In my book, Communication Wins, I wrote about audience awareness and personality types. In this blog we’ll take a look at audiences by age group.

Succeeding in any business environment today requires getting the attention of one of the most entrepreneurial and text-friendly generations in history.  They are also the most stressed and distracted demographics ever to exist.  Understanding and developing new marketing strategies that appeal to customers and their personal lifestyle, both in learning and in information gathering, is the key to successfully marketing.  Finding a way to get through all the marketing noise that bombards the average person can be daunting and is more challenging than ever before.  

Who is your current market and why is understanding their information and learning style so important to the success?  They are divided into three groups: Generation X, Generation Y, and Global Tweens.  

Generation X is tech savvy and very skeptical.  They are between the ages of 30 and 50; they are the parents of children ages 8 to 18.  They are adults who want to understand their options.  Generation X is your number 1 target audience for most companies.  Marketing strategies aligned with the lifestyles and technological preferences of this age group are critical to success.

What do we know about Generation X?  We know they surf the web for information on every subject imaginable, including hobbies and specialized medical procedures.  Email, cell phones and text messaging are their primary, if not only, source of communication 24/7.  Digital organizers and recorders keep their busy lives on schedule.  They depend mostly on their friends and family for recommendations when making decisions, purchasing products and buying services.  Generation X women make the majority of buying decisions for the family.  Their purchasing decisions are based on emotion, trust, personal relationships and their own perceived value of return on investment.

Marketing studies show that traditional marketing strategies are relatively ineffective on the Gen X audience.  They retain less than 1% of the marketing messages they encounter on a daily basis and they are very skeptical of information they do retain.  Bottom line: Gen X consumers want verifiable proof of expertise, quality and good customer service with minimum sales hype.

Generation Y is Generation X on steroids.  They’re young, smart, and assuming, often to the point of arrogance.  They want to wear flip flops to work, they listen to iPods at their desk and text message to their friends every waking hour.  They want to work but they don’t want work to be their life.  They feel they are entitled to their parents’ lifestyle but without the hard work and effort it took to get there.  They are a force of as many as 70 million.  Tighten your chinstraps because this generation, ages 16 to 30, is different than any group that has come before, including their parents.

The impact of their personal attitudes and lifestyle will have a huge impact on how products and services are marketed.  Maintaining long term relationships will be very difficult with this ever questioning and fickle generation who has no tolerance for outdated thinking and lack of computer skills.  If you don’t have a good website and an effective online strategy, you are invisible to this group.  

Since childhood they were both pampered and programmed with nonstop activities, meaning they are now both high performance and high maintenance.  Gen Y do the majority of their window shopping online before buying and they are very discriminating.  Don’t be fooled by their casual dress, piercings and tattoos.  This generation appreciates quality.  They are tech savvy and a generation of multi-taskers; they can juggle emails, phone calls and Google searches on their iPhone’s simultaneously.  They would prefer to send a text message than make a cell phone call.  They are more comfortable working virtually (online) than face-to-face, through personal relationships or even on a phone like previous generations.  

For many their favorite pastime is going online to social networks such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.  Most spend more time surfing the web and communicating in social networks than they do watching television.  They put a high value on self fulfillment and think nothing of making constant changes in their life to get it.  Building relationships that contain loyalty will be very challenging with Generation Y.
    
The last group is Global Tweens.  They heavily influence the buying decisions of their parents.  Today’s children are increasingly aware and very well informed.  Global Tweens between the ages of 5 and 15 are much more tech savvy than prior generations.  They are the first generation to be totally raised in the digital age of computers, iPods, cell phones, text messaging, gaming, DVDs, and the ever expanding internet.  Most of these kids learn to read on a computer.  Digital technology is second nature to them.

It is easy to underestimate their highly developed preferences and the effect they have on global marketing, and the buying decisions of their parents.  They do not like being treated like the children they are.  These kids are 8 going on 18.  They learn more from interactive educational software than the written text, and they respond to trendy marketing that immediately grabs their attention and gives them something to talk about, photograph or text to their friends since the vast majority have their own cell phones.  

