When you have a small business with a limited marketing budget, you can sometimes ignore online marketing, because you simply don’t know where to start. What if you try one strategy and it doesn’t work? How much money will you have wasted?
Part of the solution is to realise that online marketing is essential to the success of your business in today’s internet focused world. The other part of the solution is carefully select one online channel that is perfect for your business.
The underlying question here, is of course, how do you pick this channel?
The answer is that you need to know your target audience and where they hang out online, then you will know which channel to select.
Identifying your target audience
To be able to market your products or services successfully, you must know who you are marketing to – in other words, you must know your target audience. No-one can design a marketing campaign for everyone, so you will need to reduce this down to your most likely customer and then design your marketing campaign to target this type of customer.
One of the ways to find out the demographics of your ‘average’ customer is to use Google Analytics. This platform will give you a host of valuable information about visitors to your website, which you can combine with your own knowledge to identify your most likely customer.
What if you don’t have any visitors yet and you have a brand new website? In this case, you will just have to brain storm your target audience, using your knowledge of your products or services. For example, if you sell baby clothes, your most likely customers will be young women of child bearing age with one or more children under the age of 5 years.
These young mothers may be very happy to purchase their baby clothes online, because they are time poor, but they can still search the internet while their little one is down for an afternoon nap.
Identifying the best channel
Following the example above, when this young mother goes online, she will most probably spend time on Facebook, where she can easily catch up with family and friends, and also share her latest baby photos.
In this case, the ideal marketing channel for you to target is Facebook, giving you one big social media site where you can generate plenty of leads for your business. Using Facebook ads allows you to successfully target your audience, as you can be selective about the type of people who are presented with your Facebook ads. This saves you a lot of money promoting your business to people who would rarely if ever buy your products, giving you lots of qualified leads for your money.
Continuing on with the same example in Facebook, you can also target customers by country, so if you only ship your baby clothes to customers in Australia you would limit your targeted audience to Australia. You can even locate customers by postcode, suburb or state, as well as by gender, age bracket, relationship type, education, salary range, type of work and whether they have children or not.
Once you have successfully generated a continuing supply of leads from this one channel, you can then add in other channels that your target audience might also frequent.
For help with online marketing for your new business, call us on 02 8097 7957 or complete our online enquiry form.