The following article is based on an excerpt from Outcome-Based Marketing: New Rules for Marketing on the Web.
Wouldn't it be good to know who your ideal prospects are before sending out emails, newsletters, tweets, Facebook fan-page invites, or webinar invitations?
Many of us naturally assume that everyone wants to hear what we have to say or desperately wants to purchase the service or product we're selling. Found that to be true lately?
Finding Your Audience
The Web landscape is full of locations that attract all sorts of prospects. Some flock to iTunes and YouTube, whereas others congregate at blogs and community websites. Each business owner's challenge is to figure out where his or her ideal prospects gather.
Not every person is willing to purchase our products—there, I've said it. Even though consumers are turning to the Web in droves to make purchases, statistics show that only about 3% of people who initially visit a website are ready to purchase. That means the other 97% are just window-shopping, kicking the tires, gathering information—or, they're lost.
In simpler terms, that means for every 1,000 website visitors, only about 30 are ready to buy. Now, one might say, "Wow, that's fantastic. Thirty new customers per hour or per month." But not so fast.
Let's factor in the "bounce rate"—the percentage of visitors who leave a website within five seconds of arriving. It is typical for a site's bounce rate to be between 50-60%. So, let's subtract 550 visitors from the 1,000, and now the number of visitors ready to buy quickly drops from 30 to 13.
Profile Your Ideal Prospects
The best way to know your ideal prospects is to identify their habits, their mannerisms, their wants, needs, and desires. Don't define the ideal prospect as a "male or female living in the continental United States who likes to fish." That's way too general. The first characteristic—"male or female"—includes everyone alive!
Try to come up with a more specific picture of your ideal prospect. Suppose you are in the seminar business and small business is your niche. Your ideal prospect could be described as...
- A self-starter
- A pioneer
- A person with high energy
- His or her own boss
- Strong-willed
- A workaholic
- Competitive
- Someone who knows he or she cannot do everything
Those characteristics will lead you in certain directions on the Web and steer you away from others. For instance, small business entrepreneurs are less likely to congregate on MySpace than they are to assemble on LinkedIn, a professional network of more than 55 million businesspeople from 200 countries. It's a great place to establish business relationships.
People who know they cannot handle every obstacle they encounter are more likely to frequent bookstores, Internet knowledge bases, and other educational opportunities, such as seminars.
Businesses typically have several prospect types. Make sure to isolate each type with its own characteristics and wants, needs, and desires. Being too broad attracts a general audience, whereas a company's products and services likely don't appeal to a massive group of people.
Once your ideal prospect is profiled, you'll need to ferret out his or her favorite places to congregate on the Web. People tend to congregate in certain spots online. Financial people like reading blogs about making money and investing other people's money. Fly-fishing enthusiasts hang out at fishing forums (where they can lie to one another about the last "big one" that got away).
A company's ideal prospects have plenty of places online where they might gather. It's your job to find out where your prospects congregate and develop strategies to gain visibility in those venues.
Consider Various Meeting Points
Let's take a crack at chopping the Web up into meeting points. There are forums, chat rooms, community download sites, social networking sites, traditional websites, and blogs. Your ideal prospects may subscribe to newsletters, read articles, or get targeted press releases. Don't forget about their favorite search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Surely, the Web could be separated into more chunks, but this is a good starting point.
Suppose you run a marketing firm with offerings that include on-the-ground marketing tactics, such as direct mail. Or perhaps you specialize in Web marketing solutions with mostly electronic touches.
Do Some Digging
How could you easily tell if your ideal prospects visit community sites such as Digg, Sphinn, StumbleUpon, or Delicious? Do some searching.
If you go to Digg and search the term "marketing," you'll find more than a million results (and more are coming each day). "Internet marketing" brings up only 120,000 or so posts. "Marketing," then, is likely more popular than "Internet marketing."
So the analysis may be showing you that fewer people are submitting articles on "Internet marketing." That means there is room for you. You could start submitting articles and attracting a following of readers. Just by perusing the menu on Digg, you can see that it has posts about technology, world and business, science, gaming, lifestyle, entertainment, sports, and offbeat items.
How does Sphinn compare? Its website tagline reads, "Internet Marketing News and Discussion Forums." Bingo! That may be just the place to get in front of your ideal prospects. Searching for "marketing" articles brings up over 950 posts. "Internet marketing" gets you more than 1,300 posts. You should develop a strategy to be seen in both of those venues. Those two spots are where "your people" gather.
To uncover whether your prospects read or contribute to certain forums, all you need to do is spend a little time reading the discussion threads. Are they talking about what relates to your business? Are there problems to be solved? Can discussions be added to begin establishing relationships?
Marketing dollars are not spent wisely when your ideal prospects' whereabouts are unknown. Here's a story to illustrate that point.
A Vignette
A summer camp—let's call it Camp FunInTheSun—wanted to determine the best place to spend its marketing dollars. It had spent about $9,000 a season on advertising via local radio spots and Yellow Pages ads. As the new summer got underway, the camp asked each family or organization how they had found out about Camp FunInTheSun.
Half had found the camp's website, and the balance had attended the camp as a teen, had sent their kids to the camp in the past, or had known someone who had.
None had let their fingers do the walking or had heard the local radio spots—and so $9,000 had been dumped down a dark rat hole.
Needless to say, the camp stopped the Yellow Pages ads and local radio spots, and it launched a campaign both to reach past guests and campers and to strengthen its Web presence.
