Here’s a great example of targeted marketing for you. I am around 99% certain that you are a business owner. In fact, I believe you either own a business, or are a consultant or a freelancer.

I was spot on or pretty close, wasn’t I?

How was I able to be so sure?

Targeted marketing

I have grown the readership of this site, via targeted marketing. Everything I have done in order to develop this blog, has been based around attracting the attention of intelligent, small business owners who want better sales results for their businesses. The content here is also targeted, with everything I have written, focused on the subject of marketing and business development.

As a direct result, I have a highly targeted readership of small business owners; the exact profile of people who use my marketing services.

Targeted marketing and time wasters

Just as targeted marketing delivers targeted results, the opposite is also true. Small business owners, who use a less focused approach to their marketing, tend to attract a little of everything. As a result, they typically get fewer business inquiries and many of the inquiries they do receive, are from the wrong kind of people.

For example, I spoke with a business owner recently, who told me how frustrated she was with all the time wasters who contacted her. I asked her what she meant by time wasters. Was she referring to people who were asking her for free advice? No. She said she was referring to the number of people who contact her looking for help in areas that she doesn’t cover. Similarly, I receive emails all the time, from people who complain that their prospective clients are too fee sensitive. With a little investigation, I often find that they are marketing a premium quality service, to people who buy bargain bucket services. That’s what happens when you fail to target your marketing correctly.

If you find that you are attracting the wrong kind of inquiries, or enquiries from the wrong end of the market, it’s entirely possible that the focus of your marketing needs to be improved. If you use social networks to randomly connect with people because they look interesting, that’s a GREAT strategy for socialising; however, it’s less effective if you are looking to build a targeted network of great business contacts and prospective clients. It’s like attending a networking event and randomly talking only to the first 10 people you see; rather than being a little wiser and connecting with the 10 most suitable people in the room.

Targeted marketing messages

When you write, do you write for as wide an audience as possible? Do you try to tell everyone who could possibly buy from you, every benefit of your services? If you do, you are making a mistake! Your marketing needs to be targeted to your prospective clients and their needs. That’s all. By trying to be vaguely relevant to everyone, your message becomes weakened. In order to compel or inspire people to call you, visit you, email you or click your links, your marketing needs to motivate them to take action. This means delivering targeted marketing messages to the right people!

If you want to be able to confidently predict who sees your marketing, and therefore contacts you, get specific. Don’t focus on the size of your network or the number of leads you generate, until you are attracting the right people.

Your feedback

How targeted is your approach to marketing? Do you write exclusively for your target market, or for everyone who could possibly buy from you? How confident are you, that 95% of your readership are the exact people you need to market to? Please take a moment to share your feedback.

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The big story about The Gap (you might call it “The Gap Flap,” although of course I never would) is how a fierce outcry in social media forced The Gap to take down its new expensive logo in favor of the old one that its customers love. You can take a gander at both below to see what everyone is up in arms about.

Now, what I know about logos fits snugly in a thimble, so this is the last place that you should expect me to wax poetic about the pros and cons of either logo. I sometimes shop at The Gap and I can’t imagine that the logo has anything to do with that, although I suppose it would probably be something I was unaware of. But this isn’t about the logos.

No, you say, it is about the power of the social media, right? Well, perhaps. But it’s more about what you get conversation about in social media. 99% of The Gap’s customers probably couldn’t care less about the logo, but a very vocal 1% do, and that is who you hear from in social media. Once those 1% start talking, then a lot of the 99% hear what they say (the 1% have framed the issue for them) and then some of them say, “Yeah, what’s wrong with that old logo that I love?”

And because it is just a logo, there is nothing wrong with it. There is nothing that you can defend as to why you changed it. You might have focus groups that show how more people are attracted to it and you might have research that show that it evokes a whole new image for the company and that sales go up 20% but how can you tell that to your customers? At best, they will feel like you are manipulating them.

So, I am wondering if the days of making well-researched changes to logos might be nearing an end, at least for businesses that inspire some level of passion about their brand. Or perhaps The Gap needed to involve the 1% in the process of changing the logo, rather than springing it on them after lots of secrecy.

No matter. What is important is that in an age of transparency, it’s harder and harder to tell your customers that you just sank millions into redesigning your logo instead of doing something valuable for them. Instead of making higher quality clothing, or lowering prices, or improving service, or increasing selection, or something else that many customers care about, you redesigned your logo.

By doing so, you annoy that vocal few that actually revere your brand in a religious way, and you can’t defend what you are doing to anyone without looking slick. The big story here is not that social media forced The Gap to revert to its old logo. The story is that social media forces companies to do things that help their customers, and changing the logo is probably not high up on any of their customer’s list.

