You have heard this word before. It is what you dream about as a marketer. This is the key that would put the magic in your marketing results. Can you guess what that word is?
It is “targeted”.
We often say that it is important to get ‘targeted’ traffic. What do we mean by this? It means you want visitors to your site that are most likely to buy your product. People who are in need of your product or service. In one word you want BUYERS!
Marketing companies spend millions each year studying the demographics of their customers. For example a young married couple in their mid 20’s are more likely to be looking for an apartment than a middle aged couple. If you can find where these customers hang out on the web then this is a good place for a real estate company to advertise apartments for rent.
This may sound like a given. You may expect this to be common sense marketing but you may be surprised at the number of Internet marketers who are wasting their money because they ignore this one important fact. The question that must be asked and satisfactorily answered is “Who would need my product or service and where can they be found?”
Getting targeted visitors to your site can make or break your business. This is the reason why buying ‘guaranteed traffic’ would always lose over using pay-per-click search engines. The latter is targeted and the former is not. Of course if you are using PPC search engines you must refine your keywords to what potential clients would be using to find you.
There are many adcopy writers who would start out their sales letters by qualifying their readers. This can be done by asking a question, stating a problem for which they have the solution or simply stating a fact. As soon as you read the first paragraph you know whether this is something you would be interested in. You often see questions like: “Like to lose 30 pounds this summer?” If this fits you then it grabs your attention and you read on. Aiming for the entire web population would leave you disappointed everytime. It’s all a matter of targeting!
Before you throw your hands in the air because your ads are not doing well, find out if you can better target your ads. This is the reason why advertising in Ezines is so effective. Subscribers to a particular newsletter are already saying that they are interested in that particular subject. All you have to do is find the Ezine that deals with your niche market and send your ads to them. No magic here.
I would like to share with you one example of how I applied this matter of proper targeting that increased my ad response by over 1,700%!
I have a free classifieds Adboard at my website that people can post to using automated posting software. I own a copy of this software as well but I found another comparable but better program. Anytime an ad is posted to my board I have permission to email the person with an ad of my own. (A kind of reverse marketing that some FFA website owners use.)
Now I already know what each of these advertisers are interested in – posting classifieds in the shortest time! They already bought the software for $97. All I am doing now is offer them a better product. This is the secret of all the copycat products you find advertising on infomercials all the time. They already know that if a product sold well they have a ready market for an updated product. (How many abs-shaping products you have at home gathering dust?)
Here are some other examples you may find useful:
1. Advertise safelist-mailing programs on other safelists.
2. Advertise Ezine subscription in other Ezines covering similar subjects.
3. Offer a complimentary product to your customer base. You sold a baseball bat, sell them a ball.
4. Post your ads in forums (where this is allowed of course) that deals with your niche market.
5. Use lead capture pages or buy leads for your particular program.
Your imagination is really the limit here. However, I think that you can improve your ad results if you keep this key in mind.
Let me close by giving another example, this time a negative one.
In one of my MLM programs, I know a group of distributors who bought ‘guaranteed signups’. This is a pretty new idea but it works like this. You pay a company in order to have people sign up for your free program. These signups are paid a small amount by the company (much like paid-to-read-emails programs) to sign up under you. You are then allowed to follow them up through autoresponder or other means to have them upgrade.
You can guess the results here, except you just skipped the rest of this article to this paragraph. These people are not necessarily interested in your company. They are simply working the program for the small fee they get for signing up under you. Many were the disappointment with this marketing effort.
Now let us change this into a positive experience. You already know something about the ‘type’ of people who would be involved in this program. They are looking to make a quick buck on the Internet without any big outlay of funds. So why not have them signup for an affiliate program or paid to read email offers?
The big question is would you be willing to pay the $300 for the 500 guaranteed signups.
It is all in the targeting. Target you marketing towards targeting to reach your targeted income!
Copyright Ray L. Edwards 2002
Ray Edwards is the author of “77 Ways To Skyrocket Your Website’s Conversion” and “The No-Click Traffic Sertect” Learn how to drive targeted traffic to your site and convert them into buyers in the quickest time. Visit http://www.raydal.com.
