Know Your Audience When Marketing Online (1)

Online marketing has become one of the most popular advertising options available. It reaches a worldwide audience and is available 24 hours a day. For this reason more and more potential customers are going online for a variety of reasons including researching products and services and making purchases.

As more and more consumers go online for these reasons, it is important for businesses to establish an online presence. This is so important because failure to do so may result in their competitors gaining an edge over them in competing for sales. While it is important for business to begin online marketing campaigns; it is also important for these same businesses to realize basic advertising principles still exist and they cannot neglect these principles.

Most importantly those who advertise online have to be aware of who their target audience is and how to reach this audience.

As with any marketing campaign, business owners should do some market research before they launch their online marketing campaign.

The crux of any good digital marketing campaign is to identify the specific characteristics of your ideal customers, including geographic, demographic, and psychographic variables.

The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will become.

Ideally this will involve hiring a digital marketing consultant with a great deal of experience in conducting and evaluating this type of market research. The results of this research should determine the basic demographical information for the target audience. The results should also include information on how to reach this target audience.

What this really means: it isn’t enough to know the demographics and location of your prospects. You have to know as much as possible about them, including their:

?          Personality traits.

?          Interests.

?          Values.

?          Opinions.

Knowing all of this will help you:

?          Come up with an accurate list of topics and keywords to target.

?          Set up your pages to convert more effectively.

?          Create a great user experience.

?          Optimize your content.

?          Craft the perfect message to cause your readers to take action.

?          Find key influencers in your market.

A business that cannot afford to hire a consultant to conduct this market research should still make an effort to obtain this information on their own. This can be done through informal polls of current clients. This information may not be as comprehensive as the information obtained in a more formal study but it can still provide a great deal of insight into the best way to reach the target audience.

Once this information is obtained, it is important to tailor the marketing campaign to appeal to the target audience. There are a number of different variables which can be modified to ensure the right message is reaching the right people in a manner they can understand and in which they can relate. Some of the ways in which your marketing campaign can be tailored in this way include the aesthetics of your website or advertisements, your copy and the use of more advanced design features such as audio and visual or interactive tools.

If you think about building a business, your website would be a natural location to showcase everything about your business and product. And one way to build maximum awareness and recognition is by generating traffic to your website. So, your first objective would be to get, say, 100 visitors a day, and then, 1,000 visitors a week.

It takes a lot to differentiate your brand in today’s “me too” world of electronic business solutions. And it is very important to engage in such projects that will ensure that traffic is headed your way -- consistently.

How:

?          Hang out where your audience hangs out and sign out with your website details -- answer relevant questions on Reddit, HackerNews, Quora etc., so that the audience learns of your expertise in the space.

?          Use Call to Actions at different places on the site so that the visitors are engaged and are compelled to explore the website, rather than opt for an early exit.

?          Invest in SEO efforts to drive organic search traffic to your website.

?          Paid Search is one of the most effective ways of driving traffic to your website, but businesses must be able to justify the expenses while measuring the outcome. (Here’s a hack - you could experiment with a paid search channel like Google Adwords even before you build your product, if you have the budget. This works well as a research tool, to see if the product you are building has demand and will sell).

The aesthetic appeal of a website can greatly contribute to how the website is viewed by the members of the target audience. A website which is designed to attract the attention of an older generation with more conservative tastes should include muted colors, clean design and conservative graphics. This will help to ensure the target audience enjoys the website. Conversely if you are looking to appeal to a younger audience with more liberal viewpoints you might chose to design the website with bold colors, eye catching graphics and creative design features.

The copy you include on your website should also take your target audience into consideration. Consider the examples of a conservative and a liberal audience listed above to create a better understanding of how the copy on your website can appeal to the target audience.

When marketing to a more conservative audience, the copy should be tailored to use formal language and use facts to back up viewpoints. However, when you are marketing to a more liberal audience or a younger audience you can consider using less formal language which is likely to appeal to the target audience. You can also focus more on emotion to express viewpoints. 

To be continued...