Social media isn’t all that complicated, folks. If you change your logo, people are going to talk about your logo. But is that where you want the focus? Try changing something you want them to talk about and see what happens. So the next time you are considering a marketing change that is more about image than customer value, you might want to mind the gap.

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The woman in question was a longtime market researcher who has spent her career gathering copious amounts of data—the more the merrier—the better to inform our big decision.

Try as I might, I don’t think I convinced her that you can make decisions while you are gathering data and then make them again if the data sends you in a different way. This was all too much for her and she was absolutely rooted in place in opposition against such an idea, so much so that she refused to take part in the case study at the end of the class, because there wasn’t enough data to make a decision.

I felt sad for her, because she will have a tough time in Internet marketing, which means that each year it will be harder for her to succeed at any kind of marketing, as more and more becomes digital. In traditional marketing, it made sense to do whatever you could to make a better informed decision, because a mistake was so costly. You might blow your yearly ad budget with one wrong move, and it was extremely hard to reverse. In digital marketing, it’s exactly the opposite.

Most decisions cost almost nothing and are easy to reverse—there is almost no risk. In fact, the biggest risk is failing to do something, because when you are idle you can’t gather any execution data about your idea. It’s almost like how sharks work, where they have to keep moving in order to get oxygen. In Internet marketing, you must keep moving to breathe in your feedback data, so you know where to move next.

So, I am keeping that poor woman in my prayers, hoping that someone else can reach her where I couldn’t. She struck me as extremely intelligent, fully capable of coming up with endless reasons why she didn’t need to do this Internet thing the way I suggested, but I hope she comes around. We all need to recognized when we are sabotaging ourselves, so that we can move on again.

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It wasn’t too many years ago that just about anyone who knew how to code a link to a Web site could be a successful affiliate marketer. You drop a few pennies on paid search or banner ads, you gin up a Web site where you dump your affiliate links, and presto! It was a cash machine. Unfortunately, there are now tens of millions of affiliates with the same dream, selling the same products, and sales seem a bit more meager than before. What can you do to succeed at affiliate marketing today?

It has become borderline unaffordable for most affiliate marketers to use paid media, whether it is banner ads, paid search, or something else, especially when they are first starting out. To take advantage of free forms of marketing, such as organic search or social media, you need to start sinking your time into building unique, interesting content. In competitive fields such as fashion and beauty, that means an awful lot of content, and your first impulse might be be one-stop shopping, to have the biggest catalog, with the most products, with the widest selection, and that idea couldn’t be worse. It’s incredibly hard to compete with Amazon.com and other large companies—you’ll never stand out with so many products.

Instead, specialize! Fashion or beauty are still way too broad. I’d pick something super-specialized, such as:

• Clothing for women with thick waists
• Hair styles for over-40 women who have always wore their hair long
• Styles for women to wear to work at casual firms
• Piercings that can be easily removed for work
• Skin care for African American women with uneven complexions
• Tips for women who must get ready in 30 minutes or less each day
• Clothing for women who like Goth styles
• Alternatives to permanent tattoos for teenagers whose parents won’t say “yes”
• Hair coloring tips for senior citizens

There are a lot of ideas here, and you can probably think of hundreds more. Pick one of them. Pick one that you know something about and are willing to devote lots of time into researching so you can write about this problem endlessly.

I know zero about fashion or beauty, so none of these ideas might be any good. (And certainly I would not expect them to dovetail with your specific interests.) But I use them as examples of what you might consider so that you see how specific you should start out and you notice three things about each idea:

• It is about a specific audience
• It solves a very specific problem
• There can be many different suggestions (read: products) for the problem

So, you need to be a lot more focused on what your expertise is within fashion and beauty and construct a narrow site that you can write very good content for. Start small with this kind of very specific focus. You can always add more sites later. If they are similar enough, someday you might have the big catalog that you dreamed of at first. You just need to get there a step at a time.

The successful affiliates that I know spend a lot of time on their businesses. They create unique and compelling content with deep information that attracts the audience for the products they sell. It’s not enough to warm over the product catalog. Not only will Google not show you in the results, but they won’t even allow paid search ads for such duplicate content. The successful affiliates know a lot about subjects that interest their customers. The real secret to affiliate success is to write content that solves problems and attracts customers to your expertise. If you start small and grow, you can succeed, too.

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Below is a breakdown of the sections of a text ad and certain items that should be contained within each section.

Headline:The headline helps you catch the eye of the searcher and should immediately proclaim ‘Hey! I am relevant to what you are looking for!’ If you look at the ad below you can see the term ‘Contact Lenses’ (the search query entered) appears in the headline, letting the searcher know that the ad is offering what they are looking for.

