Does Your Niche Market Include Baby Boomers?
June 27, 2008
If your niche market includes targeting baby boomers, you might be surprised to find a lot of your target audience spending their time on the web.
This is in STARK contrast to the current landscape of most of the web. Most of the web is created with young eyes in mind. Take for example the prevalence of teen tiny type used in many website designs Choosing the right typeface is truly an art… read David Airey’s Typography Tips but many graphic artists are in love with a 9 pt arial for content instead of the much easier to read 12 pt size.
Kay Frenzer over at SEOdiva offers a unique perspective on who is actually surfing the web. In her post Gaping Hole in Online Marketing to Baby Boomers, she chronicles many fascinating statistics of baby boomers on the web and how many of them feel ignored by the web.
One thing I’ve noticed with my older clients is they always want to add a page to their blog about “how to use a blog”. Yet, I have SEVERAL clients who are 60+ who are launching their second (or third) careers and are using a blog to help promote their new business.
So if your niche market includes Baby Boomers (people age 45+) then take a look at your site through THEIR eyes. Will they see themselves in the images featured on your site? Can they READ your site? Are you trying to reach them online?
According to Kay’s research, if your niche market included Baby Boomers, you’ll find a lot of them feeling ignored and unloved online!
Blog Marketing: How to Get Free PR for Your Blog Courtesy of Don Imus
June 25, 2008
Want to garner free publicity for your products or services? The follow Don Imus’ lead and make racist comments for all to hear and/or read.
This morning, CBS Radio is getting plenty of free publicity for their latest “shock jock”, Don Imus. ESPN is all over the story… blogs are buzzing:
- The Hollywood blog leads the parade with what has to be a tongue in cheek title “Is Don Imus Racist?”
- Eflux Media jumped to his defense with Don Imus Was Being Sarcastic Not Racist
- Hot Air has a blog post on Imus steps in it again?
- The Politico blog weighs in with A new Imus controversy?
- The Sirens Chronicle has her own DELICIOUS take on the remark at There you go. Now we know…
What do all of these posts have in common? They’re bringing Don Imus and his recent comments on his radio show to the forefront for yet another 15 minutes of fleeting “fame”.
Perhaps one of the Imus show sponsors is making noises about canceling… or perhaps the last book didn’t bring glad tidings for the show. Whatever the motivation, this kind of comment could NOT have been made accidentally. It was deliberate and it worked.
Everyone is talking about Don Imus today. It’s a great time to find a MORTAL BLOG ENEMY to really rack up the PR for your blog.
Want lots of free PR for your blog… defend Don Imus’s comments… or make a few of your own. (Note: Tongue is FIRMLY in cheek here!!!)
Your B2B Niche Marketing Strategy
June 23, 2008
Niche marketing is not just for B2C websites but also apply to B2B websites as well. Creating an effective B2B Niche Marketing Strategy is essential to business to business marketing success.
Of of my recently discovered but quickly becoming favorite blogs is the one maintained by Joost de Valk. In a guest post B2B SEO: Marketing strategy for specific niches by his Onetomarket colleague Erik-Jan Bulthuis he writes:
As the graphs shows, it might take weeks or even months for someone decides to buy the product. In the same research of Enquiro Research, 85% of the respondents claim that they use online media somewhere in the buying process. This shows the importance of having a good B2B website for your products and services. Search engines do play an important role in the buying process.
When a purchasing decision takes weeks or months, that is defined by Neil Rackham of the Huthwaite Institute as a Major Sale. One of the defining characteristics of the Major Sale is that the buyer, whether it be an individual purchasing on behalf of a business or an individual purchasing on his/her own behalf, needs to be able to TRUST the seller.
That means, if you’re making a Major Sale that you need to be OBSESSED with building trust with your buyers.
One way to establish that trust is to have your website rank well NATURALLY on related keyword terms that your buyers are using to find the solutions your company offers. There’s just something about the listings on those first few pages of Google that automatically inspires trust among buyers… whether they’re B2B or B2C!
Which is why SEO is important to every business trying to execute and niche marketing strategy which includes the web as a marketing tool. It’s surprising how often visitors will type the business URL into the search box to find a website. What’s sad is when the company’s website doesn’t appear first in such a basic search.
Providing Customer Solutions = Profit
June 18, 2008
One of the biggest issues I get “push back” on from clients is encouraging them to focus on the problems their customers are facing when creating their marketing messages. When you can provide customer solutions to problems, profits will follow almost automatically.
