Identifying your niche market
Niche marketing – appealing to a group defined by behavioural or
attitudinal characteristics – is the key to success on the internet.
Partly because of the way search engines work and partly because
of the nature of the net itself.
Search engines are great for finding information about specified subjects, making them powerful niche marketing tools.
Always remember, the internet is an interactive medium. People who
are interested in a product, subject, hobby etc actually want to
contribute to debates (through bulletin boards or forums) and
surveys. Look at Amazon – it encourages people to write their
own reviews of books, CDs etc – achieving two objectives simultaneously;
greater customer involvement and fresh, free content.
With niche marketing you have a much better chance of success.
Your customers will want to find your site, you can get closer to them
and build a real understanding of what they want. The opposite is offering
something for everyone and disappointing them all – which is what
Boo.com did – and look what happened to them. They “dot bombed”.
As in any offline marketing strategy it’s critically important to understand
who your target niche market is. This is because everything that you
communicate and offer on your site, and in your promotions, should
be focused on your customers’ needs and aspirations.
By appealing to their emotions you’ll be able to relate as individuals
and sell to them, again and again.
What do you need to know about your customers?
The days of defining customers through simple demographics are gone.
Have you noticed how age groups are often split so that they finish at 45+?
As if a 46 year old is the same as a 58 year old who, in turn, is likely to have
very different priorities to a 72 year old. It's crazy.
To develop a deeper understanding of your customers takes time and dialogue.
But, with a website, you don’t have to spend a fortune on marketing research.
If you collect customer data and communicate through your own newsletter
or a community forum, you can build a clear picture of what your customers
are like and what they’re looking for. Or conduct your own survey
free at http://www.Surveymonkey.com
Then you find or create a product or service that fills their needs.
This way, you ensure your product has a market before it’s even created.
If you want to learn about how to create and sell products online,
have a look at Michael Green’s page here
http://www.howtocorp.com/sales.php?offer=Incise&pid=30
Another low cost and very valuable tactic is to use forums to identify what people
in a particular market are looking for. There are discussion forums for virtually
any subject you can name on the internet.
Try Yahoo groups to start with and take part in online discussions.
Over time you can build a reputation as an expert in these forums
and drive traffic to your site too.
For a summary of the best ways to find what your market wants,
see the 'Insider Tips and Tricks to Internet Marketing' course
at http://www.EzineMarketingCenter/imc/. I've taken this course myself -
I was so impressed that I signed up for a six month mentoring programme too.
Need a product to sell online?
If you need a product to sell and you don’t want to go through the hassle
of creating or sourcing one yourself, here’s how you can get trading quickly.
You’ll probably know about affiliate marketing. You promote other people’s
products and get a 5%-50% commission on any sales. The host company
makes the sale, provides the merchandise and pays you.
The best ones provide tools and tips to help with your marketing.
And the really good ones provide entire websites and automated marketing.
ADAPTING TO WEB CULTURE
Life is different on the WEB. Everything is faster (well it’s supposed to be!),
people expect openness and above all, the reader is in control.
The key to selling online is to foster an illusion that the reader is
in control while carefully steering them in the direction you want.
It’s worth remembering that the internet’s purpose is not primarily
commercial. You may know that it developed in two areas – academia
and the military before becoming a cult amongst techies and a mainstream
medium in the late 90s, early ‘noughties’.
The culture that developed in the early days and still survives is one
of learning, sharing, giving, action and irreverence.
How does this affect your business?
1. It means being generous with your information – the more you give,
the more valuable your site will become to your customers.
2. There are huge opportunities for sharing customers and business.
By building links with other sites and creating affiliate marketing
relationships or joint ventures, you can get and give value to your
customers and related businesses. ‘Co-opetition’ describes the
‘abundance mentality’ of the net well.
3. Word spreads quickly on the web. If you let people down, the
whole world can know about it in seconds. It’s important to
acknowledge mistakes and rectify them quickly.
4. Price is as big a factor online as offline and very easy to research.
You need to monitor your competitors’ pricing closely and be aware
of price comparison sites like www.uswitch.com and www.text4price.com and any discussion
forums related to your market where price could be discussed.
5. Finally, for now anyway, make sure you acknowledge communication
and purchases by automating customer messages. You need a tool
called an autoresponder to do this. Try http://www.aweber.com/?202918 or www.autoresponderplus.com/link.php?a=incise
The other phenomenon with which you must engage is the nature
of online commerce and communication. Everything is quicker now.
The pioneers, those that didn’t implode, have trained people to
expect instant acknowledgement of purchases, 24 hour ‘customer
service’, swift fulfilment, interactive experiences and active
involvement in their sites.
Amazon is a classic example. It invites customer reviews of books,
DVDs and CDs, prompts suggestions of other products you might
like according to the selection you’ve made and has built an innovative
affiliate distribution system that now embraces cars and all manner
of consumer goods.
The Amazon model is appearing everywhere. So you mustn’t think
that just because you’re running a small business you can’t, and
won’t be expected, to provide a similar experience.
Businesses that fail to meet the expectations of online customers
won’t last long. The online world is if anything, more demanding
than offline. It’s harder to build relationships and there’s no physical
contact. Your brand, and the way you manifest it in
EVERYTHING YOU DO, which I'll cover in a later article, will be central to
your strategy for keeping your customers.