If you have created very granular ad groups you can create text ads that utilize keywords or keyword phrases within the headline. I recommend staying away from DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion). This can lead to you ad using lowercase letters in the headline.

If you have enough remaining characters you can highlight other specifics about your product or service. For example high lighting things like ’99% Approval Rate’ or ’15% Off’ can help increase your CTR and set you apart from your competition.

Description Line One:The first line of your text ad description must do two things – answer the searchers questions and include the keyword or keyword phrase.

If someone is searching for discount contacts or cheap flights like the following text ad, let them know that you are the solution to their question.

If you include the exact keyword within your description line it will not only be bolded and catch the eye of the searcher but also show relevancy to the query.

Description Line Two:In the second line of your text ad it is important to set yourself apart from your competition. If you do not require credit checks for loans or you have more products available then your competition, let them know through your text ad.

Most importantly your second line should contain a CTA or Call To Action. If you are attempting to have site visitors sign up for free information using a CTA like ‘Sign Up Now!’ will set an expectation of the potential visitor. If you are driving searchers to your site to apply for a loan using a CTA like ‘Get Cash Now’ or ‘Apply Now!’ can help lead to conversions.

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BTW, landing pages could be considered any page on your site, but for the purpose of this webinar the focus was on pages designed to get someone to take a desired action, such as request a quote, sign up for an email newsletter, etc. Although not necessary, these pages might be outside the normal navigation of the site, and only linked to from an ad or banner on another page.

• Don’t overwhelm people with form fields. Keep them as minimal as possible, asking as few questions as possible.
• Look at value vs. cost in the eyes of your prospects. If the cost (whether it’s time, effort or price) outweighs the perceived value you’re going to fail.

How do you fix this? Reduce the perceived cost and increase the perceived value.

You can reduce the perceived cost by reducing friction. Friction might come from unnecessary length or difficulty on the landing page. Look at your landing pages now. Is there too much text? Too much scrolling? Too many pages to purchase?

You can further decrease perceived cost by quickly answer the visitor’s questions:

• Where am I?
• What can I do here?

According to Flint you have “four inches and seven seconds” to answer these questions. If you don’t, your visitor will click the back button and you’ll lose the lead. When someone firsts gets to your landing page there’s a moment of disorientation; confusion is a big contributor to friction, so answering these two questions immediately will increase your conversion rate.

The next big fix is to increase the perceived value of your offering. Do this by identifying and communicating key factors that differentiate your from your competition. Use specific, quantitative & “instantly credible” language. Even if you’re not going head-to-head with your competition, you should still try and be as specific as possible.

I sometimes struggle with this (specificity) myself for our own landing pages. Do our web sites have 4x the awesome sauce of our competitors’ sites? Will signing up for our email newsletter make you 176% more smarterer? I’m still working on those metrics.

Some other bon mots I wrote down:

• Lose all caps in your headlines…difficult to read and frustrating to visitors.
• Use a strong headline; big, bold and dramatic.
• Include at least one paragraph of text, w/bold and/or italicized text to highlight the important ideas. This paragraph needs to overcome the natural cynicism of anyone surfing the net.
• Use images that draw the eye to the text, not that compete with it.

OK, now I’m off to optimize some of our pages and try some A/B split testing on them. Wish me luck!

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When I discuss this concept with companies, however, too often I hear something in the realm of “we don’t know what to provide our customers that would be helpful.”

Because helpfulness hasn’t historically been looked at as a marketing objective (tons of great stuff about this umbrella concept in Scott Stratten’s forthcoming new book UnMarketing – buy it), identifying areas where help could be provided isn’t in the DNA of most companies – yet.

Diagnosing your potential helpfulness doesn’t have to have the complexity of drilling a relief well, learning the triangle offense, or even Mahjong. You just have to put on your customer glasses for a while and think through all the questions, confusions, and frustrations they may have at each stage.

Taxi Mike is Here to Help

During my recent vacation in Canada, I stumbled upon a fantastic example of marketing via helpfulness, from Taxi Mike in Banff, Alberta. Mike drives a cab for Banff Taxi Taxi, and to stand out from the rest of the drivers, he produces an online and offline guide to the local hotspots. Taxi Mike’s Dining Guide is a simple, 8.5×11, tri-fold rack brochure, printed on bright yellow paper, and available for free just about everywhere in town.

