When you start a website, if you hope to sell your products and services, you must first understand a little about who might actually buy those products and services. The more you know about your prospects and clients, the easier it will be to sell to them. Here are five questions you should be able to answer about your online target market.
- What are their demographics? Demographics are things like age, education, gender, marital status, job type and income level. They are the basic facts about your target audience that help to segment your market. They give you an idea of where prospects are in life and what major events might influence their purchasing decision.
- What are their psychographics? Psychographics describe how your prospects and clients view the world. They focus on character, personality and motivations. For instance, are your prospects and clients optimistic or pessimistic? Open-minded or closed-minded? Do they take control over their lives (“seize the day”) or believe that they are victims and “things happen to them”?
- What do they want? You’ve probably heard countless times that people buy benefits, not features. What, specifically, does your target market want? How will their lives change if they buy your product or service?
- What are their key problems, concerns and frustrations? Many people buy products or services to solve a particular problem. What is your product or service the “solution” to?
- What else do your prospects and clients buy? What other products and services that are similar to yours are they buying or have they bought in the past?
Research Your Target Market Online
To learn more about your target market, you should conduct some online market research. Specifically, you want to know where they go online, so that you can find the right types of people and get them to your website. There is no point in building a website if you don’t attract the right types of people, so here are a few starting points.
- Online forums and communities – Do a Google search for your keyword + “forum” and analyze the search results. Look for popular forums with a lot of activity. What are people talking about? What questions do they ask? What are popular discussion topics?
- Blogs – Browse sites like BlogCatalog, Technorati and AllTop for popular keywords your target audience might search for and compile a list of the most popular blogs in your market. What are bloggers talking about? Which topics get the most number of comments?
- Videos – What videos do they watch? Search YouTube for your keywords and look for popular videos. Which videos get the most views?
- Articles – What articles are of interest? eZineArticles is an article directory that allows anyone to submit articles to their website. (For instance, here’s a link to my author profile.) You can search eZineArticles for content ideas or even use the articles in their directory free of charge on your website, in your newsletters, or in free reports as long as you credit the author for using the content. What topics to authors write about most?
By understanding what content your prospects and clients want most, you can make your website a valuable resource by providing that content. With a small amount of research, you will never run out of ideas for what to write about.
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