Content Modelling: A Master Skill

APRIL 24, 2012

Go to article

by RACHEL LOVINGER

• Published in: Content Strategy
• Discuss this article » | Share this article »

In “Tinker, Tailor, Content Strategist,” which runs concurrently in this issue, I asked you about content strategy master skills, which hardly seems fair if I don’t share one of my own favorites. More and more I find that the content model is one of the most important content strategy tools at my disposal. It allows me to represent content in a way that translates the intention, stakeholder needs, and functional requirements from the user experience design into something that can be built by developers implementing a CMS. The content model helps me make sure that the content vision becomes a reality.

What is a content model?

A content model documents all the different types of content you will have for a given project. It contains detailed definitions of each content type’s elements and their relationships to each other. You can capture a high-level version in an org chart-style diagram, or use a spreadsheet to capture a more detailed version. The level of detail in the model is determined by the purposes you need it to serve.

A simple, high-level content model

The high-level model shown here depicts some common content types of a music website and how they’d relate to each other. Items in the sales chart would link to pages about the relevant songs, artists, and albums listed. The album, artist, and song pages would also be linked to each other. This model can be used to validate the concept with stakeholders, and helps IAs and designers start thinking about the implications for the flow of the site.

Most of the time, however, you’ll need a more detailed content model that breaks down each content type into its components, and provides information such as the format in which you expect each attribute. In the example above, a more detailed model—showing the breakdown of information captured about an album, artist or song—would be developed to inform the design of the pages themselves and help configure the CMS. It will also eventually be useful in training the content creators.



Why is a content model important?

The content model both influences and is influenced by the work of several other disciplines. A content model helps clarify requirements and encourages collaboration between the designers, the developers creating the CMS, and the content creators.

For information architects and designers – The content model helps information architects and designers make sure that the page designs accommodate all the content types for the site and provides guidance on the bits of text and media that will be available for the page. At the same time, the content model needs to support the content, layout, and functionality portrayed in the designs. If captions are included in the layout, that must be captured in the model for an Image. If events must be sorted by date on a calendar, then Date has to be captured in a separate field and it has to be sortable data, not just text. Depending on the complexity of the site, a high-to-medium level of detail is usually sufficient for designers.

For developers – The content model helps developers understand content needs and requirements as they configure the CMS. Given the many types of CMS, there are many ways to accomplish the same effect. If the content model indicates something that isn’t easily accomplished by a given CMS, it helps the developers adjust their approach to create the desired result in a way that’s compatible with the way the CMS works. Developers will need a greater level of detail in the content model. If the content strategist doesn’t provide them, the developers will interpret content needs and make up the details themselves. And they may not be in a position to keep in mind all the design requirements, as well as the needs of the content producers who will use the system.

For content authors and producers – The content model gives content authors and producers guidelines on what content to write or create and how to enter it into the CMS. Although they aren’t generally part of the content modeling process, it’s important to keep this audience in mind because they’ll be the ones working with the CMS each day. For their sake, try to keep the model intuitive, be consistent where there are similarities, and keep redundant activities to a minimum. Depending on how you set up the content model, you can make it easy for them to get their work done, or you can make them dread having to use the system.

How do you create a content model?

There are three main things to consider:

1. The assembly model: The way content creators will put individual content items together to make webpages, campaigns, documents, or other content products.
2. The content types: The various configurations of content that are distinct enough to be unique types in the system.
3. The content attributes: The content and metadata elements that make up each type, including how they relate to each other.

THE ASSEMBLY MODEL

It’s important to understand that most CMSs have a bias. They’re often designed around a certain “unit” of content and that’s what they’re optimized to create. For blog applications, the unit is a post. For Sharepoint, a unit is a document. For most web content management tools a unit is a webpage, even though we’re more likely to be making dynamic sites that use (and reuse) content in a variety of configurations.

