Regardless of the budget you have available, getting to know your target market before you launch a website is critical to its success.
In this guide I’ll share a few low cost ideas that will at least give you some insight into the people you want to sell to.
Forget about guesswork
In their mad rush to get up and running online, many small business owners forget this fundamental step and just make assumptions about the people they want to target. This approach isn’t likely to work, and even if it brings in some clients, you could still be missing out on many more.
In an ideal world we’d all have a huge budget to pay a specialist firm to get to know our target audience inside out, but very few start-ups are in that position.
Listed below are a few ideas to help you get to know your potential clients better:
Ask everyone you know for help
Imagine you’re clear on your target market; for example, women between the ages of 50 and 80 with a decent disposable income. There’s bound to be someone you know who knows someone that fits into your target market.
If you ask enough people, you should be able to get a few who are willing to help you out by trialling a product or service you’re offering or completing a questionnaire.
Use social media
You can also post a poll on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook to get feedback from your target market. If you ask the right questions and give people some form on incentive to complete your poll, you could end up with some extremely useful information you can incorporate into your website.
Ask a copywriter
A good website copywriter will have experience of researching target markets for their clients. They will also know how to channel this information into well written text on your website. Of course, this is a more expensive option than the two above, but it could very quickly produce a great return on your investment.
Look at your competitors
If there’s anyone online offering the same services/products as you (and it’s likely there will be) then take a look at their website and other marketing materials to see what you think.
You can often learn a lot more by viewing sites that haven’t researched their target markets properly than those that have. Take a look at the language they use, does it sound appropriate for your audience? A great question to ask your target market in a questionnaire or online poll is “what websites do you like/dislike and why?”
Courtesy of www.searchblogger.co.uk