Define Your Target Market
Now that you know your objective and your subject matter, you need to spend some time thinking about your market. You know: those people who might actually be interested in your content and what you're selling.
This is one of the most important tasks in preparing to write and create content for your internet marketing efforts. If you don't know your market, you won't be able to provide the information they seek, nor speak in words that compel them to action.
Here's an example: Have you ever written a cover letter to apply for a job? If so, you likely spent some time reading the associated job ad, to target your message to your potential employer's needs and requirements.
Unfortunately, defining the needs of your target market isn't as easy. But it's even more essential. Because if you miss the mark, you won't just be losing one job opportunity. You'll multiply that missed opportunity across the entire size of your market.
What You Need to Know
Of course, there are an indefinite number of things you can find out about your market. And many of these will depend on your subject matter, products and services. For example, you might actually need to know your market's average shoe size, if you're selling shoes. Common things that people look for include geographical location, age, gender, industry, income and education level.
You don't have to build the perfect demographic profile to get started with web writing and content for internet marketing. There are two fundamentally important variables, however, that you must determine, two issues that can truly make or break your success. These are your market's:
- Desires and goals
- Frustrations, challenges and problems
Easy, huh? Knowing these variables will help you in two key ways.
First, you'll know what subtopics to address within your chosen subject matter. For example, if your subject were something like "men's formal shoes," you might learn that your prospects are keenly interested in choosing the right shoe for their suit, and very annoyed with having to constantly polish. If you create content on either subject, you're therefore guaranteed to have an interested audience.
Second, you'll understand your market's motivations. People either move toward pleasure or move away from pain. (And for most people, moving away from pain always wins out over moving toward pleasure. Knowing your prospects' desires, goals, frustrations, challenges and problems will therefore help you craft compelling sales messages. For example, if you knew that your prospects hated polishing their shoes, a good headline for a shoe might be, "Spend more time getting admired and less time polishing these scratch-resistant Oxford beauties." (Okay, so there's a bit of moving toward and moving away motivation there.)
How You Can Find It Out
If you have the money, you might want to invest in some expensive market research to give you the information you need about your market. If not, it's time for some grassroots and guerrilla approaches.
So how can you discover your audience's motivations? Here's a good start:
- Create a spreadsheet. In it, create two worksheets. Name the first "Desires and goals." Name the second "Frustrations, challenges and problems." (If you want to get really fancy, you can break each of these into its own worksheet. There actually are subtle differences between a desire and a goal, for example.) Now, in both sheets, add a header to the left-most column labeled "Motivations," and freeze that column.
- Speak with your prospects. Ask them outright about their desires, goals, frustrations, challenges and problems. Listen carefully. You will be surprised at how much they will want to talk about these things.
- Add each distinct motivation to your spreadsheet. For example, "Have shoes that attract women's attention." Add them along the left-hand side, under your "Motivations" header. Now, every time you speak with a prospect, add their name as the header of a column. Beneath it, enter a "1" for every motivation they express. So John Smith might tell you, "I hate when shoes don't fit properly." Enter that as a frustration in your "Motivations" column, enter "John Smith" as the header of a new column, and place a "1" in the cell where the motivation and John Smith meet.
- Tally your motivations. As you do this, you'll find that prospects begin to repeat certain motivations, and you'll start hearing similar things over and over. By tallying how many prospects expressed which motivations, you can define the top motivations for your market and target them accordingly.
- Automate your research. Once you have a good sense of your market's motivations, you can add the top motivations to an online survey and direct prospects and customers to it to continue your research. You can also provide a field for "Other" that allows them to provide you with further insight, and potentially new motivations you hadn't learned from your earlier efforts.
If you don't yet have many prospects to speak with, there are other ways to get started.
For example, visit forums where your prospects might hang out, and see what issues come up on a regular basis. Another place where you can do some guerrilla market research is question-and-answer websites such as Yahoo! Answers, where you can see what questions people are asking in different categories, and thereby learn some common motivations.
You might also have a general idea of your target market's motivations already. If so, start making your list!
What's Next?
Now that you've identified your audience, it's time to choose some specific keywords.
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