Almost every day gurus send out email messages or email promotions about the importance of traffic. In marketing especially internet marketing, your traffic is your lifeline and without sufficient traffic to your offers you are going to have a hard time trying to get sales. The fundamental equation to acquire a sale is to have an offer that converts and pair it up with traffic. But not just any traffic… mind you, but targeted traffic.
So what is targeted traffic? Why is it important to sell the right traffic and how can you find out who are your target market? These questions are very important, and you must be able to answer all of these questions if you want to become an advanced marketer for makes a lot of money and sales.
Why sell to the right people?
Selling to the right people is very important. Allow me to give you a quick simple test here. If you are selling bags, who do you target? Will you try to sell to a person who has just bought a bag or a person who has never bought a bag before?
Some would argue that you must try to sell to the person who has never bought a bag before, doesn’t have one, and he might want one. This is only true in some cases. Here’s the fact, not very one need a bag and the reason why he has never bought one could be because he never needed or wanted one.
I know I am not a bag buyer, and I never even glanced at the ‘bag’ section whenever I go to the mall. So in actual fact if you are trying to sell to me, it’s going to take a lot of effort, marketing, and convincing that I would need a bag. And the worst part of this all is that at the end of the day, I might still not want to buy your bag.
People do not just buy stuff because you are selling it well. People actually have to think that it is something they want, and something worth paying for before they actually take action. And the fact that everyone has too much in their lives these days and more and more people are screaming for more ‘space’ in their house means that they can’t just go out and buy anything they want or stuff that are marketed to them even if they have the money.
So the correct answer would be bag buyers then? Not necessary. Some bag buyers will only buy 1 or 2 bags in their lifetime and use it for as long as they could. Hence the correct answer would be to sell to ‘avid’ bag buyers. If they seem to have a lot of bags, passionate about it, talks about it all the time, then these people are the perfect target for if you are selling bags because they will keep on buying bags with no sign of slowing down.
Who are the right people?
So now you know why we need to find the right kind of people before trying to sell them stuff. The reason is simply because they are easy to convert, and they are going to keep buying stuff from you as long as you give them the satisfaction that they are looking for. This could be in terms of a quality product or a quality service.
However, it when it comes to marketing to the masses such as internet marketing, the bulk traffic that you get usually tells you very little about them. Hence marketers have developed a set of techniques where they target people in terms of demographics.
When we speak of demographics, we speak of age, sex, location, interests and stuff like that. Knowing these demographics are key to finding your target market.
Obviously, if you are selling female handbags, your target market would be female and if your bag price might tell you that you need to target women at the working age. If you are selling children’s school bag, then the age you would like to target would be little school kids or if it’s on the internet where the adults would be doing the shopping, you would like to target parents at the age where most people have kids.
Knowing the demographics and laser targeting your offers makes it easy for you to sell your offers because you are able to weed out the majority of the people who are not even slightly interested in your offers.
The study of demographics can go much deeper, for example, some bag designs are older fashioned, and you should know your target would be the elderlies and if your bag design is more colorful and trendy then your target market would be teenagers.
How to find these people?
There are websites out there like quantcast.com that actually collects data on websites visitors and demographics. Using these sites, you can easily find websites that have your target market and you can then contact the website owner and place and advertisements there.
You could also go to forums where people are actively talking about your product’s niche and market your offers there using subtle marketing strategies. You must remember that with the help of demographics, you are no longer bounded by the niche.
This is very important because now if you are selling women handbags, and you know your demographics, you could actually go to other niches such as the cooking niche where the crowd is full of people that you would like to target. This will certainly broaden your horizon in terms of getting a new source of traffic for your offers.
Another great place to advertise using demographic targeting systems would be Facebook. It’s targeting system is entirely based on demographics, which makes it easier to reach out to the people who are potentially looking to buy your product. Last but not least, the search engines be it via the natural search results or PPC ads, will almost guarantee you the best of targeted traffic as long as you use the right keywords for your product.
