Consequently, you must align your content per your audience’s needs.
You might wonder how to write content with SEO in mind?
To help you out, review the following three steps that you should consider before starting the process of writing.
Explore keywords with traffic potential
You should start by reading the content that people write within your business niche. It will help you identify the main (seed) keyword people type on Google. Yes, choosing the right keywords is important but it doesn’t mean you must read content from your competitors to identify them. You can think by yourself what would your target audience type on Google to find your service.
Let’s say, you write a piece of content for a website that sells sports nutrition. Your seed keywords would be “sports nutrition” and “sport supplement.”
The next step is to identify keyword phrases and questions that would be based on your seed keywords. You can use Keywords Explorer tool and review a few reports.
The first report is “Questions” which suggests to you all possible questions that contain seed keywords.
The same analysis you do with your seed keywords using “Phrase match” report. This report lists the queries that are sorted by the monthly search volume.
Identify search intent
Google chooses what content to show people according to their search intent. Search intent is what the person wants to find behind a query. In other words, you must understand all possible “why” and “what” that your content must cover to satisfy a user’s needs.
To make sure your content goes in line with the search intent of your target audience, you should fulfill the next three conditions:
Choose the correct content type
The most straightforward way to understand what type of content you should put money on is by exploring the top positions on Google. It will tell you what type of content ranks well and you should take it into account.
For example, if your target keyword is mainly used across interrogative queries like “what is the difference betweenorganic and paid search“, you will get such content types as blog posts, articles, or videos.
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However, if your target keywords don’t have informational intent, you won’t rank for blog posts. You will rank for video content or attract your target audience to your product pages.
Think about content format
It won’t be hard to understand what content format you’re willing to create. There are a few standard formats to choose from – listicle, how-to guides, expert roundups, etc.
Work on exploring content angle
Content angle reflects the purpose of your content. To put it simply, you must understand what message you want to send. To give you a clear idea of what it means, let’s analyze this very post per these three aspects.
1) Content type is “blog post”
2) Content format is “guide”
3) Content angle is providing concrete actionable tips on SEO writing for the beginners
Keep in mind these nuances and move forward with implementing the next tips.
Proceed with the determination of subtopics
You already have your target keyword. You know what type of content you’re going to write. You know in what format content will be created. Plus, you decided what angle content will take.
What is the next step?
The next step is to figure out subtopics for your future writings. Three ways will help you here. Let’s review them:
Analyze your competitors’ content
Must admit that this is a cool idea to analyze content created by the competitors. Just type your top priority query on Google and review the top pages it suggests. Afterwards, review the outline for each post paying attention to headings. For instance, this post onexplainer videocovers different subtopics that you could cover in your content as a separate topic.
Review “People also ask” section
“People also ask” section can provide you with more topic ideas. These are the variations of what people might also be looking for on Google based on your primary keyword.
Explore what your competitors might rank for
If you want to be ahead of your competitors, you must explore other possible keyword ideas and topics they rank for. One of the best ways to do this is by usingContent Gaptool. Just paste your competitors’ URLs and hit the “Show keywords” button.
Review the results and compare them with each other. Focus on those keywords that are used by all the competitors you’re analyzing.
Once all the preparations are done, you can start writing the post. Nevertheless, continue to read and you will find out five SEO writing tips.
SEO writing tips
It won’t be hard to guess that SEO writing aims to create content that would rank high on Google and attract traffic to your website. Consequently, without knowing some SEO tips you won’t be able to write optimized content right off the bait.
Here are five tips that will help you drastically.
Create a perfect title
Without a proper title tag, you won’t get neither traffic nor CTR from your target audience. Hence, review the titles of the pages fromyour competitorsand think about how you could write the better one.
You must use a target keyword in the title tag + keep in mind search intent you have identified at the beginning stage. Try to make every title tag unique that would make people never bounce back from the page.
Short URL
If you want to createSEO-friendly content, you should start with the URL of the post first. Basically, any URL must be simple and easy-to-read. It must include a primary keyword and you should keep it short.
Work on featured snippets optimization
Being featured in “featured snippets” is a wonderful opportunity for your content to be easily noticeable by a target audience. To be able to optimize your primary keyword snippet, you must understand the exact format that would meet the requirements of a future featured snippet. Afterwards, create content accordingly.
Internal links
Internal links are one of theon-page SEO elementsyou should never ignore. Plus, these links are good for user experience. Remember, you can’t cover everything in one topic. All additional subtopics related to the main topic can be covered in separate posts on your blog. Internal links help your target audience to navigate on your blog reading information from other articles thereby.
Add images
Images make your content more engaging for your audience. It helps people to absorb information visually. Just imagine if you read this very guide without images and screenshots. I bet you would leave it without compunction.
Conclusion
Summing up everything mentioned in this post, SEO writing is not about using the right keywords, ranking, and traffic. These elements are just a part of the game. The main course of the process is creating readable content that would help the audience to solve the problems.
As a bonus for your efforts, you get traffic to your websiteand ranking positions.
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As a self-employed consultant in the consulting industry successful marketing is the bridge between your services and clients who would benefit from them.
