Identifying And Reaching The Target Audience

Identifying the target audience

With a well-defined list of business objectives in hand, you are now ready to work
out who you want to reach in order to best meet those goals. In other words, the
businesses objectives help determine the target audience.

As it is quite likely that many readers will already have a blog or site up and running
at this stage, it is important to state upfront that if, as a result of the research you
perform here, you find that your blog or site, in its current form, is not suitable, then
it may be necessary to refocus what you have or start a new blog. Don't be afraid to
change direction. Rather bite the bullet now than persist with a site that you don't
believe will be effective.

Doing a bit of research into who might be interested in your product or service
(your target market) can often yield surprising results. For example, you might
have a business selling garden furniture with a blog on growing garden plants. The
obvious audience for a blog such as this would be home owners as they are most
likely to have gardens. What about people who live in apartments?
In all likelihood, gardening services and landscape artists might also be interested in
a good quality blog on this topic. These businesses might be interested in a slightly
different aspect of gardening, although no doubt there are topics that will appeal to
both groups.

Aim and target your consumer

What about regional differences? Garden plants in Colorado are not likely to have
much appeal to gardeners in New Mexico, unless they are determined to fly in the
face of natural selection. Who are you going to cater for?

What about age groups? How many teenagers enjoy gardening work? As unreal as
a hardworking teen might sound, I am sure there are one or two lurking around. But
do they fit your target market? Probably not, as they are unlikely to own homes and
gardens, and therefore won't need garden furniture.

Is income bracket a factor? People who live in apartments may not have the
resources or inclination to read up on the fascinating world of garden plants.
City dwellers may be very high earners, but still not be interested in gardening.
So, urban and sub-urban people may be different in this regard. By considering
each and every aspect that goes into making up ideal visitors, you can begin to
piece together how to present content and information to best meet the stated
business objectives

Any given audience consists of smaller subgroups. Content
should be created to target specific subgroups in order to be
as relevant as possible.

In particular, knowing who you are aiming at can help determine the structure of
your  blog or site as a whole. Major subgroups of your target market
could have content categorized and presented in focused, relevant segments.
Remember that you can target different market segments organically; focus on one
or two major audience subgroups and then branch out once you have additional
resources or demand.

Reach the target audience

Knowing who you are catering for is one thing. Knowing how a particular niche
industry is already organized is another. It may be that the people you wish to
reach tend to use chat groups regularly. Maybe they cluster around one or two large
forums, or are widely spread out in smaller communities.
Spend some time learning who the players are. Think about whether they would
make a strategic ally or whether they are direct competitors. Find out where the
action is. Do people gather at conventions and meet face-to-face, do they hold
webinars, or are they disparate and thin on the ground?

Learn what is popular and what isn't. Online communities often have their own
flavor or way of doing things. Some, for example, will disallow strong language
completely and encourage a tone of respect of moderation. Other communities are
barely moderated at all and adopt an "anything goes" attitude.


As your blog (or the website your blog is integrated with) is going
to have to integrate well into the existing networks and communities, it is
important to ensure that the content you offer is acceptable within the context
of the wider community.

Here is video tip: How to use google keyword tool to find niches

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Content For Best Marketing Campaign

Pre-marketing preparation

The following post is going to talk about how to create that content in the most
efficient and effective way in order to drive traffic through your blog. However,
there is one more important feature of the earlier diagram that we need to talk about
before we can begin, and that is identifying your target market or target audience.
You can think of a target market as one or more defined groups of people who are
interested in what you have to say or offer. This is an extremely important concept.
While the Internet is a vast place with many millions of people online, inevitably,
individuals or small groups of individuals are only interested in certain things at
certain times.

Your job as a marketer is to determine which niche interest groups constitute your
target market and go after only those people.

If you refer back to the earlier diagram, you will note that traffic arrows coming from
the market into the search engines and social media sites only came from certain
niches and not every niche. This is because I want to make it clear that, depending
on the content of your blog or site, only certain niche groups will be interested.

So, before you even begin marketing to anyone, you need to make sure you
understand the value of what you are offering, and who is likely to want that
offering. When I refer to "value", I don't mean, necessarily, in physical dollar and
cents terms. You might, for example, offer your opinion on politics or climate
change. People may not have to pay to read that opinion, but if they are interested
in what you have to say, it holds value for them.

Pre-marketing preparation procedure

The following diagram represents how to prepare for an Internet
marketing campaign:

From this diagram, you can see that aside from understanding the value offering

(knowing how and why people will derive value from what you offer), it is also

important to first create business objectives that will ultimately be met by your

marketing efforts combined with the blog or site.

In the Internet marketing sense, a business objective is a goal you want your blog

to achieve. It could be generating revenue through advertising, it could be getting

visitors to sign up to your newsletter, or anything else. When a visitor comes to your

website and performs an action that fulfils one or more business objectives, that is

called a conversion.

A conversion doesn't necessarily have to mean that some form of financial

transaction takes place. However, it is important to understand that because

marketing is labor intensive, and in some cases financially draining, you should

generally frame your efforts within a financial context. That is to say, spend a bit of

time working out how best to assign a monetary value to your conversions.