Integrating your on and offline businesses
Assuming you have an offline business, you need to be very clear about how your online operation will complement it. Define from the start exactly how the two will work together, which parts of the sales and customer service activities will be done online and how you can improve service and cut costs by moving any processes online.
You need to identify every step in the customer experience. A good example is customer communication. Lots of business communication is intrusive, thoughtless rubbish that gets rightfully binned or deleted on receipt. But communication as customer service, for example a reminder that your car’s MOT is due, is positively welcomed because it’s timely, relevant and helpful. And sent by email, it won’t cost you anything either.
You can probably write down pretty quickly why you think your current customers buy from you. And, if you were to ask them, you might also be fascinated by their answers; how well do you really know them?
The point is that your website, emails, banner ads, press releases, affiliate programmes and everything else you’ll be doing online will be far more powerful if they replicate what you do successfully offline.
To analyse this you need to break down the sales process into several steps from initial awareness to repeat purchase. At which point do you give customers best value? When and why do you lose them? Are there clear trends demonstrating that, for example, after two years they stop buying? Perhaps because you take them for granted and stop trying?
This kind of analysis can boost both sides of your business and save you a fortune in marketing costs. Getting new customers is a lot harder than keeping current ones.
Having a website is a great way of opening up new markets locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. But it can also be a way of adding more value to your current proposition.
Suddenly you’ve got a 24 hour business presence accessible across the globe – how can you use it to keep customers and get them to buy more from you?
- by offering better prices for people who buy over the net where the costs of processing are lower
- by using your website as a way of capturing customer email data and communicating with them – virtually free – when you’ve got something valuable to tell them
- by offering an email help and enquiry service
- by cutting your marketing costs and possibly your prices through less printing
- by building online links with complementary, non-competitive websites you can offer your customers a wider range of services and earn commission on any sales.
How to define your brand values
Small businesses don’t usually think of themselves as brands. But the fact is that every business has a brand – an intangible combination of the emotional and rational benefits of buying from you – your reputation in other words.
What’s the point of brands? Take the difference between BMW and LADA cars. They both get you from A to B but you’d pay far more for a BMW. And that’s the real point about brands. They add value to customer perceptions and command higher prices.
To build a picture of your brand, find out why people buy from you, not your competitors. Why do they stay with you – or leave? What role does price play? And service, reputation, locality, innovation, convenience and so on.
Build a clear picture of the value people get by buying from you and make sure every manifestation of your business – from business cards to the way you and your staff behave to your products and marketing – is designed to reinforce that.
Your logo, marketing, website, premises and vehicles are all visual and verbal ways of expressing what your business stands for and what you deliver. A well co-ordinated communications strategy builds synergy across all elements of the marketing mix so that every pound or dollar you spend goes much further.
Promoting your site and building a list of hungry customers
This is often the bit that small businesses baulk at - yet it’s impossible to succeed online unless you promote your site.
The good news is that if you’re targeting a niche, telling your target market about your product and service is much, much easier. You can place your ads precisely where they'll stimulate most interest. We’ll go into much more detail about the practical things you can do to maximise your budget’s value in future articles. But, with performance-based advertising (Pay-per-click), you can avoid the hit and miss of traditional ads because you only pay for the exposure when a prospect visits your site.
We’ll also cover search engine optimisation and many other tactics in detail and I’ll give you plenty of tips on what to do and where to go for more help.
A tool I can strongly recommend is Michael Green’s How To Promote A Product – 24 Power Keys Guaranteed to Promote any Product (or service)on the Net at Any Time!. I use it myself. http://www.howtocorp.com/sales.php?offer=Incise&pid=22
But one thing you must do, if at all possible, is to keep in touch with your market by email. It’s low cost but immensely valuable.
First you must capture their email addresses and get their permission to contact them with regular mails. You can do this by offering an incentive such as a free report or special offer. Then you build a dialogue – not a monologue – with them over time. This establishes trust, rapport and understanding. And then they buy.
To get the most from your internet marketing you’ll need:
- a high quality product or service that appeals to the needs of your target market.
- a well-planned and clearly designed website to describe it.
- a structured sales process with powerfully persuasive sales copy at every stage
- access to statistics that show how your marketing is doing – the number of people visiting your site, where they came from, the number buying and so on.
The five pillars of internet marketing strategy - To learn more about this author, visit Paul Lock's Website.
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Paul Lock
(Visit Paul's Website)
Brought up in London and been in marketing
since the days of Johnny Rotten - yes,
that long. Corporations may be slow moving
and full of political windbags but
they're a great way to get your training.
After 20 years 'training' I went into
the agency world and set up my own company
three years ago. We help small businesses
make the most of their web marketing
investment, from design and planning to
search engine optimisations and analytics.
If you can't measure it, don't waste
your money - are you a business person or
a gambler? Over the years I've made more
mistakes than you could shake a stick at
and, on the basis that an investment in
knowledge pays the best returns, I offer a
few morsels which might help you make
fewer mistakes than me. I hope my articles
help and feel free to visit my web site.
Best of luck,
Paul
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