The short-and-sweet of this article is that if you want more customers to your local business or visitors to your website then you need find out what they like, and where they hang out, and then communicate with them there. The rest of this article is an expansion upon this simple idea.
A bit of history: I started out with this whole internet marketing with ppc (or pay per click advertising). Since then I’ve learnt that there are TONS of other traffic sources that you can harness in your business, and the list is growing all the time. Anyway, my point is that there are so many traffic sources at your disposal to grow your business. But if that’s the case, then where is the BEST place to start?
The Best Place to Start
The best place to start is to understand your target market intimately. Here’s what I mean – lets say that you have a bicycle shop. You might sell mountain bikes, road bikes, bikes with training wheels, and bikes for the leisure Sunday rider. Each of your customers wants a bike, but they all have different reasons for wanting a bike and they are all very different groups of people.
For instance, the mountain biker is into adrenaline sports, and wants a thrill, but he also wants a bike that won’t break down on him whilst he is flying down the hill over a jump at crazy speeds. Whereas the leisure rider just wants a nice smooth and easy ride that gently takes her around the streets on a warm summer day.
By just decribing these two different examples I am getting pictures in my head of what these people look like, what they talk like, where they hang out, and the types of jobs that they might do for a living. By considering the people you are targeting you are going to get a really good idea of the types of sites that they frequently visit on the internet. You need to describe the typical people in this group in as much detail as you can, even if you have to make some of this stuff up (i.e. she has long brown curly hair and her name is Lisa). It might sound retarded but this approach really does work.
Accurate Targeting
Once you are at that point you can THEN start to think of ways to grab their attention, whether it be with a paid advertisement on google, facebook, or abcnews.com, or alternatively an organic listing in the search engines through search engine optimization. The key point here is that when you understand your target customer, you’ll know where they typically spend a lot of time, whether on the internet or off it. They might frequent a particular sports site on the internet, and if that’s the case you might be able to advertise directly on that site by contacting the site owner.
Also, through this process of researching and segmenting your target customers, you are going to figure out appropriate ways of communicating with them. For instance a website page targeted at mountain bikers would most likely have a picture of a 20 – 30 something year old male in good physical shape, taking a drop off a jump on a kick-ass mountain bike, and the whole language of the page would be directed specifically at people in this demographic.
Conclusion
By segmenting your target audience, figuring out what they like, and where they spend their most time, you are much more likely to find profitable approaches to advertise to them. Drop a comment below if you have some questions concerning demographic targeting for your business.
Related posts:
- Why You Must Identify the Target Audience for Your Small Business
- Are You Treating Your Business Customers Like Objects?
- Why Use Customized Facebook Fan Pages For Local Business
- Simple On Page Search Engine Optimization for Local Business Websites
- How to Drastically Improve Small Business ROI by Segmenting Your Market
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