This is why I hammer pretty hard on “focus on your customers as individuals so you can provide solutions” in my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.
See, if you know what PROBLEMS your prospective customers are facing, you can then create marketing messages which focus upon the CUSTOMER SOLUTIONS your business provides.
The beauty of targeting your market as individuals instead of “groups” is that groups don’t have “problems”… individuals do.
When you define your target market as individuals, it’s easier to address the specific individual’s unique goals, desires and problems. When you define your target audience as individuals, it prepares you to create effective marketing messages… ones that enter into the conversation that is already taking place within your customer minds.
Need Help with Small Business Advertising?
June 11, 2008
Small businesses need all the help they can get when it comes to creating successful and effective advertising messages. This is why many small business owners cringe when they hear the quote attributed to John Wannamaker that goes, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
You can almost hear the cries of agony from small business owners through your monitor….
“HALF of my advertising is going to be WASTED!?!?!
You mean I have to spend TWICE what I need to spend to get my advertising to work?”
Um… that may be overly optimistic. Seth Godin writes in his post 5 Common Cliches (done wrong):
Half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half. Actually, it’s closer to 1% of your advertising that works, at the most. Your billboard reaches 100,000 people and if you’re lucky, it gets you a hundred customers..
I deliver even worse news in my book and elsewhere on this blog… it’s possible that what IS working in your advertising messages may actually be HURTING your business instead of helping to build it.
I’m just overflowing with good news today, aren’t I?
It gets worse. Dominic Canterbury in his post “I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half” hits the nail right on the head when he writes:
I’m telling you this because as an independent business, you probably learned most of your marketing tricks by watching the big, successful companies. Very sensibly, you might have presumed that huge and expensive marketing departments headed by big-name gurus would actually know what they’re doing.
Turns out, though, the big boys really don’t know what they’re doing. No doubt some of it is working, but they don’t know how, when or why. And to make matters worse, it’s looking like the really big, flashy and expensive stuff is actually the least effective.
UGH! If you can’t learn from the big guys, then where can you catch a break? Well, there is a silver lining to this dark, dark advertising cloud… watch the successful SMALL businesses in your area and see what they’re doing.
The problem with this approach is you can’t see EVERYTHING they’re doing because you can’t be everywhere at once. However, there is one thing you can look for in successful marketing messages… usually they speak to the solving a problem for a tightly targeted customer. (Read my post The Power of Pain for more on this subject.)
Creating a tightly targeted “niche marketing” message is the first step in creating affordable AND successful small business advertising campaigns. This is my cue to shamelessly self promote my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.
Affordable Small Business Advertising
June 9, 2008
Over the past two decades, I have spent my career helping small business owners to create affordable small business advertising. The problem most small business owners have is that the only place for them to turn for help in creating such advertising are the media reps which sell local advertising. Every once in a while you’ll find a real pro selling advertising at the local level whose primary focus is upon creating success for your business. These advertising pros recognize that they will achieve success by helping YOU to achieve advertising success. If you’re lucky enough to have found such a gem, be sure to send him/her a nice thank you gift because this type of local media rep is very rare.
Many advertising reps are focused on one thing: selling advertising. Whether your advertising works or not for your business is usually not a primary concern. Offering an affordable advertising solution is usually the FURTHEST thing from your local media rep’s mind.
With that in mind, here are 5 keys to creating affordable advertising for your small business.
5 Keys to Creating Affordable Small Business Advertising
1. Tightly target your advertising message.
When you try to create a message for everyone, then you’re in fact speaking to no one. By tightly targeting your advertising message, you can then…
2. Tightly target your advertising message delivery.
When you’ve created a tightly targeted message, you can then tightly target your delivery. You’ll buy your small business advertising based on the number of “impressions” you make. When you tightly target your message, you can tightly target your audience. That means fewer “wasted” impressions, which are impressions you make when you’re reaching members outside of your targeted audience.
3. Focus on a single media
When you’re operating on a limited advertising budget, there is no such thing as a “media mix”. For the absolute MAXIMUM impact, pair radio or television with your website.
Radio and television are GREAT at operating “under the radar” and getting tightly targeted advertising message noticed.
4. Tightly target your ad delivery.
This is where you’ll meet with resistance from your media rep. He/she will usually try to get you to allow the station to determine where to place your ads. Worse yet, you may try to spread your ad dollars over as long as possible. THIS WILL DRAMATICALLY AFFECT YOUR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN’S SUCCESS!