Tech savvy audiences of all ages have shifted their information gathering to the internet and are always on the go, and they look to the internet to quickly research their buying decisions.  They all respond to visual kinesthetic marketing mediums, like video, as one of their favorite forms of communication.  Your website, especially with video, is the first step in emotionally engaging these groups with your personal message.  Your first contact with new customers and clients is no longer a phone call; it is the Internet.  Does your website project your image the way you want it to?  Is your website keyword optimized so prospects can easily find you on Google in your demographic and geographic footprint?  Are you listed on Google Maps in all your surrounding areas?

Digital technology is changing and advancing at lightning speed.  It is difficult to keep up with it all.  Discovering how to synergistically meld your current internal and external marketing strategies under the umbrella of an internet marketing program will save you time, money, and level the playing field among competition if you know how to do it correctly.  No matter how big or small the practice or what your experience level, most websites look the same and deliver the same written message.  In order to stand out you must do or say something different to engage your audience today.  

Without the PR component advertising alone lacks credibility, third party endorsement and the ability to generate that elusive buzz to increase referrals.  Now Web 2.0, the latest in internet technologies, provides the missing link to complete the PR component with many different options available.  With the latest downturn in the country’s economy you can’t afford to lose existing or future customers.  Now is the time to reevaluate and update your current marketing plan to include Web 2.0 internet marketing tactics if you want to set your website apart.  

Don’t be left in the dust wondering what happened when you weren’t paying attention to your online competition.  The most valuable real estate you can own in any business is in your market’s mind.  Communicate with them on their terms in a format they are comfortable using.  It’s all up to you.  Are you going to be a leader on the digital road to success?  Or are you going to join the growing list of companies known as digital road-kill?

When we conduct website evaluations for clients we usually have to spend time explaining what certain terms mean. That's too bad because these are terms, in my view, that every business person should know.

Just as someone had to explain to you what a website was in the 90's, you now need to know some of the other key terms surrounding websites and, specifically, terms associated with search engines.

Search engines are, after all, what drives traffic to your site. They are the first step in converting someone with an interest in your products and services into a paying customer.

Here are some of the more common terms and definitions.

Search engine: Search engines are programs that attempt to emulate human behavior as it relates to finding information online. There are 100's of search engines but Google, with 65%+/- market share is the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, followed by Yahoo with 19% share and Bing with 9%. Google users are more often male, older and wealthier. Yahoo searches tend to be younger and less affluent. Bing users tend to be female, older, and are most likely to convert from searcher to buyer.

Spiders, crawlers, or robots (bots): These are automated programs used by search engines to visit your website, analyze, and then index its content. You need to create and insert "Metadata" (see next bullet) and a "sitemap" to help these programs analyze your site and its content correctly. If the search engines are able to analyze your site accurately then they are more likely to deliver high-quality visitors.

Metadata & meta tags: Metadata and meta tags give the search engines a structured description of your website. They are invisible to the average visitor and appear at the beginning of the code on each webpage. Metadata must be keyword (next bullet) rich to help drive traffic to your site.

Keywords: Finding the best keywords for your site is part science and part art.The best keywords are the ones people actually type into the search engines when looking for your products and services. If those words have limited competition, so much the better. Generic terms such as "marketing," for example, are too broad and have tons of competition.

Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO is the process of editing metadata and website content to rank higher on the search engine result pages (SERPs). It has been reported that ranking at the top position (#1) on page one of Google, for example, will drive significantly more traffic (254%!) to your site than the next highest (#2) ranking position.

Natural or organic search: These terms refer to search results produced by a search engine's algorithm when indexing unpaid submissions.

Paid search or Pay-Per-Click (PPC): Paid search results are purchased (fixed fee or bid) by someone, usually the website owner or their marketing agency. They can appear in sponsor banners at the top of the search engine page or in ads that appear in the right margin of the page. They are typically highlighted with a slightly darker background so you can distinguish between paid and natural (or organic) search results.

Search engine marketing (SEM): SEM combines both natural and paid search activities. So if you are conducting both SEO and PPC activities, or campaigns, then you are actively conducting search engine marketing. In my view doing either qualifies as SEM.