During one conversation at the start of a project using FatWire, I started sketching how the elements of a page could be assembled. One of the developers immediately observed, “That’s a very Interwoven way of doing things. We can’t do that in FatWire.” Interwoven is a line of CMS products that allow you to identify a repeatable group of attributes within a content item. For example, an individual FAQ item could be composed of a question, an answer, an optional image, and an optional link. When creating the page, the content creator can “replicate” that entire group of attributes to create as many FAQ items as needed to complete the page. FatWire doesn’t allow that kind of open-ended replication of groups of attributes. You must either specify the maximum number of fields you need for all of the question-answer sets (and the user can leave some of them blank), or you must make the question-answer set its own separate content type and then assemble the sets into a list on the FAQ page.

To make these decisions, you need to consider how modular your content needs to be. Some types of content, such as a press release, may be fairly self-contained. Each instance of Press Release will create one page. In other cases, you’ll have pages made up of many different reusable content modules collected to create the whole. In the FAQ example, if you want to be able to use certain questions on multiple FAQ pages, then it makes sense to have each question-answer set be its own content item. Then they could be manually gathered into lists, or they could be tagged with terms to be dynamically assembled into FAQs by topic.

Some other things to consider when thinking about the assembly model:

• How structured does the content need to be? Do you need to capture specific, uniquely identifiable data that can be used to sort or filter the content (for example, date, price, rating, author, or location)?
• How flexible does the content need to be? Can you predict what the elements of a page will be, how many and in what order? Or do you need to support an open structure with the ability to add varying numbers of various content elements to any part of the page?
• How reusable does the content need to be? Can you make the reusable parts separate so that they can be shared across different pages of the site?
• How tolerant are your content creators of laborious processes? If you ask them to take a lot of unstructured content and break it into dozens of distinct data fields, are they going to have the time to do it? If you’re lucky, maybe they’re already used to doing that kind of work, but try to avoid asking them to break up the content if it serves no functional purpose, because this can be very time-consuming.

Don’t worry too much about getting precise answers to these questions at this initial stage. This information will help guide decisions in the next two steps. So even if you can’t get consensus on the answers, just having the questions will help shape your thinking and discussions for the rest of the task.

THE CONTENT TYPES

Questions about how structured the content needs to be will help you determine what constitutes a distinct content type. If the content doesn’t need to be structured, you can have one basic content type and put whatever you need to in it. This is the premise behind a blog post. Very flexible but very unstructured.

More likely, you will want to create at least some structured content types. Then you need to abstract the kinds of content you’re creating and look for patterns. Consider the elements that make up a piece of content and see how many attributes they have in common. For example, a Recipe is clearly quite different from a Slideshow. But is a Band Profile close enough to an Actor Profile that they can be two flavors of the same underlying Profile type?

There are other reasons to make something a separate type of content:

1. Distinct, reusable elements. You might decide to create an Author content type that contains the name, bio and photo of each author. These can then be associated with any piece of content that person writes.
2. Functional requirements. A Video might be a different type of content because the presentation layer needs to be prepared to invoke the video player.
3. Organizational requirements. A Press Release may be very similar to a general Content Page, but only the Press Release is going to appear in an automatically aggregated Newsroom. It’s easier for these to be filtered out if they’re a unique type of content.

The lines can get fuzzy, especially because some elements within the type will always be optional. Sometimes it comes down to a question of “How many differences does it take before something is a completely different thing?” When you have a situation that’s too close to call it’s probably a good idea to collaborate with your tech team and business analyst or functional analyst to come up with the best approach.

THE CONTENT ATTRIBUTES

In the last step, you’ll identify each different element of each content type. This includes both the content that you can see on the page, and the metadata, which you don’t see. It also includes relationships to other content types. For example, if you create a separate Author content type, you will need to indicate that a Review can have an Author associated with it.

Some elements will be obvious—your press release has a title, maybe a subtitle, an optional image, and body text. But determining which pieces of information need to be captured in separate fields can be a challenge in some cases. Consider the following:

• Layout Do some things need to be displayed in a completely different style, or on varying places on the page? You should avoid having markup and styling stored with the content, so ideally each element that needs to be displayed differently should be in its own field. For example, you could just make the subtitle part of the body text and ask your editors to bold it, but how well is that going to work with the RSS feed or on a mobile device?
• Reuse Again, a separate field of data can be pulled out and used independently of the rest of the page, but not if it’s all part of one big body text.
• Sorting and filtering If you want to be able to sort content by date, or filter content that pertains to a particular city, then these pieces of information have to be in a field by themselves so that they can be used to sort and filter.

