BroadVision Marketing Blog

Would you sell long-term-healthcare insurance to a college student or place ads to sell body piercings to people living in-home care situations? Who you are selling to is a simple idea within your marketing strategy. A key factor to success in today's market place is finding subtle differences to give your business the successful marketing edge. You want to sell your product or service in an appropriate way to different segments of the population or only to those in your niche, those who share experiences, values and goals. You could segment them based on demographics, like their date of birth, income and occupation; or through psychographic life-stage segments, like young families, empty-nesters or careerists.

 

As an internet marketer how do you create blogs, Facebook Fan Pages, and Tweets to target the specific market that you sell your product or service to? Connecting to these and thus to your potential clients is what marketers call inbound marketing. You could use demographics or psychographics as ways to connect more directly with the specific clients. The drawback of demographics is that it gives too narrow an amount of information. Psychographics comes with a price for the software. So how can a small business create the right target?

There is a third way to look at people that combines both demographics and psychographics and creates a bit wider group, but in ways that can be useful without being expensive. One of the names of this path is segment marketing or segmenting. In previous blogs we called it cohort marketing, but that is an unusual term.  Let’s just use segmenting instead.

Do you know that on average just over two billion searches are done per day on Google and that in 2010 46 percent of those searches were for information regarding products and services, according to SRI International Think Tank; October 2010? When it comes to your internet marketing strategy, how do you project your inbound marketing messages to reach your target market through all the messages on the internet?

Before you can reach them using inbound marketing techniques you need to investigate and select that target market.  In other words, how do you start identifying the people you want to become your customers? This big funnel, by the way, is the work of Social Steve Goldner from his Social Steve’s Blog. 

Guest Blogger: Ann Mullen

You have a product you want to sell. Putting it out on the street is not going to get it sold unless you are an ice cream man in the middle of July. Creating a website and writing blogs and more blogs about it aren’t going to get it sold either.

So if you have tried these methods without success or if you want to start selling your product, buckle up for a ride to your Target Market (no, not that Target).

Target market? What's that?

Your target market is the specific group of consumers that you want to aim your product or service towards. Don’t mind the preposition at the end of that sentence or the man behind the curtain.

Speaking of curtains, let’s say you want to sell curtains and draperies for fancy high-end living rooms. If you take your products to a gun store where people named Bubba and Billy Bob hang out, you have gone to the wrong target market. If you put your blog in this niche, you probably won’t get any bites either. You have to decide who you want to sell to.