Site Target Marketing - From Influencers To Demographics
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People who browse on the Internet love control. They love controlling their web space. They have pop up blockers, ad-ware detectors, ad blindness, and they have developed selective vision to words and images that seem like ads. Internet adverts survive by ubiquity; they are just all over the place. And yet reviews are avidly read; products that are reviewed in-depth by websites like Gizmodo and devhardware generate thousands of hits. All these products are from the same companies that spend thousands of dollars on ads, but can get more bang for free when they are promoted by influencers, such as technology sites, blogs, websites like Digg, Searchie's, Slashdot and other websites that are influencers.
After identifying where your target web audience lives, what they read, what kind of sites they visit, how much they earn, their age, what community web sites they join (most of the time by boring, tedious research), the influencers have to be identified. They include forum moderators, writers, bloggers, Diggers, and community sites like Facebook and MySpace. Once the influencers are identified, you need to target them so that they can spread the news about your product. Like i said, the initial demographics are obtained by hard, slogging research. Reports have to be obtained via traditional methods like surveys and focus groups or just studying your web site metrics -- studying where your traffic comes from, checking your landing pages and how long your traffic spends on them, and also knowing the click through rates on your paid ads.
Grunt Work
Surveys, polls, focus groups, reports about buying trends, and demographics can be obtained from a variety of sources. Conscientiously searching for particular data via the search engines can help sites that have done primary market research in several industries (especially technology and telecoms). Academic documents as well companies such as Vizu,Survey Monkey and Zoomerang provide market research services. This identifies the target market.
In reaching out directly to these users, key words are put into the web site's copy. Key words are bid on or ads are targeted towards them. Ads are purchased on web sites that they visit, magazines and papers that they read, and in shows they watch on television. This reaches out to the users directly.
To reach out to the influencers (web admins, Diggers and company), the first stage is viral marketing techniques, ebooks, videos, free copy and social media optimization targeting blogs, and community sites and forums. One such means is what I call "the payperpost phenomena," promoted by sites such as www.payperpost.com. This is the sometimes maligned (but highly effective) advertising model of having bloggers review (promote?) a product for a fee. This puts the product straight into the arms of the influencers (another great way, if you sell hardware, is simply sending your gizmo to a tech editor's desk). Other influencers are tapped into by simply encouraging tagging links such as "Digg it" and "Slashdot it."
Next: Keywords through Conclusion >>
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