Once you’ve determined what the different elements are, you’ll also need to capture information such as what format each element should be in and whether or not it’s required. For example, if you want to sort a certain type of content by date, then every instance needs to have a date, and you can’t have some dates entered as mm/dd/yyyy and some entered as dd/mm/yyyy. Again, coordinate with your tech team to make sure you’re providing them the information that they need to configure the system. And coordinate with your business/functional analyst to make sure that your recommendations are aligned.

CONTENT MODEL DOCUMENTATION

Since the content model serves different audiences, at several different stages of the project, treat it as a living document. It’s never really complete—you just stop updating it when the project is over. As such, it’s better as a working document than a finished deliverable. Over the lifecycle of a content model many people will have input, and it’s even possible that different people will own it at different stages. In most of my projects I’ve handed off the content model to either a functional analyst or developer at some point.

Mainly, the project team will use the content model internally. I’ve rarely had stakeholders who wanted to review an in-progress content model. When they have, they’ve had little to say about it. What they really want is a CMS that meets their design, tech, and business needs, and also serves the people who will have to use it. The content model helps the team to make that happen.

On occasion, you may need to ask stakeholders for input or decisions. It may be more useful to pull out the salient details and present them separately. This way they can focus on the question at hand rather than trying to understand the whole of the content model.

If you must also create CMS training or content production guidelines, the content model will serve as a useful starting point. You can easily excerpt information as needed and reformat it into a more user-friendly document. Though we might strive for a well-configured CMS that’s intuitive and easy to use, the reality of the implementation is almost always more complicated than that. Providing proper guidance to the CMS users could make the difference between the project being perceived as a success or as a serious mess.

Conclusion

A content model is a powerful tool for fostering communication and aligning efforts between UX design, editorial, and technical resources on a project. By clearly defining the assembly model, the content types, and the content attributes, we can help make sure that the envisioned content strategy becomes a reality for the content creators. In my recent projects, I find that content modeling is more and more in demand. It’s a valuable skill for any content strategist, especially those that strive for mastery. 

• Illustration by Kevin Cornell

Content Strategy: 3 Questions You Need to Be Able to Answer Now

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2012

Go to article

At Content Marketing World 2011, Sally Hogshead gave a brilliant keynote where she talked about digital content and storytelling.  One of the things she said was that you can’t be comfortable and innovative at the same time.

That conference was in September 2011, and since then I’ve thought about that statement a lot.  I think Sally has an excellent point—most of the time in life it’s very difficult to be try new things and feel safe at the same time.

However, I think when we’re talking about digital content, there might be a way to do it. The key is knowing the answers to 3 very important questions—special thanks to Larry Freed, of Foresee Results for this framework.

You should always be able to answer these 3 questions:
1. Performance: How are we doing?
2. Allocating Resources: What should we be doing?
3. Knowing the Facts: Why should we do it?

Performance: How are we doing?
Measurement is a critical part of content strategy, and yet it is missed so often. We often focus on planning and creating content, but the lonely stepsisters publish and governance are neglected.

There is yet another step after governance: measurement. Measuring our content, its performance, our engagement, conversions, all that stuff the numbers people love to crunch is imperative. Those results let you know if you’re comfortable.  If you’re doing well, and those numbers are good, then you are on the right path.

Allocating Resources: What should we be doing?
If you can answer how you are doing, then you the next step is the innovation—what should you be doing?  Based on your numbers, if you’re performing well, then you have the comfort to be innovative.  Try new things—maybe make a humorous video for a stuffier brand.  Try a content marketing campaign that won’t directly generate revenue, but is important for brand awareness.

You can afford to be innovative because you’re already measuring and tracking your performance. And most importantly, those measurements are informing your decisions.

Knowing the Facts: Why should we do it?
So how do you know when it’s time to be innovative, instead of safe? The answer is that you are paying attention to what your customers are saying, in every feedback arena you have. Or maybe you aren’t comfortable, because you’re not doing well.

Even then, it’s time to take a good look at your analytics—what you are measuring—and listen to those. Are your conversions really high on one campagin, but really low on another? Look at the whys—different audiences? Different creative? Whatever the differences are, pay careful attention to those, because that’s where you’ll find some of your answers.

