Part One: Identifying your Target Audience

If you want your marketing efforts to work, you must define a Target Audience. If you skip this step, you will end up marketing your products and services to people who are likely to never be interested in them. If you want to cast a wide net, you could define your target audience as anybody who would pay for your products and services. However, you probably want to narrow your focus more than that. Maybe your target customer is one who won’t be able to imagine life without your product or service. When you have your target defined, create a profile: complete description of the person. Who is your customer? How old are they? What industries do they work in? What do they do for enjoyment?

Now you have identified who. The next step is to identify the why? Why will these customers buy your products or avail themselves of your services? Is it time saving, a bargain, or easy to use? Are you simply solving a problem that nobody else is?

Part Two: Understanding Your Customers’ Interests

Once you know who your customer is, it is time to find out what they like, and what they do. You can do this by utilizing the demographic information you identified in part one. Use information such as gender, age, and geographical region to do some research and gain valuable knowledge about your customers. Once you know your customers’ interests, you will have a better grip on where to advertise, special offers that will appeal to your base, the content they will be interested, and where you can find them on Social Media.

Part Three: Study those who have found Success in your Niche

You need to know who the top players in your industry, and you need to know what strategies they are using. Fortunately there are several analysis tools you can use to accomplish this goal. One of these is a well-known, but grossly under-utilized competitive analysis tools. This tool is Google’s advance search feature. If you know the website URL of one of your competitors, you can find every location on the internet that links back to their website by typing Link: customerwebsitename.com into google. This information will give insight into where they are placing their content and who they are establishing relationships with.

Part Four: Develop Relationships with Important Bloggers in Your Industry

Who are the respected authorities in your industry? What are they saying on their blogs? Most importantly, how can you get your own content featured as a guest blogger? The first step is seeing how to use Social media: to develop presence and a following. This is accomplished by publishing your own content on your company blog, personal blog, facebook, instragram, or youtube. After all, a well-known blogger isn’t very likely to give space to another blogger unless that blogger brings an audience with them. Another step that you can take to establish familiarity with other bloggers is to connect with them on a regular basis. Tag them in your posts, follow their blogs and Social Media Accounts, and engage with them in conversations.

Part Five: Connect with your Target Audience Via Social Media

If you have not done this already, you should begin by creating social media accounts on the major social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. If you would like to set yourself up to develop relationships with businesses in your space, you will also want to create a LinkedIn profile for your company. Finally, keep in mind that account creation is only the beginning.  You must participate in these forums actively and frequently, place guest post on authority websites. This includes engaging in conversations with your customers.

Part Six: Give Your Customer Base a Great Website

Congratulations! You’ve identified your target consumer. You’ve worked to understand their interests and concerns. You’ve studied the successful people and companies in your niche, and developed a relationship with some of them. Finally, you’ve begun to build relationships with your target customer on social media. Your final step is to develop and improve your website until it is a customer converting machine. Here are just a few of the steps that you can take to turn more visitors into customers:

• Many visitors won’t scroll down unless they see something compelling. Make sure the top half of your webpage contains great information, action links, and special offers.
• Make sure every page has a visible call to action.
• Pare your forms down to only information that is needed.
• Post your best selling products and services together, and provide a link to those services on the top half of your web page.
• Keep the content on all web pages fresh
• Don’t force your customers to register or click through a lot of links in order to place an order.

Keep in mind that the smartest of the customer conversions tips is to insure that it is as easy as possible for customers to order your products and services, and to pay you.

Sources:

www.quicksprout.com/
   www.jeffbullas.com/
   www.problogger.net/
   blog.kissmetrics.com

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