1.
BlueGlass X 2012
How to Build a Large, Passionate
Audience From Scratch with No
Connections

2.
Who Am I?
• 12 years of online marketing and product merchandizing
experience in e-commerce and affiliate marketing
• Worked in all facets of online marketing with a focus on
SEO, Social, and Content
• Currently with Reinvent an in-house incubator for one of the
largest domainers in the world
• Run my own P/T consulting business

3.
My Audiences
• BuildDirect.com
– long buying cycle, complex
products, high $ value but a
broad audience.
• BlackFriday.com
- very seasonally focused site with a short buying cycle, very
focused on a single day
- Long build up and must both capture the audience
beforehand retain them, but also must lure them away from
the competition just before buying

4.
Getting Started
• Who are they?
• What’s important to them?
• Where do you talk to them / find them?
• How do you get their attention?
• How do you get them to act to join you?
• How do you get them to share and expand the audience for
you?

5.
Who Are They?
• Make some assumptions
• You have to start somewhere
• Don’t let the assumptions stand too long w/o
more info
• Prepare the organization to re-evaluate or
change audiences
• Make a list of sites like yours

6.
Who Are They?
• Google Ad Planner https://www.google.com/adplanner/

7.
Who Are They?

8.
Who Are They?
• Quantcast (www.quantcast.com)

9.
Who Are They?
• SEM Rush http://www.semrush.com

10.
Ask Them!
• Talk to your customers
– Surveys
– Ask similar people
• Surveys
– 4Q http://www.4qsurvey.com/
– Survey Monkey http://www.surveymonkey.com/

11.
Create Personas
• What’s a Persona?
• How do I build them?
• Allows you to put yourself in their shoes
• Segment and prioritize large diverse audiences
Resources:
• http://usability.gov/methods/analyze_current/personas.html
• http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/personas.html
• http://boxesandarrows.com/making-personas-more-powerful-details-to-
drive-strategic-and-tactical-design/
• http://uxmag.com/articles/personas-the-foundation-of-a-great-user-
experience
• http://www.amazon.com/The-User-Always-Right-Practical/dp/0321434536/

12.
Create Personas
Debbie Do-it-Yourselfer
• Debbie is a 35 year old married woman with 2 school age
kids. Debbie’s home is important to her. She likes to
entertain and takes pride in having a stylish home that
others admire. Debbie enjoys reading home decorating and
gardening magazines. Debbie and her husband Dan are of
middle income but Debbie aspires to the types of homes
she sees on TV and in the magazines.
• Dan Do-it-yourselfer, Sam Small-contractor, Dan Developer

13.
What’s Important to Them?
• What works for your competition? Don’t be afraid to be a fast
follower for a while.
• Ask around
• Phone Calls
• Picked (via email) a group of customers then we simply
phoned them and asked
– What do you like about the site?
– What resources do you use to do research?
– What other sites do you like?
– What matters to you when you make a decision?
– Do you use Facebook, Twitter, browse on your phone, etc.
– Etc.

14.
Where Do You Talk to Them?
• Suit the medium to the audience
• Don’t just think about online
• Participate where they do
• Developers might be Reddit, Hacker News
• Marketers might be Twitter, marketing blogs
• Retail buyers might be Facebook, your own
blog, “shopping” blogs, etc.

15.
What We Did @ BuildDirect.com
• Started with an assumption of who they were
• We were WRONG
• Talked to customers, surveyed them, built personas
• What did they want? Aspirations. Dream home.
• Give them what they wanted – room scenes, blog posts on
interior design, engaged designers, participated in forums
• Went other places they would be: TV, Home improvement
shows.

16.
What We Did @ BuildDirect.com
• Tried FB and completely failed, it wasn’t what they wanted
• Gave away free stuff (samples) with tons of our branding
• Long slow build
• Follow up, customer service, and word of mouth was one of
the best audience builders.
• The audience was built by other audience members, but not
through social
• One way was to let them show off their homes, let them do
the promotion

17.
What We Did @ BuildDirect.com
• Then went after smaller audience segments (builders)
• Industry organizations (even local, Twitter)
• Use different speakers for different segments (CEO for getting
professionals to follow on Twitter, etc.)