If you’re comfortable in your measurements, then you’ll be able to be innovative with your content.  The goal of storytelling is to engage your customers and keep them coming back for more.  In truth, it’s convincing them to be comfortable with your brand, and also feel your brand has something new to share with them.  The best of both worlds.

What do you think? Can you be comfortable and innovative at the same time? And do you have any examples of when you did so?

More Than Usability: The Four Elements of User Experience, Part I

Go to article

By Frank Guo

Published: April 24, 2012

“UX professionals use the termuser experience much more broadly, to cover everything ranging from ease of use to user engagement to visual appeal. User experience better captures all of the psychological and behavioral aspects of users’ interactions with products.”

Some people mistakenly use the terms user experience and usabilityalmost interchangeably. However, usability is increasingly being used to refer specifically to the ease with which users can complete their intended tasks, and is closely associated with usability testing. Therefore, many perceive usability to be a rather tactical aspect of product design. In contrast, UX professionals use the term user experience much more broadly, to cover everything ranging from ease of use to user engagement to visual appeal. User experience better captures all of the psychological and behavioral aspects of users’ interactions with products.

To help define the objectives and scope of user experience efforts, as well as enable their meaningful measurement, I would like to propose a conceptual framework that describes four distinct elements of user experience, as shown in Figure 1, and how they interact with one another in driving better product designs.

Figure 1—The four elements of user experience

In attempting to achieve conceptual simplicity, I’ve reduced the many aspects of user experience to the four elements that I believe are the most fundamental. It’s possible to treat additional aspects of user experience as subcategories of these elements—for example, credibility, accessibility, and findability, from Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb.

Usability—Is It Easy to Complete Tasks?

“Usability is about how easily users can complete their intended tasks using a product. There are many types of usability issues that hinder users’ ability to complete the tasks that they intend to perform.”

While people sometimes use the term usability to refer to all elements relating to user experience, it should more appropriately be viewed as just a subset of user experience.

Usability is about how easily users can complete their intended tasks using a product. There are many types of usability issues that hinder users’ ability to complete the tasks that they intend to perform. Let’s look at some examples.

A person takes out his iPhone because he wants to dial a phone number to call a person who’s not in his contacts, so he has to input the number. He taps Phone at the bottom of the screen. Easy. What’s next? Well, there is no keypad on the screen. Nor is there a field into which he can enter the number. In interaction design terms, there is a lack of any call to action, affordance, or contextual cue. So, he spends some time inspecting the screen, and after about 30 seconds, he discovers theKeypad button at the bottom, shown in Figure 2. He’s solved the problem, but discovering how to enter a phone number, one of the primary functions of a phone, should not take that along! This is a usability problem.

Figure 2—iPhone user interface

Here’s another example. Do you recall your first experience using your company’s intranet to do things like getting new office supplies, submitting an expense report, managing your career development, or taking a look at your paycheck? Were you able to use the intranet effectively without asking the help desk or your colleagues for help? I doubt it. Many intranet sites have really, really bad usability—so bad that you could probably never figure out how to do some tasks on your own.

These just a couple of examples that demonstrate the frustrations of performing tasks using software that has usability issues—as most applications do.

Usability is not about user intention, user engagement, or visual appeal—the other elements in my user experience framework. But usability does encompass all of the UX elements relating to ease of use. Things like learnability; content discoverability, findability, and readability; and the ease with which users can recognize information and affordances all fall into this category.

Usability, in itself, is a vast topic, and an entire generation of human/computer-interaction professionals have devoted their careers to advancing the field and improving digital-product user experiences. However, user experience goes far beyond users’ being able to complete their tasks, learn about new features, and find their way around a Web site. In fact, some other aspects of user experience are probably more important when it comes to driving business success.

Value—Does a Product Provide Value to Users?

“While usability is an important aspect of product design, it is certainly not the most critical aspect of user experience when it comes to driving business success. There are many products that have good usability, but do not enjoy success in the marketplace.”

