Tag Archives: 30tips

Topics to be covered today

1. Audience definition
A while ago I was starting a marketing campaign for a client and after a nice long chat about goals the question comes up .. “So who is our target market”?

The client answers, “Everybody that has a business”.

WRONG! Defining your audience is a crucial step in marketing (online and offline) and unfortunately, this is a step that most people never go through. They assume their market is everyone and they move forward without any precision in their campaigns. Lack of precision WILL result in lack of conversion.

Your audience is going to determine

• your keywords
• where you go to market your product/service
• how you position your product/service
• the product/services that are complimentary to yours
• and so on

SO … The more information you have about your audience the better off you will be able to address them and the problems/issues that they may be facing.

Things to look at when determining your target market are

• Geographics (location, climate, pace of life, etc)
• Demographics (age, religion, income, education, marital status, etc)
• Psychographics (attitudes, beliefs, emotions)
• Technographics (technologies used, etc)

Audience Definition Example:

Bad
All Businesses

Ok
Small to medium businesses based in California with annual revenues in excess of $1M

Better
Woman-owned businesses in the pet food industry, based in California with annual revenues > $1M. Organization size less than 10 people experiencing rapid growth over the past three years.

Can you tell the difference? When your target market is sufficiently defined you should be able to picture them in your head. Once you have this level of understanding of your audience – your keywords
will get better because you can craft them to appeal to a specific trait. With better keywords you will get more targeted traffic and with more targeted traffic – your conversion rates will be higher.

Sound simple? It can be if you practice.

I almost forgot – it is OK to have more than one target market as well. You just want to run through the audience profile for each one.

The daily take …

1. Audience definition will help you precisely target your market(s)
2. 4 areas to look at when defining your market (Geographics, Demographics, Psychographics, Technographics)
3. When properly defined you should be able to see a mental image of your customer
4. It is OK to have more than one target market

Coming Up … What’s up ROI? Calculating Return on Investment.

Below is a sample email from our “30 Tips in 30 Days” email series. If you would like to signup for the free email series you can do so here.

Topics to be covered today …

1. Search Engine Optimization vs. Search Engine Marketing
2. Two categories of SEO
3. Why is SEO important

OK .. here we go.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is actually a subset of a larger marketing effort called Search Engine Marketing. To give you a better idea as to how this all works, let’s start there.

Search Engine Marketing includes all marketing efforts that are tied to, you guessed it, search engines with the goal of increasing search engine rankings. Increased search engine rankings lead to increased search engine exposure and since 86% of all traffic online comes from search engines in one form or another*, this is where we want to be.

Search Engine Marketing can include:

• SEO (search engine optimization)
• PPC (pay pe click advertising)
• online display advertising
• article marketing
• PR
• etc.

We could easily write a post or three on each of these topics but we want you to get back to work at some point in time so we will save these other topics for another day.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of improving your website to gain higher visibility in the search engines. SEO can be broken up into two main categories:

On-Page and Off-Page optimization.
On-Page optimization includes all of the changes that you can actually make to the pages on your site to make it more meaningful for search engines:

• page title tags
• meta descriptions
• keyword rich content
• alt and title tags on images
• internal page linking
• sitemaps
• etc.

Off-Page optimization includes all of the tasks and improvements that happen on other sites.

• inbound links (links from other sites back to yours) – local business listings
• reviews on review sites like Yelp, etc.
• directory listings
• etc.

Both On-Page and Off-Page optimizations are needed if you want to boost your website’s organic search rankings. As we dive deeper into this email series we will be talking about some of these topics in
much more detail.

The daily take

1. SEO is only a part of a larger online marketing campaign called Search Engine Marketing
2. SEO can be broken up into two main categories – On-Page and Off-Page optimizations
3. SEO is important because it helps you gain ORGANIC (non-paid) rankings in the search engines. Without this you have to pay for it.

Coming Up … Market Research: Who is your target market really?

Source: Website Usage, Brand Effectiveness and Consumer Perception Statistics, February 20, 2010