7 Steps for Turning Twitter Into an Effective Market Research Tool

Twitter:  Waste of Time or a Business Tool?
I used to think that Twitter represented no significant value for business needs.  Just to be familiar with it, I opened an account a while ago, and tweeted here and there.

That all changed as I began working on a startup, developing a technology to prevent cyberbullying.  In that process, I discovered very effective ways of using Twitter as a practical tool for market research.

Challenge
Many business executives, product managers, marketing professionals and sales reps find it hard keeping up with  industry news, competitive info and market trends.  Even though there are plenty of tools, keeping up with the news still requires hours of finding, sorting and reading articles.  People are usually busy with tens of different tasks, leaving market research as something that often gets pushed down in priority.

Enter Twitter
There are armies of people who are tirelessly tweeting 24 hours a day.  Tweets are brief.  It takes less than a minute for us to determine if they are useful or not.  We can use Twitter as tool to quickly get up to speed with the relevant news, spending just 5-10 min a day.  Here is how I do it:

1.  Create a Twitter account that contains the words of the main business problem you are trying to solve.  In my case, it has "Cyberbullying" in it.  This will be useful later, when you would want to use Twitter for marketing needs.

2.  Find people tweeting on the subject of your interest.  You can use the search bar for that.  Play with multiple keywords to get the content you want.  Then check profiles of people you found and make sure they fit your needs.

3.  Create your Twitter list.  Follow as many relevant users as possible.

4.  Get a mobile app.  It may be easier to get quick updates on an iPhone or Android.  I am using TweetCaster on Android.  It gives me updates in a very easy format.  It takes me only 5-10 min to go through the daily news.  I often discover news before they show up in RSS feeds or other major news sources and tools.  The most relevant ones get lots of retweets from many people.  It is sort of "crowd voting."

5.  Trim your list.  As you are finding people who are tweeting irrelevant things for whatever reasons, unfollow them, until you have a "golden list" of sources that bring you the best quality news.

6.  Check few times a day for 3-5 minutes each time and you will be abreast of the latest industry news.

7.  Augment this with your more in-depth research from various sources when you have time.

That's it!  
In military terms, Twitter became my Special Forces team for getting the dirty job done quickly and effectively.  Other tools are like my regular military units for thorough, longer-term type projects.

Is "Good Enough" marketing good enough?

The "good enough" concept is valid and important in many areas, including product management.  There is never a perfect product, so a good product manager knows when the product is "good enough" and ready.  This is based on many factors, such as customer feedback, quality, R&D reality, roadmaps, competitive data, etc.  This subject is taught  in Pragmatic Marketing and is widely used in most PM organizations today.

But does this principle work in other marketing areas?  Not in my experience.  For example, the difference between "good enough" and great for PPC and SEO is drastic.  Lots of PPC campaigns never work and exec teams stop believing in these as valid lead gen tools because marketing never puts the right level of effort on finding out what are the exact keywords their prospects use at different buying stages, from the research to purchase.  This is not an easy process.  And good enough usually = failure.  This is where you use "Hack Marketing" to find the right keywords.  The results of these extra steps are the difference between success and failure of PPC and SEO.

The same goes with the rest of messaging.  It really pays to conduct research and understand what are the exact words customers and prospects use.  There is no "good enough" here.  For example, we changed one word describing how the product category is referred based on customer feedback.  Lead gen campaign results shot up 67% in one week.

Finally, "good enough" marketing materials in my experience are useless.  I rather have a great web site with all the right messaging and use it as the major marketing tool instead of  tens of mediocre white papers just because it is "the right thing to do" and "everybody does it."

So is "good enough" marketing good enough?

6 Ways To Avoid Fluff in Your Marketing Materials

FLUFF is one of my pet peeves. Why use complicated words that add up into phrases that mean nothing?  Words like leverage, easy, flexible, scaleable, secure, ROI, TCO.   They demonstrate lack of subject knowledge and discourage the target audience from reading these documents / web sites / blogs.

Here is an example I just found on a web site of a well known vendor.  "...(product) is the foundation for the CIO's and IT leadership team's performance system. It features a cascaded optimization system, the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets, and a secure, comprehensive, operational environment for a hybrid world."

What?  A "hybrid world?"  Wasted words.  I counted 19 words that are just fluff and mean nothing.  Wasted space.  Wasted time and budgets.  There are better and more practical ways of writing marketing materials that people understand and read.  My suggestions are below:

1.  Know your audience.  Understand who exactly is your audience.  Which industry?  What is the main function of your target reader?  What are their pressures and challenges?  What are their titles and reporting structures?  Their internal customers.  Demographics.  Internal politics, etc.

2.  Understand the lingo your audience uses.  Talk to your customers directly.  Ask how are they using your product.  Don't assume you know the words they use.  For example, you would fail if you used "IT words" with process engineers in Electric Power companies.  When marketing cyber security to Power and Energy, we had to change about 80% of our marketing materials.  But the results were amazing - almost every IT department we contacted, wanted to talk to us.  Even at the meetings, we were treated like peers rather than vendors.

3.  Simplify.  Read what you wrote out loud.  Pretend you are presenting in person to your target audience.  Keep on rewriting until the text flows easily and you would have no problem verbally presenting it.

4.  Be brief.  Less is more.  Remember, the goal of most marketing materials is not to close the deal, but rather get the prospect interested enough to contact sales or try the product.  Longer texts tend to discourage busy viewers from reading.

5.  Avoid fluff.  Avoid generic words, like flexible or leverage.  Try quantifying or using proof points.  For example, "the industry's deepest and broadest insight into IT-controlled assets" is fluff.  However, something like, "a system covering 95% of the industry's IT-controlled assets" is much more credible and easier to understand.

6.  Test.  Most of us, marketers, don't work in the functional area of our target buyers.  It may be a good idea to test the text with your target audience.  This can be a very revealing exercise.  In my experience, this step has revealed some gems that turned into new marketing tools and lead generation approaches that we never knew existed.  For example, from our customer conversations we discovered an IT community called Spiceworks, that turned out to be one of the best lead  generation sources for SMB markets.