While usability is an important aspect of product design, it is certainly not the most critical aspect of user experience when it comes to driving business success. There are many products that have good usability, but do not enjoy success in the marketplace. For example, traditional mobile phones are giving way to smartphones, even though many phones are very easy to use. Why? Because mobile phones do not provide the value to users that smartphones do. Consumers want the ability to surf the Web, use instant messaging, play games, and use GPS services on their mobile devices. Here, we are talking about the value aspect of user experience.

What drives a product’s value to users? Alignment between product features and user needs. If a product’s features are designed in such way that they support user needs, users will consider the product valuable.User needs encompass more than just their explicit needs—things that users know they want. They also include users’ implicit needs—things that users don't express as needs. Apple products like iPhone and iPad are excellent examples of satisfying implicit needs. In meeting users’ unexpressed needs, they are not only easy-to-use products, but also devices that add much value to users’ daily lives.

Perceived value is closely related to the other elements of user experience such as usability and desirability, but the key drivers of value are a product’s functionality and features. Value forms the cornerstone of a good user experience. A product that does not add value by fulfilling user needs does not provide a meaningful user experience—regardless of how well it might be designed.

Adoptability—Will People Start Using the Product?

“Adoptability relates to users’buying, downloading, installing, and starting to use a product.”

The Yahoo! Web browser toolbar, shown in Figure 3, might be both easy to use and valuable to a typical Internet user, but if users don’t install it, all of the product’s good features become irrelevant. This is the adoptability element of user experience.

Figure 3—Yahoo! browser toolbar

Let’s look at some other examples of adoptability issues. When companies launch their iPhone apps, they typically embed links to the apps on their desktop Web sites. However, this is a very problematic design decision: a user is visiting such a Web site on a computer, so how can she click the link to the application and download it to her iPhone? The Vanguard financial-advisor site, shown in Figure 4, exhibits this problem.

Figure 4—Vanguard.com

The right way to introduce Vanguard’s iPhone app would be to place a link to it on their mobile site, which shows up by default on the iPhone. However, when I took a look, I found that their mobile site doesn’t provide such a link. So, here’s a failure of adoptability: users simply don’t have a straightforward way of downloading the Vanguard iPhone app. So they need to go to the Apple iTunes store, search for the keyword Vanguard, select the right Vanguard iPhone app, and install it—not the most spontaneous way for users to get on board.

Based on the above examples, it’s clear that adoptability has a lot to do with the design of workflows. In addition, adoptability depends on things like credibility and brand perception. Content that does not look authentic or that is associated with a weak brand will have problems drawing users.

Adoptability is very closely related to usability. To improve adoptability, UX professionals employ robust usability techniques to ensure that they design a product’s workflows to support users’ natural ways of discovering its features. However, these two elements are also fundamentally different. Adoptability relates to users’ buying, downloading, installing, andstarting to use a product. In other words, adoptability is about that stage when a user has not yet used a product, while usability becomes most relevant once a user has begun using a product. By making this distinction, I hope to call out an often neglected aspect of UX strategy: providing easy access to a product.

Adoptability is also clearly different from value. Even if a product brings great value to users, they still might not choose to use it because of difficulties relating to access and installation, as I’ve illustrated in my earlier examples. In other words, adoptability relates to obtaining accessto a product, while value relates to a product’s features and content. To improve adoptability, a product team must consider the natural context in which a user first gets exposed to their product and how it impacts the design of the installation flow.

At first glance, adoptability seems to relate to product marketing—both are about promoting product usage. However, unlike traditional marketing, which focuses on marketing campaigns, Web promos, marketing email messages, and so on, adoptability is a user experience element that you should consider as an integral component of a product’s design.

Desirability—Is the Experience Fun and Engaging?

“Desirability relates to emotional appeal.”

So far, we have examined cognitive, or rational, aspects of user experience. But desirability relates to emotional appeal. Oftentimes, products that are both easy to use and useful prove to be failures in the marketplace because of their lack of desirability. Examples include traditional MP3 players versus iPod and consumer electronics products made by all other manufacturers versus Sony products.

In fact, people often enjoy using products that have poor usability. For example, many video games have really poor usability: their instructions are hard to understand, their navigation is very confusing, their settings menus are hard to discover, and the readability of their content is poor. But that hasn’t stopped me and others from playing them, because they are just so engaging.