Steve
800-707-9150

Search engines are very good at finding keywords, phrases, images, people and crawling for metadata. What Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and the rest lack is the ability to contextualize their results.

NewsSift (www.newssift.com) is a new search engine from Financial Times that does just that. The new search engine is targeted toward business people and organizes search results by topic, organization, place, person, and theme. The interface looks familiar to those of us that are used to seeing PowerPoint slides.

It’s only in BETA now but I think this is a tool worth watching. To illustrate how it works, if you were searching for "Dakota" you would receive results related to two states, the child actress Dakota Fanning, organizations such as a universities, government agencies, and legislative branches, any organization with "Dakota" in its name.

So instead of getting 100 URL's with a short description of each in response to a search term query, NewsSift lists terms in each of the five categories previously mentioned –topic, organization, place, person, and theme. It provides a (contextual) path instead of a list.

NewsSift uses contextual and relational technology from Endeca that allows it to recognize the difference between Rolling Stone magazine and the Rolling Stones, for example.

Once users have selected their context from the five lists, they can drill-down further by adding related topics, more specific terms, or cross-referencing across multiple categories. For example, a user can search for "Charlotte," which will bring up the Charlotte Bobcats, the City of Charlotte, Charlotte Ross, and the Charlotte Region. If you then add the term "Stimulus," you will be presented with a list articles written about the Stimulus Package and Charlotte. In this regards, the value, if you want to call it that, is the site eliminates long search strings with quotations around some words and phrases but not around others, which is often the most effective way to use Google.

Google is slowly embracing the concept of semantic search -- putting terms in context. However, they have a lot of money invested in their existing architecture and the algorithms necessary for semantic search apparently don't scale to cover Google's billions of indexed pages.

Google did announce recently that queries are going to contain related terms (more than just different spellings or forms of the word searched, as is the case now), which signals that Google is moving toward what NewsSift has done.

NewsSift is hiring technologists while Google is reducing its workforce. NewsSift has a long way to go, but it is this type of innovation and willingness to take on a market leader that will turn this economy around. Will NewsSift take down Google? I doubt it, but it will be interesting to watch.

Update on decline of print media. In an eMarketer sponsored report, Consumer Magazines; Rethinking Paper and Pixels ($695.00) Carol Krol writes: “The numbers are sobering: 525 magazines folded in 2008. As of the publication of this report, so far in 2009, 87 other titles have closed. The bleeding will not be stanched any time soon.”

Steve

One of the basic rules of writing is: “Show, don’t tell.” Nowhere is that becoming more applicable than on the Internet.

When Google bought YouTube many of us wondered why such an incredibly profitable company as Google, a company already rich in eyeballs, would buy a company that was losing money. In fact, up to that point YouTube had no clear revenue model. More than one person asked, “YouTube has pretty cool technology, but how are they going to make money?” The answer to that question is starting to reveal itself.

Google has long recognized the trend that more and more people are selecting the Internet over television and print as their preferred source for entertainment and, more recently, their preferred source for news and information. It’s more than a bad economy that is causing newspapers across the country to fold, it’s a behavioral trend brought on by competition from the Internet.

The subtext to this trend is: As a society, we no longer want to read. We’d prefer to have things explained to us and nothing explains anything quite as well as pictures. We are visual creatures, after all, and by definition video is a visual experience.

Back to Google; specifically Google Gaudi. Gaudi stands for Google Audio Indexing. In simple terms, Gaudi uses voice recognition software to locate search words and phrases inside videos, such as Google Video and YouTube, just like Google searches through HTML text looking for words and phrases in websites. The dawn of a new era of search capability has risen.

Most companies have invested in a website. Few have done anything (SEO) to insure that website can easily be found by prospective customers and current customers. That makes no sense to me, but I digress. Those that care about maximizing the return on their web-investment should begin investing in video. Advances in technology have made video more affordable. Stated another way, in today’s world you can buy a lot of technology for a reasonable amount of money and that is what the smart money is doing.