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• Strategic Marketing for Driving Traffic to Your Online Business
• What Is A Landing Page?
• Building An Effective Landing Page
• Increasing Landing Page Conversion: Converting the Prospect Into A Customer
• Focusing Your Marketing Energy
• Targeting Your Customer
• The Ebook Market Explosion
• The Environmental Impact of Ebooks and Printed Books
• Email Marketing Statistics
• Marketing with Constant Contact
• Leading with Talent Development
• Talent Development: Why Management Is Not Enough
• Using Training to Support Employee Engagement Initiatives
• The Benefits of Hiring A Business Coach

Targeting Your Customer

by Kris Kiler

Create User Profile

“Customers attach value to products in proportion to the perceived ability of those products to help solve their problems. Hence a product has meaning only from the viewpoint of the buyer or the ultimate user. All else is derivative. Only the buyer or user can assign value, because value can reside only in the benefits he wants or perceives.”
— Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Imagination (p77)

Who is going to browse your website? Targeting the profile of your user can be valuable to the marketing process for your website. Some people believe that the entire world is the market. Or others believe that if they identify specifics of the user then they are leaving out huge groups of individuals that may purchase from their website. One thing to remember is that the target customer is not necessarily the entire market for your website.

Think of your entire market as an apple tree. It is an extremely old metaphor, but a good one. Then, consider the fact that not all apples are easy to get to. You don’t have a ladder (that would be way to easy) and the ones at the bottom are easy to reach. The ones in the middle are moderate to reach. The one’s at the top—difficult to reach. Then consider that at each segment; easy, moderate, difficult; there are multiple variables that define the customer groups within a particular segment.

Your job is to determine, as best you can, the characteristics of the customers in the easy-to-reach segment. These customers will be defined by both psychographic and demographic characteristics.

Psychographic Characteristics

Psychographic characteristics relate to the style and personality of your user such as values, interests, and activities. Questions to ask yourself and write down;

• What beliefs does your user have?
  
  
  

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• What values do they hold?
  
  
  

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• What activities do they take part?
  
  
  

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Demographic Characteristics

Demographic characteristics are those that relate to those things outside of personality or style such as race, age, gender, income, regional location, employment status, education level and so on.

• How old is your user?
  
  
  

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• Is race or gender an important factor? If so, determine gender and race of your user.
  
  
  

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• Will people in a certain income-bracket be more likely to purchase from your website than others? If so, determine appropriate income bracket.
  
  
  

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• Is your website written for people with a college degree or higher?
  
  
  

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• Is there a certain employment category that your website may be positioned for? {Lawyer, Doctor, Health Professional, Educator, Politician, Government, Public Services, Military}
  
  
  

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Now that you have a picture of your user it is time to define those activities that will most likely attract the user to your website.

> Next Step : Marketing Activities

About Kris Kiler

Kris Kiler is an author, consultant and entrepreneur. Prior to founding Kris Kiler Marketing Design, Kris was president and chief executive officer of Unite Media Group Inc, an Internet services, publishing and consulting organization focused on human personality differences. Kris has worked extensively with corporate trainers and management consultants to create custom training programs and to develop and implement successful and innovative corporate training initiatives. He also published more than twenty-seven publications through Telos Publications by a variety of writers and collaborators—overseeing everything from acquisition, editing, design, printing, and marketing. Kris has been designing websites and marketing collateral since 1996. He has worked with more than 140 marketing clients to navigate their success on the Internet through the design of their website, email marketing, Internet products and services, and supporting print collateral.

Kris is the author of Leading Engagement: An Executive Summary (forthcoming), Ready, Aim, Capture!: The Secret to Successful Internet Marketing and coauthor of 101 Ways to Generate Top Book Sales: A Handbook for Authors Ready to Plead Insanity and The Author’s First Aid Kit series (forthcoming).