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DEFINE YOUR TARGET CUSTOMERS
Your target customers are those who are most likely to buy from you. Resist the temptation to be too general in the hopes of getting a larger slice of the market. Try to describe them with as much detail as you can, based on your knowledge of your product or service. You can start with some demographic questions:
- Are your target customers male or female?
- How old are they?
- Where do they live?
- What do they do for a living?
- How much money do they make?
- What other aspects of their lives that matter to you?
Remember to get specific and honest with yourself.
CUSTOMER PROFILING
Secondary information may help you define your customer profile and give you a broad marketing guideline, only market research that's done specifically for your business, or primary research can get you close and personal with your own unique target customer.
Conventional market research, however, is expensive. A startup entrepreneur can design and conduct a do-it-yourself market research, with the assistant of an internet marketing service provider to find out a great deal of information about the customers.
Keep your mind open to any information, but also keep a list of primary research questions handy, such as:
- Who influences your customers and how?
- Why do they buy?
- Why should customers choose you and not your competition?
- What can you offer that the competition doesn't?
- How do your customers prefer to buy?
- How can your businesses benefit from the Internet?
MARKET RESEARCH
Keep your research questions in mind as you take the following research steps:
1. Read.
Not only articles, interviews and survey results published in trade periodicals reflect specialist knowledge of your market are invaluable for forecasting upcoming trends and identifying customers' needs. But ads, letters to the editor, and other "extras" can be even more revealing. Study the ads of your competitors to get an overview of recent market. Are there more or fewer ads now than last year or three years ago? What do they reflect?
2. Tap the Internet.
Newsgroups and discussion lists on the Internet debate every imaginable topic. Chances are, some of them partially match your customer profile. They may be talking about the type of product or service you offer -- or can be encouraged to do so. Best of all, everything they've ever said is cached by search engine such as Google. You can also take it one step further and start your own thread to initiate a more tightly focused discussion. A caveat: Some lists and groups don't welcome commercial postings. Always observe their rules, and phrase your questions discreetly. You can ask any number of questions that don't violate their posting etiquette and still supply you with a wealth of feedback
3. Check out the competition.
You can learn about what to do and not to do by studying your competitors. Visit their Web sites, and look at their prices, guarantees, testimonials and special offers. If they offer newsletters, get on their mailing lists. You'll get free information on improvements, new product lines, trends and even customer responses. Do you see any aspects you could improve? 4. Business school.
Call or visit the Web sites of local business colleges as well as the faculty of business departments at universities and colleges in your area. Find out who teaches classes on marketing, preferably small-business marketing. Try to persuade them that your business would make a great real-life market research project.
INTERNET MARKETING STRATEGY
Online Marketing
Search Engine Optimization:
The key to getting your business name to pop up in search engines is to use sound online marketing principles, rather than trying to manipulate the search engines with tons of keywords and inflated link popularity. That means you should:
- Provide useful information, valuable content and links that are related to your business.
- Make your domain names and page titles relevant to your business and keywords.
- Solicit links from (and link to) sites with good reputations, traffic and Google PageRanks.
- Keep your content current and image tags appropriate. (Image tags are the small bits of text that describe your image files. You can't see them on your web page, but the search engines read them in your source code.)
As long as your links are designed to enhance the value of your site's content or to increase your credibility and authority, then your site will continue to see good rankings on most search engines
Online Advertising
When developing your advertising strategy, you will need to determine the objectives of your advertising campaign. The most common objectives for an online advertising campaign include:
- Building brand awareness
- Increasing website traffic
- Generating leads and sales
You have a number of choices to make, such as what type of advertising to use and where to advertise. These choices should be made based on your objectives.
Banner:
If your objective is to increase overall brand recognition, a nicely designed banner ad on one of the high-traffic search engines or online directories would be effective.
Pay-per-Click Advertising:
Take advantage of Pay-per-Click advertising. More and more small business owners are starting to realize exactly how effective they can be, as compare to conventional advertising.
Leads Generating Service:
If you would like to generate leads and find potential clients, then a more strategized approach should be taken, such as sending out your company newsletters to members. Newsletter is a great business tool to increasing potential customer database, and cultivating customer loyalty.
Blogs:
Blogs are a simple way for anyone to post new content in an easy-to-read website format with the newest information always on top.
Blogs are absurdly easy to start and even easier to maintain. Some even let you post with your e-mail--just sit down, write a letter, mail it to your blog address, and you're done. It's so easy that some people post a dozen times a day.
But how can a blog benefit your business? Your blog can boost your ranking in the search engines, increase your traffic, and improve your credibility--all of which will ultimately lead to more sales!
Email Marketing
Effective marketing of your products or services in today's business means that you must communicate by email. Even if you have no website or no listing in search engines, you must be able to communicate by email because your clients - current or future or both - want to communicate with you by email.
The benefits of email:
- Fast - Email messages can be delivered to the receivers in just a few seconds.
- Lower cost - You just need a Internet connection to send a message. You can send it anytime and anywhere without increase your cost.
- Interactive - The message should be interactive and questions can be answer immediately.
- Multimedia - Video clips, pictures and sound files shortcuts can be attached to your message to make your communications more effective.
- Targeted - The messages are sent to a selected group of people.
- Personalize - A different message can be sent to different group of people to enhance the respond rates.
Newsletter Marketing
Newsletter is now a widely accepted form of B2B and B2C communication. Newsletter is widely used to build online community, promote products or services, reinforce brand awareness and improve customer relationship.
How newsletter can benefit your business :
- Remind people that you exist. People will only return to your site when they remember to. An occasional appearance in their mailbox ensures that you wouldn't be forgotten.
- Drive traffic to your site. Newsletter is one of the most successful way to drive traffic to your site no matter you are selling products, sharing opinions or ideas.
- Build awareness. Newsletter can alert your customers to new product features. This will make a mental note to your customers.
- Build trust. Newsletter can be used to build your professional credibility. Your messages build a sense of comfort and trust in your products or services.
- Build an e-community. Sending regular newsletter to your customers can reinforce the idea that a user belongs to a community. This indirectly retains a good customer relationship.
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