By Jeanne Hurlbert, PhD

There’s a hot new tool that offers HUGE opportunity to ramp up your marketing results, by linking social media with surveys.

Today, we’re going to fill you in on the new tool and show you EXACTLY how you can capitalize on it.

Pay close attention because this kind of geographic targeting promises to be the next big thing.

Here’s the scoop:  a small (1%) group of Twitter users now has access to a new service, Local Trends.  It’s a new twist on local search that lets you measure trending topics in a geographic area.

With this tool, you can do 2 very important things.  First, you can target your own area (appears you can change it when you travel).  So if you market locally, this gives you a huge opportunity, because you can

• stay on top of hot topics in the local market and keep your brand in the conversation,
• follow up on these topics in your surveys, to get more systematic information, and
• use these topics in your marketing messages and offers.

The second function of Local Trends is where it really gets cool for those of us who market nationally or nternationally.  Local Trends lets you click on a list of cities and countries to find out what the trending topics are there.  Right now, the list is small, but you it will grow.

Once this list does grow, this gives you a HUGE opportunity to really increase your conversions.

We’ve told you for a while that segmenting your list and personalizing your offers could skyrocket your conversions but this can put it on steroids.

Here’s an example:  Let’s say you’re getting a lot of prospects and customers in Vancouver, BC.  With Local Trends, you could find out about issues, hot spots, trends, controversies—all sorts of things going on in Vancouver so that, when you send messages, offers, or invitations to your customers there, you can connect with them in a much more personal way.

How do you do that—how do you KNOW if a lot of prospects and customers come from Vancouver?  Use surveys.

Use super-short surveys of your prospects and put a customer profile survey in place, as we’ve been teaching you, and include location information in the data you collect.

As your database grows, look for cities, regions, areas where you have “clusters” of customers.

Where those segments are big enough, create a list segment.

Use Local Trends to periodically see what’s going on in that area, so you can use those trends in your messages to that segment.

It’s just as simple as that.  Location-based targeting, like Local Trends and Foursquare, is just the beginning, so stay tuned for updates and get ready to ride the next big wave.

Suppose you could show your customers data that showed that more than 90% of your customers were satisfied, on 7 different measures–real, scientific measures of satisfaction–something like this.

Pretty cool, huh?  Well, you can get those data on an ongoing basis, easily and inexpensively.

And I can pretty much guarantee they’ll have a HUGE impact on your customers and prospects.  In fact, I’d be willing to bet it could double, triple, or even quadruple your profits.

I saw this in action this week, at my daughter’s school.  At their annual Open House, where prospective parents come to tour the school to deside whether they want their children to attend the school.

And featured at the event were survey results that showed that more than 90% of current parents are satisfied, on 7 different measures.

As you can imagine, that was VERY persuasive evidence for these parents.  These data spoke volumes, far more effectively than anything we could say.  One parent was so impressed he wanted to try to move his child into the school right away.

Well, guess what–if you’re running a business, you’re having “Open House” every day, as you compete for customers.

Don’t you want to have evidence like this to CONVERT those prospects–evidence many of your competeitors lack?

Imagine if you could have  a chart like this sitting on your home page or sales page.

Imagine if beside that, you could list literally hundreds of testimonials from satisfied customers, telling these prospects how your products and services transformed their businesses or changed their lives.

Imagine if you could also put case studies on that page, “stories that stick” because they show exactly how your products or services worked.

You can have all that on your home page and sales page, if you put a a satisfaction survey in place for your products and services.

Let us show you how you could have a survey like this in place, in just a few hours.

Customers often ask us,

Under what circumstances do you prefer multiple choice surveys or fill in the blank surveys? Are multiple choice surveys more (mis)leading?

In general, I’m a big fan of closed-ended questions, which are generally multiple choice.

Are they misleading?  That’s a REALLY important question.

They are, if you don’t know what you’re doing and you write bad questions.  And “loading” questions or writing “leading” questions can actually cost you money.