A large part of desirability is attributable to innovative visual design. Figures 5 and 6 show two examples of how strong visual appeal drives desirability.

Figure 5—Visual appeal drives Bing’s desirability

Figure 6—The visual appeal of iPad drives its desirability

It is worth noting that we should define desirability within the context of users’ tasks. Thus, desirability is not just about nice-looking graphics and sleek designs. A desirable product must engage users in relation to their intended uses of the product. Therefore, many designs that don’t appear desirable to people who aren’t a product’s target users nevertheless score high on desirability with its target users. For instance, Excel is desirable to me when I need to perform data analysis, an activity that I enjoy a lot. I have a great time using the software because its simplistic user interface lets me perform my tasks well, despite the fact that it doesn’t look pretty, as shown in Figure 7. If Microsoft added pretty graphics to Excel, I might find the experience less desirable if the graphics distracted me from what I intended to do.

Figure 7—Desirability is not tantamount to great visual presentation, as Excel’s UI demonstrates

To further understand how desirability is dependent on a user’s context, let’s take a look at the Nordstrom.com and eBay.com home pages. From the perspective of visual appeal, Nordstrom.com, which is shown in Figure 8, is the clear winner because of its more polished look and feel. But from a user experience perspective, hard-core eBay users—auction shoppers—would find eBay.com's visual presentation, shown in Figure 9, much more desirable. The reason: eBay shoppers are typically in search of bargains, and pictures of used items for sale meet that need. The design of Nordstrom.com’s home page is suggestive of its high-end inventory—something eBay shoppers wouldn’t want. To sustain its desirability, eBay.com should not apply an overly polished visual treatment to the site for its core business: online auctions.

Figure 8—Nordstrom.com

Figure 9—eBay.com

Examples That Illustrate the Differences Between the Elements of UX

“Now that I have introduced the four elements of user experience, you may have noticed that, in some ways, they look rather similar to one another.”

Now that I have introduced the four elements of user experience, you may have noticed that, in some ways, they look rather similar to one another. Let’s look at a few examples of problems that can help us to distinguish these elements from one another:

• a problem relating to adoptability—A user hears from her friends that an iPhone app is very useful and would like to try it, but she doesn't know how to install it on her iPhone.
• a problem relating to usability—A user is actively using a product, but has problems completing her intended tasks.
• a problem relating to desirability—A user finds her experience with a product rather enjoyable despite the fact that she has difficulties performing her tasks with it. Thus, the product has good desirability, but needs usability improvements.
• a problem relating to user value—A user can perform all of his tasks with ease, but doesn’t find a product’s features valuable in relationship to his needs.

Conclusion

“In breaking down user experience into its four constituent elements—Value, Usability, Adoptability, and Desirability, I’ve established a conceptual framework that can help UX professionals to identify and work on the key elements of product design.”

In breaking down user experience into its four constituent elements—Value, Usability, Adoptability, and Desirability, I’ve established a conceptual framework that can help UX professionals to identify and work on the key elements of product design. There are certainly many other equally valid ways of conceptualizing user experience. The four elements I’ve identified to form this framework are not completely orthogonal to one another; they do overlap somewhat. For example, desirability plays an important role in driving adoptability, just as visual appeal motivates prospective users to try out a product. Usability plays an important role in enabling desirability, because users who encounter problems when attempting to perform their tasks using a product would almost certainly find that product to be less desirable as a result.

It is important that UX professionals have a clear understanding of the constituent parts of user experience. By focusing on these four very important and distinctive elements of users’ interactions with digital products, we can develop design solutions that address all facets of user experience in a holistic manner. Not only is this important in helping us to deliver delightful user experiences, it is also important in driving business success through UX strategy.

A key advantage of this conceptual model over other models of user experience is that it offers a way to prioritize UX efforts based on theirbusiness impact. For example, in the past, UX professionals placed great emphasis on usability while overlooking adoptability, an element this is often more important than usability when it comes to driving business results. In general, usability has less business impact relative to the other three elements of user experience, which focus on the access and motivation aspects of product usage, while usability is more about repeated usage.

