Target Marketing Boosts Profits

I often get made fun of for this, but one of my favorite movies of all time is “Signs,” directed by M. Night Shya­malan. Why do I like it so much?

Prob­a­bly because it shares many char­ac­ter­is­tics with Alfred Hitch­cock films. (Hitch­cock is my favorite direc­tor of all time.) But it’s also a bit funny, a bit scary, a bit emo­tional, and very sus­pense­ful. The premise is an alien inva­sion, but the plot is really about a min­is­ter regain­ing his faith.

Talk about some­thing for everyone!

That brings up a good ques­tion. How do you adver­tise a film that has some­thing for every­one? Do you try to appeal to every­one? Or do you choose the most prof­itable seg­ment of the market?

As an online copy­writer, I often face sim­i­lar ques­tions for the prod­ucts I write for. Some prod­ucts appeal to many dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple, in very dif­fer­ent ways.

Take web video, for example.

Peo­ple from all walks of life could use help putting video on the web. From small busi­ness own­ers to cor­po­rate types… from eBay sell­ers to Inter­net mar­keters… and from moms who want to show off their kids to kids who want to show off their antics…

… The mar­ket for peo­ple who want to put video on the web is wide open.

So if your goal is to gen­er­ate the most sales, who do you direct your copy to? Who is the per­fect cus­tomer to pic­ture in your mind as you craft the copy?

There are a few ways to answer this question.

If you have an exist­ing site and you’re rewrit­ing the copy, the smartest thing to do is con­sider where your traf­fic is com­ing from. Any basic web stats pro­gram should be able to list sites that are send­ing you traf­fic (Stat​Counter​.com is one of many, for instance).

A quick analy­sis of these refer­ring sites is a sim­ple way to dis­cover which mar­ket seg­ment is most likely to be your best bet for profitability.

If you’re get­ting a vast major­ity of your traf­fic from say, web­mas­ter forums, you might tweak your copy to address the “techie.”

How­ever, just because you’re get­ting more traf­fic from the “web­mas­ter forums,” doesn’t mean this traf­fic is your most prof­itable. More advanced track­ing pro­grams (like Muvar) can track the num­ber of sales from dif­fer­ent traf­fic sources.

This way, you may dis­cover that “techies” are a major­ity of your traf­fic, but a minor­ity of your customers.

Could you tai­lor your sales mes­sage bet­ter for the “techies” and see an increase in sales? Maybe. But you may have much bet­ter luck going after the traf­fic that is already con­vert­ing higher.

But what if you’re writ­ing copy for a brand new site, with no traf­fic to ana­lyze? Then how do you choose the most prof­itable mar­ket seg­ment to target?

The most obvi­ous choice would be to choose the largest group. But that’s not always the case. You might also con­sider which seg­ment is eas­i­est to adver­tise to.

One way to find out which mar­ket seg­ment is eas­i­est to reach would be to see how many of them are on the web look­ing for your prod­uct. A basic key­word search can tell you quite a bit.

If you use a pro­gram like Adword Ana­lyzer or a web based solu­tion like Word­Tracker, just type in your root key­word to find out what other key­word sug­ges­tions come up.

For exam­ple, if you type in “magic tricks” into Word­tracker, you’ll find the most pop­u­lar related searches are “easy magic tricks” and “sim­ple magic tricks” among others.

So even if your “magic trick” prod­uct might be advanced enough for a pro­fes­sional magi­cian, it might be smarter to write your copy for com­plete begin­ners… sim­ply because there are more of them search­ing for magic tricks than there are professionals.

Another con­sid­er­a­tion when choos­ing a mar­ket seg­ment could be how com­pet­i­tive your mar­ket place is. If the largest mar­ket seg­ment is being bom­barded by sev­eral dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, why not carve out a niche for your­self and cater to a smaller segment?

Also, don’t rule out cre­at­ing more than one web­site, aimed at dif­fer­ent seg­ments of your mar­ket, sell­ing the same prod­uct. Maybe a sales let­ter for com­plete begin­ners on one site, and a sales let­ter for pro­fes­sional magi­cians on another site will work the best!

Regard­less, find­ing and tar­get­ing a prof­itable mar­ket seg­ment in a cal­cu­lated way is the key to max­i­miz­ing prof­its and return on investment.

A prod­uct that appeals to the gen­eral pub­lic isn’t an excuse to write “gen­eral” copy. And skip­ping this step could be a costly mistake.

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