If one of your goals is to sign people up to a newsletter, then you should know how
and where you can make money from this newsletter down the line. Perhaps you
will market your products or provide links to special offers on your e-commerce site.
However, after you monetize that newsletter, you can generally work out how much
you expect to earn per sign up. Once the newsletter has been running for some time,
you can then make exact calculations based on the number of people signed up and
the revenue generated as a result.

For example, if you earn on average $30 in product sales for each new customer,
and you gain one new customer for every 100 newsletter signups, then you could
work out that $30/100 = 30 cents. This is the value of each newsletter sign up to you.
Thinking about those 30 cents helps motivate you to get people signed up.
By ensuring that you properly monetize your blog, you should at least be able to
pay for the high-end servers required when the marketing efforts pay off and you
start getting millions of visitors. The term "monetize" refers to one or more methods
used to generate revenue. This could be a result of advertising, affiliate revenue,
e-commerce sales, or any number of other things.
Before we discuss the two pre-marketing preparation tasks in a bit more depth, you
are now ready for a bird's-eye summary of Internet marketing in its entirety.

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Simple Way To Understand Internet Marketing

Internet marketing overview

I don't want to spend too long introducing all the different terms and concepts
involved in the field of Internet marketing. I am a firm believer in jumping in and
learning to swim—which is why this post is short, sweet, and packed with useful
stuff that you can use in the real world.

With that said, it is important that you are at least familiar with the major terms,
concepts, and processes I am going to use; and it won't hurt to give you a
bird's-eye view of the how, why, what, where, and when of marketing online.
You don't need to be a marketing pro to benefit from the straight forward
process contained in this book.
The following steps are the overall process we are going to follow:
1. Define business objectives
2. Identify target audience
3. Create content
4. Drive traffic
5. Convert traffic (monetize)
6. Analyze
7. Refine
8. Repeat

This post is going to define and explain all the terms used in this list and place
them within the context of the Internet and Internet marketing. We will also cover
the first two steps here as these are really pre-marketing preparatory steps; in other
words, things you need to know before you start marketing at all.

Understanding Internet marketing

The following diagram represents a blog or website within the context of the Internet
from a marketing perspective:

The top layer of this diagram represents the market or audience—all the people out

there surfing the web. Note that this mass of people can be broken up into niches,

represented by the boxes contained within the overall Market/Audience. A niche

can be defined as a specific interest group. For example, some people want to learn

about pottery, some enjoy astrophysics.

The diagram has been simplified to show how niche interest groups use search

engines and social networks to find the content they are after. Of course, they might

well go directly to their favorite forum or niche website without using a search

engine, but a large proportion of all traffic goes through search engines and social

networks, so this serves as a good model.

Note that different parts of this diagram are related by arrows. In this instance, an

arrow represents traffic. Traffic is the term used to describe a flow of visitors. Some

arrows are one way, indicating that traffic flows from one segment to the other. For

example, the arrow between the search engines and your blog is denoted as one way,

indicating that traffic comes from the search engines to your site, but not the other

way. Two-way arrows mean that traffic, in general, passes either way.

By looking at the web of different arrows, you can see that your site or blog needs
to integrate itself into the fabric of the Internet. In order to effectively market a blog,
you need to make connections, share content, offer opinions, comment on other
people's content, and so on. All of this helps to add links to and from other blogs,
forums, social networks, and so on. This growing network of links is what starts
traffic flowing through your site.

Like any system, there has to be a driving force that keeps the traffic flowing. Our
cars need petrol to keep moving, plants need energy from the sun to keep growing,
and so on. The fuel that drives traffic on the Internet is content. When I talk about
"content", I mean anything and everything from the written word to a YouTube
video, PPC ad, audio file, podcast, and just about anything and everything that
humans can interact with in someway.

That is important! Content is what drives traffic.

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Grow through Affiliate Backend Providers/Networks/Aggregators

There are several companies that provide the tools, technology and services that
online businesses need to register, track, report and pay affiliates. In other
words, merchants don’t have to “do it themselves” because these companies
provide all the backend functionality necessary to run an affiliate program.

The “backend providers” prefer to call themselves “affiliate networks.” Why?
Because they do more than just provide merchants with affiliate software. They
also provide merchants with affiliates, and vice-versa. Since they have a pool of
hundreds of thousands of affiliates, a merchant’s program gets instant exposure
to potentially interested affiliates.

And affiliates get exposure to a wide variety of merchants. It’s a good idea to join
each of these backend providers. You will likely come across many of the same
merchants that you found in the affiliate directories. But you will also find new
ones. So it is worth checking to see whether they feature any programs that fit
with your concept....

Commission Junction
http://www.cj.com/

BeFree
http://www.befree.com/

LinkShare
http://www.linkshare.com/

Quinstreet
http://www.quinstreet.com/

AffiliateCash
http://www.affiliatecash.com/

If you find merchants with products that fit, enter what kind of merchandise they
sell and also enter the URL of the “join page” to the POSSIBLE PARTNERS
column in your MASTER KEYWORD LIST for each keyword that is relevant.

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Rand Fishkin SEO Tips (video)

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