In his January 2009 piece for the Wall Street Journal, researcher and author Mark Penn  profiled a major market segment he called “New Info Shoppers.” According to Penn’s research, this segment, which consists of consumers who routinely do online research before making a purchase, comprises a whopping 70 percent of the marketplace.

In addition to the overarching definition of an Info Shopper, Penn reveals an ancillary set of demo-and- psychographic attributes common to the segment:

• Distrust of television advertising
• More confidence in information they seek out online than that coming from a salesclerk or other source
• Typically holds an information-based or office-park job and has Internet access at work
• Has some college or grad school
• Member of a two job family with kids and pets
• Middle or upper-middle-class income

Given its size, one would think that marketers are all over this segment, but Penn points out that a typical company in the US spends 60 times more on advertising than they spend on generating publicity, which means that marketers and their agencies have been unable or unwilling to shift resources away from the big, creative emotional appeal of brand advertising to providing the kind of hard data that the research indicates is more likely to influence purchase intent.

This very large and significantly underserved segment of the market provides online marketers and agencies an excellent opportunity. But the question Penn does not delve into is just how to go about reaching them online. As such, in this post I’ll outline a high-level approach to reaching the New Info Shopper:

1. Identify your target: what are they searching for? What terms are they using? What search engines or social media sites are they using? What kinds of sites / channels are they likely to be spending their time engaged in?

Most of this information can be gleaned from on-site metrics (if you’re not set up to collect such data, you really, really should be) such as popular search terms and pages, as well as aggregate search data provided by search engines and other third-party applications.

2.  Evaluate your site in terms of whether it contains the detailed product information the target is likely to be looking for and whether that information is easily accessible on the site; accomplishing this requires a look at the site from both a user experience / information architecture as well as a search engine optimization perspective.

3.  Enable and encourage user-generated content on your site: this could mean product ratings and reviews, customer-supplied images or videos, or any number of ways to enlist proponents and detractors in providing useful and credible information to your audience. Many may be reticent to allow such unfettered ability for your customers to influence others’ purchase behavior, but the credibility that such openness lends, along with low-cost content generation, far-outweighs the risks. Besides, the ubiquity of social media today makes user participation an imperative rather than an option.

4.  Actively participate in ‘organic’ social media marketing: leverage review sites such as Yelp, Metacritic, CNet.com Reviews, Epinons and TripAdvisor (depending on your industry) to get the word out and engage users who review your products or services in constructive dialogue. More general social media sites such as LinkedIn (mostly for B2B), Facebook and Twitter also serve as a way to create a conversation with your customers, allowing them to ask and answer questions and see what others are saying.

It is critical that you reach these consumers on their terms, and that often means in environments other than your primary web presence. Both this and the next step are excellent ways to push content out away from your primary web presence and greatly extend your reach and influence at a relatively low cost.

5.  Leverage pay-per-click on search engines and social media sites to drive those likely to be interested or actively expressing an interest in your product to the site. Pay per click can’t be beat in terms of being highly addressable to the target. In the case of search PPC, we’re using the search terms identified in step one, in addition to geotargetting (when applicable) to inform our strategy. For social media, we’re looking at any number of demo and psychographic attributes that are determined by the user’s self-reported information (industry, employer, interests, etc.) as well as their activity on the site (what groups they join, etc).

6.  Set up analytics to track user activity from the ad or search result through their activity on the site, and review the data (at least) monthly.

Ongoing review of this data can help you determine which search terms and social media sites are bringing traffic, which may yield changes to the structure or content of the site to better serve an active segment; it may demonstrate that you need to devote more of our PPC budget to certain search terms because they are popular / highly competitive; it may show that users are hitting a certain page for a certain search term but leaving quickly, indicating that you’re not giving users what they’re expecting / looking for and should look at altering the content or presentation of that page.

The list of potential insights gleaned from careful deployment and review of analytic data is infinite, but the key point here is that you’re setting up a continual cycle of analysis and optimization, which makes the site better and more attractive to Info Shoppers over time.

We’re living in a world in which access to detailed information about everything from doctors to dongles is available online and simply appealing to the emotions of consumers is not enough. The :60 spot is by no means dead, but it will increasingly serve as a doorway to information that allows individuals to make informed decisions on major and minor purchases; the question then becomes whether or not you will be participating in the conversation or sitting on the sidelines letting your competition do the talking.