Reaching Your Target Audience

A big factor to successful online marketing is knowing who your target audience is and how to reach them. To determine what types of customers you are trying to reach, you should be asking yourself the following questions:

• What age group are you trying to sell to?
• Are you selling to a specific ethnic group or gender?
• Will most of your customers be married or single?
• How fast will your audience’s Internet connections be?
• Will you target customers have children?
• What level of education will most of your customers have?
• Where will most of your customers live?
• Will your customers have any specific hobbies?

The more you know about your customers, the easier it will be to come up with a marketing plan. You’ll also be able to design a website that is the most appealing to those customers. The biggest advantage of marketing on the Internet is that it allows you to become very targeted towards your desired customers.

Personalizing Your Website

Even if you’re not selling a product or service that is for a specific target audience, you still need to have a website that is personalized. For example, even though Amazon sells products that appeal to all target audiences, they have still managed to create a personalized website that fits every customer. This is the goal of personalization technology.
One mistake that many small online businesses make is to focus only on self-promotion. The bottom line is that customers don’t care about you. They only care about what you can do for them. When someone visits your website, you have about ten seconds to get their attention before they move onto the next website. That means you have ten seconds to tell this person why it is that they need you.