If you’ve got a limited budget, then your goal should be to OWN a single program or day part. Don’t allow your ads to run willy-nilly. If you’re buying radio, schedule your spots so they HAVE to run 9 times in a 3 hour period. (Your rep won’t like this… the traffic department won’t like this, but stick to your guns and don’t sign the contract without this!) If you’re buying television, (especially if you’re using the incredibly affordable “cable” advertising) you may not be able to specify a particular show but you can certainly limit your spots to a specific station. Again, your goal is to OWN your little corner of the television network.
If you can only afford 20 spots on cable, then schedule those 20 spots over a 4 day period. Don’t try to spread those 20 spots over 20 days… your message will get lost in the sea of advertising clutter.
The word picture I use with clients is to think of a glob of peanut butter. The “month” of advertising is represented by the slice of bread. Instead of spreading the peanut butter thinly over the entire slice of bread, plop that glob of peanut butter onto the slice of bread. Don’t spread it around because we want the viewing or listening audience to KNOW when they’re tasting peanut butter!!!
5. Make your call to action a visit to the website.
This is important. See, advertising is a combination of art and science. You may need to tweak the message you’re delivering.
If you make your call to action “call our office for an appointment,” then the only form of measurement you have is whether the phone rings. However, if the call to action is “visit our website” then you can take a look at your log files and see if the ad drove visitors to your website. If it didn’t, it’s time to “tweak” either the message or the delivery method.
I had an experience with this with a client of mine. We create a tightly targeted marketing message and delivered it via local cable advertising. Because the ad drove customers to a web site, we were able to objectively see if the ad was “working”. It was. People were coming to the oddly spelled domain name via direct request. Using a traffic analysis program, we could track their movements through the websites. At that point, we knew the advertising was working so instead of changing the message or the media we used to deliver the marketing message, we began to look INSIDE the website for the problem.
A look at the log files showed that customers were leaving when they reached the product pricing page. The client lowered his product’s pricing and like magic the phone began to ring.
The important point to consider is, had we made the call to action “Call for more information” we couldn’t have pinpointed this problem as easily or effectively as we did by using a visit to the website as the “call to action”.
If you’re looking for a simple, step by step approach to creating affordable small business advertising that delivers results … pick up a copy of the book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results .
The exercises contained within the book will really help to illuminate your way to creating tightly targeted advertising messages that speak to a niche market and deliver results.
Small Business Advertising Solution
June 5, 2008
If you’re looking for a small business advertising solution, then begin by identifying the target audience for your marketing message.
Advertising is simply a way to talk to a LOT of people at once about the products and services you offer. Advertising is where you turn to when you can’t go out and meet your customers individually to explain personally WHY they should be doing business with you.
However, because the message is being delivered to the masses, it’s tempting to create a message that is focused on YOU and what YOU want instead of the prospective customer and what he/she wants. Instead of creating a customer building small business advertising solution, by creating “spray and pray” advertising messages, many small business owners will take a stab at advertising their small business, fail and then abandon advertising all together.
Small Business Advertising Solution
It’s not just small business owners who have trouble communicating with a large audience. Public speakers face a similar dilemma when preparing their message for the masses. The reason is simple: It’s almost impossible to effectively communicate with a faceless mob. However, the public speaker has a distinct advantage over the advertiser in that he/she can SEE the audience and can focus on a single individual in the audience. Focusing upon several individuals in the audiences helps the speaker “connect” with his or her audience.
The success principle holds true of your advertising. You’ve got to target your message so it connects with the audience. Just because you can’t see the audience as the message is being delivered, doesn’t mean you don’t need to still make the connection.
Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results will help you to put into practice this same success principle. Instead of trying to create an advertising message for a faceless mob, Beyond the Niche helps you to put an individual’s face on your target audience.
Beyond The Niche takes you step by step through the process of identifying and targeting your niche market. It then walks you through the process of creating compelling and selling advertising and marketing messages, the kind of messages that break through the clutter and reach your prospective customers. Learn more about niche marketing here.
Segmentation and Target Market Plan
June 3, 2008
Niche Marketing involves breaking down a market into segments (segmentation) and then creating a target market plan. Market segmentation is simply the process of narrowing down who you want to target with your marketing message.
Market segmentation and then creating a target market plan is essential to marketing success both off line and online.
The beauty of market segmentation is it allows you to focus to your marketing activities on the most productive targets.
