Should you use a shotgun or a sniper approach to Internet marketing?
The Internet has too many target markets for your business. Boosting your sales in every way can make profits rise to the ceiling and over the roof to the sky if you know how to use the right weapon.
Compare the weapons to target your customers, you need something to get as many prospects as you can, but still sift the possible buyers out.
A sniper can take out only a specific target market and look for possible buyers. A shotgun can target almost everybody’s attention in placing your ads on your website or your affiliate websites.
The sniper can only hit or catch the attention of specific customers – they have a higher percentage of making a sale. A shotgun however, is well-equipped. It gathers possible prospects and brings traffic to your website.
I would recommend the shotgun as it can target more customers at the same time. You will never know if your customer likes them or not and you can have your way in letting them know your ad and perhaps make a possible sale.
The 2 kinds of customers:
Most businesses have a mix of good, better, and best customers. Unfortunately, there are bad customers as well, and they can be a waste of time and money.
1. Good customers might be good because they spend lots of money. They might be good because they come back often.
2. Bad customers are the ones who are never satisfied and almost always cost you more to serve than they spend.
The trick is in identifying the best customers and determining what characteristics differentiate these profitable customers from all the rest. Then you focus your promotional strategies on the segments most likely to produce your new best customers. This information can come from quite innocuous questions.
Families with new babies, for example, often change their car to something more practical. A manufacturer of baby goods could build an effective mailing list by surveying people just to find out which drivers have changed from a sports car to an estate.
Here’s how to do it.
Get to Know Your Current Customers
What do you need to know about your current best customers in order to find others like them? Answer: Geographic location, demographics, and purchase history.
Anyone providing consumer goods or services probably already has much of the purchase history information required in their own sales records and a wealth of consumer information is available through census data.
Bring these bits of information together and turn your hunches into sound data to guide your product offerings, promotional programs, and overall marketing strategy. When you combine what you know about current customers with the information available to you about geography and demographics in your trade area, your search for new customers narrows in on those most likely to be profitable.
Collect Information about Your Customers
Businesses that serve only a few customers generally try to get to know each one of them personally. Businessmen with a small customer base can treat individual customers to a lunch or social outing. Whatever the event, it’s not entirely social, of course. One objective of these interactions is to quantify the customer’s need for the product or service being offered as well as what benefits or features might be important.
But for anyone providing consumer goods or services to hundreds or thousands of potential customers, that strategy is clearly impractical. Your objective is also to get to know the customers in order to determine their needs and preferences so you can market to them more intelligently. But your means of surveying them will be entirely different.
Study Characteristics of your Customers
One clothing retailer decided to make a game of it. She asked customers at the check-out to put a pin on a wall map showing approximately where they came from. People who spent a lot of money were given a special color pin. It became pretty clear after a couple of weeks that high-spending buyers lived in an area just north of the shop. What was so special about that part of town? It was because that area was laden with high-income professional workers who chose to live there.
The wall map showed the retailer her trade area. The demographics of that neighborhood to the north gave her new insight into her best customers.
The clothing retailer’s next step was to find other parts of the area with similar concentrations. She found two likely neighborhoods using demographic information, but they were several miles outside the trade area indicated by the pins on the map. She mailed an introductory coupon and a map showing the shop’s location to addresses in the prospect neighborhoods she’d identified. The coupon rewarded these more remote prospects for driving the extra distance to the store.
In marketing terms, what did she do? The clothing retailer correlated geography and purchase behavior to find her best customers. She then attached demographic information in order to identify promising new locations. This research powered her strategic marketing response – a plan to expand her trade area to include more “best-customer” neighborhoods.
