Target Your Customers. Yes zero down and pinpoint with accuracy. Grab them.
Have you noticed how a particular combination of shops always tend to cluster together, usually within easy access of a major consumer center. Say you will have a grocery store right next to a bake shop, a hair saloon, maybe a pizza parlour or even an ice cream corner, a toy store etc. Simple they are all feeding off one another. Their customers are usually the same set of people. Say you go for groceries [a basic need], then your kid starts hankering after a toy. OK lets get her one. Oops it is lunch time. How about a pizza n ice cream?
On the web, if you are just starting out, it is a good practice to lurk in the forums, find a need and then slap them with it. This usually works for info products and software. But what if you already have a product/ service that you want to market online. Say you are selling jackets or home insurance. You need to go where your customers are.
Now how do you find your customers. How do you get highly targeted traffic to your website? Of course the conventional techniques of pay per click advertising do work but can be a real drain on your purse strings or even your brain- and may not give you the amount of exposure you desire.
Here are 4 do-able steps that can immediately take your sales to the next dimension:
1. Profile your target customer:
Develop a profile of your end consumer. This information alone can identify your market.
– Who is the end user of your product (Kids, adults, men, women, elderly, sick, newly married etc)?
– Who will most likely make/ instigate the buying decision [ Parents, caregivers, school teachers, employers, brides, etc]?
– Which financial category, geographical /cultural region / heritage does your customer belong to?
– What’s the basic lifestyle of your customer?
2. Brain Storm for Keywords:
Use your customer’s profile to Come up with all possible keywords and keyword combinations your prospective customers could use to reach you. Say if you are selling home insurance, besides the obvious, your keywords could also include realtors; estate planners, wedding planning sites; home loans; liquidators, mortgage etc…[ here your prospective client is anyone who owns a home, is most likely to buy one or dispose one]. You can automate this process using the services of www.goodkeywords.com or www.wordtracker.com.
3. Target with laser precision:
Next go to www.google.com, use each of your keywords on the search engines to find the relevant sites. Here you can get as specific as you want. Say to pinpoint customers in your geographical region or by particular language, just use the “advanced search” option or scroll down to the bottom of the search results page and use the “Search Within results” option. You may repeat this procedure on other major search engines too.
4. Check And Advertise:
Visit all the targeted sites and join the mailing lists. Watch a few issues closely to get the hang of it. Then:
– Take out top and solo ads in the most relevant ones.
– Submit highly targeted and focused articles where accepted.
– Swap Ads where applicable.
– Propose a joint venture to partner in your affiliate program.
– Ask for a link exchange.
– Sponsor some event on the dead on target’ sites/ ezines.
Just a few hours of meticulous research could work wonders for you. You will save by eliminating the untargeted ad expenses; and profit tremendously with maximum returns on your advertising efforts for a long time to come. So get smart. Target your customers.
Copyright [C] 2002 Shahnaz Rauf, www.snzeport.com
Shahnaz Rauf is a freelancer actively seeking writing projects. She is also The Editor of The Monster Twister, a Newsletter helping ordinary web owners achieve extraordinary heights without losing their shirts. To Subscribe themonstertwister-subscribe@snzeport.com Or visit her website at http://www.snzeport.com