In his guide, Mike tells you the best BBQ places, clubs, happy hours, patios, places for kids, and other insider info. Wisely, he also includes a map of the downtown area on the front. The portable size and map make it perfectly logical to bring Mike’s Dining Guide with you when out on the town in Banff. And then, when you’re blurry-eyed at 12:30am, you pull out the guide again and PRESTO! there is Mike’s phone number in big, bold letters.

Total cost of this incredibly helpful marketing effort is very low, and Mike even offsets that by including ads from sponsors! Mike you are a helpful marketing genius.

It’s a Bird. It’s a Plane. It’s Coffee

In another example of Canadian excellence in creating marketing success through helpfulness, a Starbucks in Richmond, B.C. (near the Vancouver airport) wisely has placed a logo on top of their location. Four high-rise hotels surround Starbucks like castle ramparts, each filled with caffeine-crazed travelers. At least 50% of all hotel rooms (hundreds) have windows that look out directly on the Starbucks roof logo. Sure, it’s clever outdoor advertising, but given that “where am I going to get coffee tomorrow?” is a critical question on par with “does this room have bed bugs?” for most business travelers, it’s also incredibly helpful. Bravo.

You can be helpful, too. You just first have to find your customers’ pain points. Here are some tips to help you uncover the transactional or informational rough edges that you can smooth using the sandpaper of good, relevant content:

1. Ask your customer service team. These front lines warriors are the people most in touch with the concerns and questions of your customers and prospects. Have them document EVERY question they receive. When you find a pattern, create content to address it. This is the strategy of creating a Social FAQ.
2. Ask your customers directly. Website surveys, email surveys, Facebook inquiries, focus groups, telephone calls to 25 customers each month. In addition to learning more about what questions and problems your customers may have with you, you’ll accrue a lot of goodwill just by asking.
3. Internal search reports. If you have a search engine on your website, look at a report that shows what people type into that box. Those are usually the questions that not only are top-of-mind among website visitors, but are not satisfactorily answered with your current online content.
4. Observe. You know how much you learn about your customers sitting in your office? Nothing. Make it a habit within your organization to “shop” yourself. Buy your own product. Call your own customer service department. Try to return something to your own company. Better yet, start a secret shopper program and augment your own observations with those of friends, family members, and customers willing to fill out a short shopper report.
5. Compare. In addition to routinely shopping yourself, shop your competitors, too. The way they handle questions, friction, and sticking points can serve as inspiration or a warning to your efforts. Make sure you’re not just shopping who you think your competitors are, but also who Google says your competitors are, based on search engine results.

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These multi-level marketing schemes aren’t limited to home parties for sex toys, BBQ accessories, and household cleaners, of course. They are rife on the internet. If you’ve spent any time in internet marketing circles, you’ll have seen hundreds, no doubt.

Worst business ever.

What Is Multi Level Marketing?

Multilevel marketing is where the salesperson sells items on commission – with a twist. The real “opportunity” – supposedly – is to be had recruiting a downline. A downline consists of other commission-only salespeople who try to recruit other commission-only salespeople. And so on. Some may even sell a few products!

Apparently you’re not allowed to refer to the triangular-shaped Egyptian icon anymore….

The Problem With Any Marketing Opportunity

One major problem with MLM, or any market opportunity, be it affiliate or otherwise, is the size of the market.

All markets are limited. All markets are limited because the number of people is finite. Some markets are significantly more limited than others. For example, the number of people who have $2K, or whatever, to spend on, say, a rapid-mass-cash-code-instant-money-generator is quite small.

That isn’t to say there isn’t money to be made, however the more people trying to flick products, or recruit a downline, and the more people trying to rank well in the SERPS, the less chance a paying customer will arrive via any one site. Claims about making a lot of easy money on-selling such products, therefore, should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Evaluating Market Size And Potential

Over-hyped marketing opportunities often fail because they attempt to sell commodity product into very saturated markets. Or, there may be very little demand for the end product. If there was a lot of demand, surely they’d invest money in experienced salespeople in order to grab market share ahead of competitors.

So how do you size up a market, MLM or otherwise?

If there was an easy way, well….life would be too easy Really, it all comes down to some educated guesswork.

Here’s one simple way of thinking about it:

Market size = the number of buyers in the market x quantity of product purchased buyers in the market per year x price per unit

You could get a rough idea of the number of buyers by looking at search volume against keywords you deem to have some level of buyer intent. Estimating the quantity they buy depends very much on the product. Does it need to be replaced often? i.e. a battery. Or is it a one-off? i.e. A house? When multiplied by the cost, you can estimate the potential size of a market.

There are a number of methods you can use. Some more complex than others. All involve guesswork. However, it’s important to have a rough idea when deciding where to best focus your efforts.

Quantifying the potential of a market is somewhat more difficult.