There are three commonly accepted methods of market segmentation:
• Geographic segmentation – based on location;
• Demographic segmentation – based on measurable statistics, such as age or income;
• Psychographic segmentation – based on lifestyle preferences, such as being urban dwellers or pet lovers.
You can segment a market using any or all of the above.
One common problem with market segmentation using the above methods is you’ll be faced with an array of figures…. instead of seeing through the figures to the people behind them.
Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results helps you to see BEYOND the figures and gives you tools to put a human face on those figures and percentages garnered through market segmentation.
Branding and Blogging: Getting to Know you but Not ALL About You
May 28, 2008
Branding is all about the way your business is perceived by others while blogging is all about communication. Effectively communicating what you and your business can do for your potential customers is one way a blog can act as a powerful branding vehicle.
According to Rosemary Davies-Janes, a branding consultant with Miboso writes in the post The Branding Point on the Authentic Personal Branding blog:
Effective brands have three key components.
The first is a clear-eyed, precise understanding of your personal genius. Your genius is a composite of your natural strengths, learned skills, values and preferences.
Secondly, you’ll need an equally clear understanding of your target audience; where they hang out, what they do, what they think about, what they long to achieve.
Finally, you’ll need to build benefit statements that connect your genius with what your target audience ‘thinks they want’ — as opposed to “what they really need.”
So, share what your audience needs to know via your blog and you’ll be good to go. However, many freelancers take it a step further. They share about their inner turmoil… their relationship troubles… their financial difficulties…. and suddenly it’s not a marketing vehicle but a group therapy session online.
It turns out that it’s possible to share TOO much information via your blog. Just because you can share spontaneous information doesn’t mean you should. While a certain level of familiarity will indeed build your business… take it too far and it’s possible that utter and complete transparency in your business can do more harm than good.
Over at the Psych blog, there’s a report on “Why Familiarity Really Does Breed Contempt”
“the more traits participants knew about another ‘person’, the more likely they were to find dissimilarities with themselves, and so the more likely they were to dislike them.
…once we perceive a dissimilarity, it’s all downhill from there. Even traits we might have liked, or been neutral about before, now get the thumbs down.“
What does this mean for you, your business blog and your branding?
It means sharing information on a need to know basis. Do potential marketing clients really need to know that you have a tendency to get involved in one bad relationship after another? Do your freelance writing clients need to know you’re catching flak over your anticipated move to Bimini?
Some blogs are built upon utter and complete transparency however, those blogs are not BUSINESS BLOGS!
When it comes to a business blog, keep the tone professional and the information on a need to know basis! Ask yourself before every post, “Does this enhance my professional image? Does this post inspire trust with my audience?”
There’s certainly a place in the blogosphere for discussions on politics, religion and sexuality… but if yours is a business blog… then I strongly suggest you launch a free Wordpress.com or Blogger.com blog for those discussions. Keep them FAR away from your business presence.
I once had a client who launched a side business in which she featured racy and provocative greeting cards. She WISELY kept the greeting card business’ existence very far removed from her “day job” as a corporate trainer.
Blogs make it SO easy to communicate that sometimes, you may be tempted to “cross” the line. Whether it’s posts or comments, remember… the internet never forgets!
Advertising That Tries to Speak to Everyone
May 23, 2008
When I began my career in advertising (over 20 years ago… gee… I must have been 12 at the time ? ) my advertising mentor was Joan Elias. Joan had launched her own advertising agency and she took a chance on a recent college grad who displayed a unique ability to be able to “see” inside a consumer’s head.
Joan Elias taught me that when you try to create an advertising message that speaks to everyone, you create an advertising message that speaks to no one.
Many business owners often find themselves chasing after an array of marketing tactics instead of implementing a cohesive marketing strategy, a marketing strategy that has, at it’s core, the basics of niche marketing.
Unfortunately, niche marketing tactics which may result in great success for one business may fail miserably for the next… all because niche marketing tactics must be implemented within a cohesive marketing strategy.
Advertising that tries to speak to everyone will eventually be heard by no one. Define what your business does for your customers, whether they be businesses or consumers.
Got that?
Now, create advertising messages that tell that story to those customers.
Oh, and be prepared. See, advertising and marketing will DEFINITELY help a structurally sound business grow. However, if there are “cracks” in the foundation of your business, expect a successful advertising or marketing campaign to reveal those weaknesses in a hurry.
