Communicating With Your Target Market

To succeed in any business, whether online or offline, you have to know what your target market is. If you don’t know who they are, what their characteristics are, their likes and dislikes then how can you sell to them? Assuming you have all this figured out and you have the perfect image of your target customer in your head, now ask yourself if you are speaking to them in their language?

What’s in a Language?

I don’t mean language as in the language that is native to a country – I mean the dialect, the sayings, the tone, the wording. Do you think your sales copy for an iPod accessory would be the same as for a mathematical software package for example? An easy trap to fall into is to simply write as yourself, in your own style. This is fine if you are the epitome of your target market but if not then you will lose your audience.

There are occasions when you can get away with it… such as on a personal blog :-) In this case you want to make sure that you allow your personality to shine through because you are your brand.

Examining a Typical Newsletter

Over the last few weeks I’ve signed up for various newsletters related to Internet Marketing, not so much because I wanted to buy what was on offer but because I was just interested to see how they were marketed. One of these was from a site selling an ebook on affiliate marketing. I’m not going to name it because I don’t want to promote it for them! At first it seemed quite good, the site had a video showing this guy logging into his Clickbank accounts and showing you just how much money was in there. Impressive.

As is the usual standard fare these days, I got an email from this site every day or so for quite some time but as the days went by the copy became more and more aggressive. By day four the author was telling me how he hung out with the gurus and stole their techniques. In day six he told me about all the enemies he’d made with his ebook. In day 8 the techniques weren’t just ’stolen’ but they were ‘underground’ and ‘forbidden’. In day ten he changed tactic and promoted a different product to do with Adwords. He claimed that he had a technique that would allow you to steal somebody else’s campaign and use it yourself at the click of a button. By this point I’d had enough and I removed myself from the list, I just couldn’t take any more.

But this got me thinking – the sales copy annoyed me so much that I unsubscribed even though the only reason I was reading it was to learn something. Had he failed miserably with his copy? No. I am simply not in his target market. As I thought more about it I began to get a picture in my head of the kind of person who would get really excited at these claims – it’s those people who are trying to get rich quick, make an easy living off the back of somebody else’s hard work. That’s a pretty big market unfortunately.

Getting Inside the Head of Your Potential Customer

To really market effectively you need to get inside the heads of your target market and be able to think like they do and talk like they do. I believe one of the best ways to do this is to immerse yourself in online communities within that market. This might include reading blogs, forums, joining groups on Facebook etc.

Of course you can just “lurk”, rather than participate but if you participate as well that can help your marketing efforts down the line. For example there is usually an opportunity to associate a URL with your profile so if you become a regular contributor to such communities, people within it may start to like what you have to say, and click on your link resulting in traffic and hopefully sales.

Developing a Persona in Your Niche

In a recent post I talked about the possibility of creating multiple accounts on social networking sites and I concluded that I would probably just have a single account per site but I would group them into themes based on a set of common topics and I would develop a persona around each one. The more I think about this, the more I think it is a good idea. Imagine you are working on several business in totally different niches. You have one niche that is aimed at parents with young children, another aimed at teenage boys and a third aimed at University professors.

Look at it from the point of view of the potential customer. Let’s take the example of the teenage boys market. Little Johnny (!) is surfing his favourite Facebook group about the latest XBox game and sees there’s someone in the group called “MegaMac” (I really hope I don’t find myself in the teenage boys market, it would be painful for all concerned!) who has been posting a lot and seems pretty cool. So Johnny checks out Mac’s profile and sees that he’s into other interests that Johnny is into as well. Mac has a website about this XBox game so Johnny surfs on over to that and likes what he reads, the copy appeals to him. He adds the link to his favourites and a week later he buys a strategy guide that he read about on Mac’s site. In the meantime he added Mac as a friend on Facebook.

Now in actual fact Mac was a 42 year old mother of 3 who hates video games! Has Johnny been deceived? Is it wrong to do this? But more to the point if Mac had used her real name, and her real profile do you think Johnny would have been as likely to click on a link to an XBox site written by this woman? I don’t think so.

Mac was able to connect with her audience (I talked about the importance of connecting with people in yesterday’s post) and make her audience feel at home in her company by developing a persona that fitted into that niche. It’s a win-win situation because Johnny wouldn’t have bought the strategy guide if the website had been rubbish. So putting aside the marketing for a moment, all this stuff only helps you if you actually develop good content in the first place!

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