Why?

• Because the bottom line is that you need to know what people think.
• The more accurately you find that out, the more money you’re going to make:
• Knowing exactly what people want, what they’ll pay, when they’re satisfied (and when they’re not) can double, triple, or even quadruple your profits.

So you’ve GOT to write good questions.

The thing about “leading” questions is that it’s often not obvious when a question is “leading” or “loaded.”  Sometimes, they’re really tough to spot, particularly when you’re writing questions about your own products and services.

Here are some tips to avoid that problem:

1.    Use neutral language,  avoiding any terms might get an emotional response.  After you’ve drafted your survey, make a pass through it JUST to look for strong language that might “lead” someone.

2.    Balance your response options.  If you’re asking people whether they agree or disagree with a statement, make it “Agree strongly, Agree, Disagree, Disagree Strongly,” not “Agree strongly, Agree, Disagree.”  You want both “sides” to have the same number of responses.

3.    Review, review, review.  Go through the survey yourself, then put the survey away for a couple of days, then come back and look at it again.  Then, ask a couple of other folks to look it over for you and get their input.

4.    Once you’ve reviewed it, pretest it.  Get a small “subsample” of your customers (20 or so is usually enough), have them take the survey, then give them a few questions that ask THEM whether they thought anything was leading, whether they saw any problems with the survey, and so forth.

Have more questions?  Just ask!

Traffic is pretty much the “Holy Grail” of online marketing.  But traffic is useless if you can’t CONVERT it into SALES.

To do that, you not only need to know “who they are,” you need to know why they came.  Because if you give them what they came for, you increase dramatically the chances that they’ll buy.

Enter the “intent index,” which measures EXACTLY why people go online and gives us an awesome opportunity.

Here are some of the things the “intent index” tells us and what they mean for us, as online marketers:

• People are more than twice as likely to go online to be entertained (82%) and to learn (88%) than to do business (39%) or to shop (31%).   Which means that if we entertain them, we increases the chances they’ll buy.  So try putting a quiz on your site–they’re fun and highly entertaining AND they educate people, which is why they can up conversions by as much as 80%!
• At least 72% go online to find a community.  So give them one!  Give folks a chance to connect on your blog or in forums.  Better yet, create a special community for them by starting a membership site!  We have a survey template for creating a membership site to order, in our new product.
• Seniors are a HUGE group that is increasingly going online.   Like younger visitors, they come online to have fun (82%) and to socialize (80%).    So you can expand your market by targeting quizzes SPECIFICALLY at senior prospects.

Increasingly, then, intent is a “new demographic.”

Do these statistics apply to YOUR customers and prospects? Do you know WHY people come to your site?

Find out!  Do surveys to find out why people are coming so you’ll know how to keep them coming back!

New figures confirm what smart online marketers already knew:  Blogging has become a huge marketing tool, one no business person can afford to ignore.  And blog surveys give you a way to “stand out in the pack” by engaging your audience and building that all-important bond with your customers and prospects

The numbers tell us 2 important stories:  about the explosion of bloggers and, even more important for marketers, the enormous growth in blog readers.

Although estimates vary, the estimates are that nearly 28 million Internet users have blogs that they update at least monthly; that’s about 14% of the population of Internet users.  Projections tell us that by 2013–just 4 years from now–the number could rise to 37.6 million bloggers.

Looking at the other side of the picture, some estimates put the number of Internet users who read blogs at least once a month at 96.6 million.  That’s a LOT of traffic.  By 2013, that number could reach 128 million people.  That would could mean that 58% of  Internet users read blogs.

As the author of a new report on blogging states,“Blogging activity presents new opportunities for marketers to monitor and influence conversations relevant to their businesses,” says Mr. Verna. “Opportunities no marketer should ignore.”

And if you’re running one or more blogs–as you should be–blog surveys give you a wonderful way to generate content, draw traffic, and produce buzz on your blog.  Find out how.