A Guide to Discover the Right Terminology to Reach Your Audiences
Sometimes the hardest thing for businesses to do is to discover the right keywords or terminology their target audience uses for marketing purposes. If you try to target audiences with industry buzzwords you will most likely miss the audiences completely. You have to reach people on their level. So how do you get started researching? I am going to show you some free ways to gather data.
Online Reviews
Online reviews are full of valuable data for marketers. Many people leave detailed and informative reviews about products and services. As a marketer you can dig into the reviews of products or similar services and discover not just the terminology they use, but also the things that matter the most to the people writing reviews. Additionally, with user profiles you can gather some basic demographics of the people using the products or services you are researching.
The beauty of this information is it not only helps you determine which words and phrases to use, but it also gives you a lot of ideas to use in content marketing strategies. For example:
- What do people want?
- What upset them?
- What were they looking for?
- What was their overall experience?
- Do they plan on using a different product or service?
Many reviewers compare products or services in their reviews, so I recommend you go to the compared product or service page and read what the reviewers are saying there. Get as many content marketing ideas and terminology data that you can and then use it.
Social Media Discussions
People sure do like to talk and ask questions on social. Well, that information is very available for you to watch and gather data from. If your competitors don’t have a strong social presence, find someone that offers the same product or service that does. Watch them and how they interact with their audience. What words do they, and the audience, use? Also watch for complaints that come from customers. What upsets them? What could you avoid? What mistakes do you see being made that you could write about or perhaps create tutorial about?
Social media offers a lot free data for you. You take this data and compare it to the other data you collected. The odds of you choosing topics and terminology your audiences use is much better.
Topsy
Topsy.com allows you to see links, Tweets, photos, views, experts and things trending based on a keywords or a specific URL. The beauty of this tool is that you can search a topic/keyword and see links to where this particular thing is being discussed. You can gather a lot of information from what people have written or said.
You can also enter a specific URL and, again, view conversations about it. What is being said and who is saying it? Read the comments and Tweets. Look at what people are saying and gather as much data and terminology that you can.
Fresh Web Explorer
The Fresh Web Explorer by SEOMoz allows you to search by terms or by name the name of a person or business and see what has been said about them very recently. I recommend you explore the links that are provided by the tool and see what the page itself is about. Then read the comments made on the page.
These comments are full of great info for you to use.
Use Google’s Tools Next
Take the terminology you have gathered and enter it into Google Trends and Google AdWords Tools. Look and see how many searches have been done in regards to that term and related terms. Those related terms are great data for you as well. I use these tools as indicators but don’t depend on them completely. I think the best data is found in the options I explained above, but I do think reviewing these tools helps with the diagnostic process. I would then move on to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics offers a massive amount of data. If you have a lot of data accumulated from your “terminology research” and you start looking through your analytics you will be able to see what you have done correctly and which terms or topics that you have missed out on. Use this data to create content marketing strategies that will make sense to your target audiences.
Focus on the terms you have seen and use the ideas you have collected for future articles, blogs, videos, infographics, images, case studies or white papers that will meet the needs of your audience.
Melissa Fach has been in the SEO industry since 2007. She created her own agency, was the Managing Editor at SEJ, worked as an editor for Moz with their community team, she worked at Pubcon as the Community Manager for 5 years, and is an editor for SEMrush US Blog.
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