I could find out the size of the car market in the US using the above equation, but that doesn’t mean I could successfully enter that market. I would also have to evaluate my abilities, the level of competition, and the level of investment required.

This is often the mistake rookie affiliates/multi/level marketers make. They get suckered by the potential numbers, without stopping to think if those numbers make any sense. Even if they do, then does that mean the marketer can successfully enter that market?

Really, the marketing approach – be it MLM or otherwise – is irrelevant. The key questions to ask when considering any market are fundamental ones: how big is the market, how many competitors are there, and how can I compete?

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Marketers must prioritize what will work best and in the mix of online marketing tactics. According to eMarketer, SEO and PPC have been rated the most effective for conversions and ROI and while some companies are using software like PPC management tools to make things easier, there’s a lot more to consider for better segmentation.

With any type of marketing, relevance is essential for achieving a profitable program.  When it comes to search marketing, understanding customers, the keyword searches they use and the offers they’re most likely to respond to are essential.

In order to move your online marketing from fragmented to prioritized and more relevant through search, here are 3 key concepts search marketers should master.

1. Understand searcher personas

It’s fundamental marketing to anticipate and understand customer needs.

To really make a difference with more targeted online marketing, search marketers need to become more sophisticated in their understanding of customer profiles and developing personas to represent who they’re trying to attract via search. Delivering generic content to a searcher looking for a specific product is a common mistake that creates a disconnect for search engines and customers.

“Searcher personas and search acquisition workflows are integral to the way I approach search strategy. Before you can start attracting visitors to your web site, you need to know who you are attracting and why.” Vanessa Fox

Knowing what kind of content and types of digital assets your customers will respond to can improve effectiveness at driving “organic” search  traffic.  The same goes for designing Pay Per Click ads and landing pages that are relevant to the needs of customers you really want to reach.

2. Develop an ideal keyword mix

Many companies start with a list of keywords they think are best for SEO and implement them with on-page optimization and link building.  According to MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report (SEO Edition), 67% of small businesses place more value on on-page optimization over keyword research. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your ideas about keywords are more important than those of your customers.

Developing a keyword glossary is essential and starts by collecting a raw list of concepts, topics and phrases from sources like website content, interviews with front line employees and actual customers, competitor web sites and good old fashioned brainstorming.  That raw list is brought into a keyword research tool that will output provide a list of actual search phrases plus variations sorted by popularity.

Understanding keywords from the perspective of the searcher and where they are in the buying process allows the search marketer to properly optimize content, landing pages and ads accordingly. Same goes for making the ads and landing pages more relevant because it leads to better performance with click through rates and conversions.

From an organic perspective, specifically optimized pages that have attracted relevant links from other related web sites will result in higher rankings for keywords that are being targeted. Customers will self-segment themselves with the search terms they use. By developing an ideal keyword mix that is focused on customer needs and the solutions offered by your products and services, your search marketing efforts will better target customers in a relevant way and increase sales.

3. Optimize content for specifics

Content can mean web pages, digital assets and any other documents that can be optimized for organic search.  Optimization also applies to landing pages used with pay per click advertising to improve quality score. If you read Online Marketing Blog with any frequency, you know my mantra: “If it can be searched, it can be optimized.”

If you don’t have enough content to accommodate all the keywords you’re targeting, then you have an opportunity to create more content.  A common misconception is that updated content is important, when the reality is that adding new content that reflects the search needs of customers is what’s important. The addition of every new web page means another potential entry point to your web site via a link or search.

Being focused helps search engines understand and rank pages so that customers get what they’re actually looking for. Delivering on the promise of a compelling search result is priceless for conversions.

Wrap-up

Fragmented marketing with search helps no one. Marketers would do well for themselves and the customers they’re trying to reach by paying attention to the development of searcher personas, developing quality keyword research and optimizing specific pages and digital assets for specific phrases according the searcher needs in the buying cycle. As a result, you’ll deliver a more relevant experience for both search engines and customers.

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Maybe we need a different approach. GET HUNTED!

How? Marketing needs to pay more attention to being hunted by ready buyers. Yes, it might not have the same long term value as nurturing a prospect along. Then again…how many of our nurturing efforts have not played out the way we hope when our prospect leaves, or the company is sold?

Being hunted means that we position our www site and direct marketing efforts to be found, easily. It means working harder to make our target markets even tighter for finding those who are ready to buy. Our marketing message and value proposition must be simpler and clear with a strong call to action for our targeted buyer. Our www site must become a lead generation engine where our SEO is more effective than ever. Most importantly, our lead follow-up must be unmatched in our sector. As marketers, we must get our hunters hunted.

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