Unlike my model, other models of user experience make little differentiation between UX elements in relation to business impact. For example, in the honeycomb model Peter Morville has proposed, the UX elements—including findability, credibility, value, usability, and accessibility—all appear to have equal importance. While they might actually have equal importance in terms of user experience, they affect business results differently. This is the key message that my model delivers. Leveraging this model to prioritize our UX efforts is a large topic in itself. I’ll discuss the business implications of this framework in future columns.

7 Things to Know about Your Customers

Go to article

APRIL 26, 2012 · BY DALE TRAXLER

 

Whether you are planning to launch a new online store, new product lines, or an entirely new business, you need to know who your target consumers are and how to reach them.

These seven questions will help with that understanding.

1. Why do customers buy from you and not a competitor?
2. How often do they shop for the type of products or services you sell?
3. Do they prefer to buy online or in a physical store?
4. How price tolerant are they?
5. Are they influenced by fashion, price, and free shipping?
6. Do they shop using search engines, comparison-shopping sites, or because of social media referrals?
7. Are your products “must have” or simply “nice to have"?

The answers to those questions and many more should help you determine your marketing and sales strategies.

Market Segmentation and Targeting

Before you seek to understand your customers, however, start with knowing the overall size of the market for the products you are selling. It will help you identify your real target customer if you look at the total market.

The next step is segment the market into similar buying groups. Look at submarkets by age, income, gender, location, or any number of other approaches. For example, if you are selling cosmetics, the teen segment, 20-something segment, and over-50 segment are different in their desires and their shopping habits. It may be difficult to acquire customers in any of those market segments if you try to attract all customers with one online store or product line.

The goal with market segmentation is to group potential buyers into a segment that is likely to have similar buying tastes and habits. Even that can be challenging. But there is a lot of free information on the Internet. You can also evaluate competitive sites already selling into those markets by analyzing their demographics, traffic, and the types of search marketing strategies that they employ. I'll discuss that later in this article.

Once you have identified discrete market segments, select one or more target markets to pursue. This process includes understanding what products those consumers are seeking, how they will shop, how much they are willing to pay, and so forth.

Your target market will determine your products, site design and advertising strategies. I’ve always been a fan of niche stores that are very tightly aligned with a specific target market, but you can also set up different shops within a larger store to accomplish the same thing.

How To Gather Customer Information

A survey is a good way to gather information about your customers and prospects. There are many good survey tools, including Survey Monkey, Constant Contact, or Zoomerang. In my previous ecommerce business, we conducted surveys that were focused on the jewelry-making industry. We asked customers and prospects about their purchasing plans for the year, what they perceived the trends to be, what specific products they expected to be buying, where they were likely to buy them, and why. We also asked their age, income, experience, and level of involvement and experience in the jewelry-making industry. We typically received only general information, but we also received very detailed demographic information. As a result we were very informed about our customers.

Survey Monkey is an effective and affordable tool to structure surveys and analyze the responses.

You can solicit input and promote your survey to your existing customers in a newsletter or a link in your transactional emails. You can also promote your survey in Facebook on your Fan page or through Facebook ads. Tweet about it. Offer an incentive such as a discount or some type of drawing for a gift certificate.

Other valuable sources of customer information include tools like Quantcast and Google’s Double Click Ad Planner. Both of these tools will show you demographic information, audience interests, and other websites that are similar or have some level of affinity for the audience. They also provide site traffic information, which is useful in sizing your market opportunities. Both tools have free versions.

Other tools like Compete and SpyFu will help provide competitive marketing strategies. This can be useful as you research both market size and keywords that are being used to search for the types of products you are selling. The free versions provide limited information. I suggest using them to gather your research. You may want to invest in a subscription, however, as you plan your marketing strategy.

What Next?

Once you’ve done your research, it's time to develop strategies to reach your prospects and offer the products they want, at the right price. The first question to ask is if you should target multiple segments with the same online store. That will lead to deciding how to group products, set up your navigation and your theme.

Specific strategies for sales and marketing also involve the other elements of a business model: channels, products and services, pricing and cost models, and organizational structure. I'll explain more about strategy development in the coming weeks.

Summary

Knowing your customers and prospects should be the starting place for any type of business. Do your research and you may identify new opportunities, new competitors, and new ways of reaching your potential buyers.