18.
What We Did @ BlackFriday.com
• With Black Friday it was very different
• The basic “audience” was everyone who shops on Black
Friday.
• This year that was 247,000,000 Americans. 80% of the
country.
• First step, again, figure out who they are
• Women, 25-45, middle income and middle
education, overwhelmingly with kids 0-17.
• Previous owners made no attempt to develop the audience
through any means besides the site and reactive PR
• No content (none) and no customer service

19.
What We Did @ BlackFriday.com

20.
What We Did @ BlackFriday.com
• Started the same way as BuildDirect.
Same audience must equal same
tactics, right?
• Wrong!!!
• Back to the drawing board
• Not just who they are but what they want
• Talked extensively to
– former owners
– several very experienced retail people
who had BF experience,
– internal and external people who
loved BF

21.
What We Did @ BlackFriday.com
• Now I had a better idea of what users
wanted from us
• Did not want to hear from us out of
season
• They wanted quick hits, things that
made life easy
• Go back to who they are, what they
like, and where they are
• Timely updates (the fastest), easy to
read, not complicated, not too far of
what they expected (yet).

22.
What We Did @ BlackFriday.com
• Armed with the knowledge that they were moms, etc, we put
together a totally different campaign
• Given the audience, Facebook was the best place to test
• Looked at FB stats to confirm – 75% female , 55% age 25-44
• Went to image based posts that women, esp. moms could
identify with
• The audience on FB began to grow rapidly
• Former best post was 20K views, 783 Likes, 136
Comments, 292 Shares

23.
Facebook
• Ask for the Like, Share, Comment, etc.
• Give them a reason to visit the site
• 50% of our growth came from mobile on Facebook
• Mobile ads to Like pages
• Images, Images, Images!
• Make sure images are optimized for mobile. (403px × 271px)

24.
Facebook
• Give-aways
• Simple to run
• I like Wildfire http://www.wildfireapp.com/and
Struttahttp://www.strutta.com/
• Almost no cost on our part added 80K new email subscribers
• People love free stuff

25.
Email
• Email is our fastest, most reliable, cheapest way to reach our
audience
• Make email signup obvious
• We place it on every page and have it follow the user as they
scroll
• Strong call to action and create urgency
• Match email to the rest of your audience building
• Leverage email to build audience in other places

26.
Mobile
• 38% of traffic was mobile (18% last year)
• Created iPhone and iPad apps
• Used other media to push apps
• #1 Free Lifestyle app in 24 hrs
• We can push content to them and keep us top of mind
• Let’s us provide the content our audience wants

27.
Future Growth
• We continue to learn by listening
• As the network grows they will tell you
how to grow it more
• Where?
UserVoicehttp://www.uservoice.com
, FB, site comments, social media
monitoring
• Now we know better what they want
and can create that content

28.
Results
• Has this stuff worked?
• Since mid Sept we have increased our audience by:
– 800K Facebook fans
– 500K email subscribers
– 900K mobile app downloads
– 1 in 20 Americans visited the site in Nov.
– 200M pageviews
– 45% Growth YoY

29.
Tips - Where
• Facebook just use pics and video
• Twitter much better for growing professional networks, really
hasn’t worked in either case for us for retail stuff
• Use every medium that makes sense
• Think beyond the traditional web. Mobile, apps, print, radio,
TV, web video, are all ways to reach your audience. How do
they work together to present the same message and to drive
your audience to your most effective media?

30.
Tips - What
• Don’t give them too little, but also don’t give them more than
they want
• Don’t underestimate or over-estimate your audience
• Respond when they ask questions
• Sympathise with their troubles
• Create urgency – why do they want to pay attention to you
NOW

31.
Tips
• Don’t assume like demographics want the same things at the
same time
• What they want from your site is as important as who they
users are
• Create an authoritative voice on the subject matter
• Users want to feel like you are the expert
• Know your industry (trends, deals, products, etc.)

32.
Thank You!
Rob Woods
rob@robwoods.org
rwoods@reinvent.com
Twitter: @robdwoods
Skype: rob.d.woods
604.374.5312