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| Title : Target Your Market! | ||||||
| Author : : www.ahbbo.com | ||||||
| Target Your Market! © 2000 Elena Fawkner The inspiration for this week’s article was a submission I received from Esther Hinchliff (see her guest article “Untax Yourself” below). In email discussion with Esther about her article, I mentioned to her how refreshing it was to receive an article submission that actually had some real relevance to the subject matter of my newsletter! That got me thinking. How do you all decide where to target your marketing efforts for your businesses? I’m sure you’ve all heard, ad nauseam, how writing articles and having them published in newsletters together with your byline and resource box is an effective way to generate publicity for your business. It’s excellent advice so long as your article gets read by a targeted audience that has an interest in the subject matter of your article. It seems every day I receive at least one article submission request. I’m glad because I welcome article submissions from writers. I publish a guest article every week so I’m constantly on the lookout for fresh, relevant material that I think you will find useful. So why is it that some people insist on sending me articles about things like nutritional supplements (a case in point)? I have nothing against nutritional supplements (I take them myself!) but this newsletter is about how to start and successfully operate your own home business. And these articles aren’t about starting up a home business as a distributor of nutritional supplements (THAT would actually be useful), but, rather, about the health benefits of the particular nutritional supplement being promoted. WHY would I put something so irrelevant to the raison d’etre of this newsletter in front of you? Sure, a few of you might, coincidentally, be interested in nutritional supplements but that is not why you subscribe to this newsletter. And if you’re not interested in nutritional supplements then all I would achieve by publishing an article on the topic is a whole heap of unsubscribe requests, and rightly so. So I’m not going to waste your time with it, no matter how well written and engrossing the article may otherwise be. In order to be effective in promoting your particular business, whatever it is, you have to seek out your target market. This is as true online as it is offline. Just because you CAN reach massive numbers of people with your message on the internet far more cheaply (read “free”) and quickly (read "instantly") than you can offline, does this mean you SHOULD? What’s the point of devoting your time and energies to marketing to a massive group of people without first knowing whether they, as a group, have a general interest in your subject matter? It’s MUCH more efficient and effective, not to mention smarter, to first find out where your prospective customers congregate and then target that congregation than it is to use a scattergun approach and hope that one of your bullets will find its target. You will find that by selectively targeting your prospects before marketing to them, your conversion ratio (the proportion of your target market that actually purchases your product) will be much higher than the results you will achieve taking potshots in the dark. After all, what would you rather have, a conversion ratio of 2% out of a target market of 100 or a conversion ratio of .00002% out of a target market of 10,000? If your business is nutritional supplements, find newsletters that deal with health-related issues and submit articles (and classified ads) to the publishers of those newsletters. If your business relates to promoting knowledge of the tax-breaks available to home business owners, target newsletters related to home businesses. This is how Esther found us. She researched the home business category in Ruth Townsend’s Directory of Ezines, and targeted publishers of related newsletters. Lo and behold, she found a publisher who was looking for useful and informative content for this week’s newsletter! _________________________ Elena Fawkner is editor of A Home-Based Business Online ... practical ideas, resources and strategies for your home-based or online business. [site]www.ahbbo.com |
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| Author Link : Elena Fawkner | ||||||