Small Business Design Resources

How To Determine Your Target Market

Figuring out how to market your small business website effectively is critical to the success of your business, especially if you are investing time and money in advertising. For example, you don’t want to target high-end luxury goods to low income people or low-end goods to people looking to buy the very best.

Understanding how your customers’ think and what their spending habits are, is one of the keys of successful marketing. This is true whether your business is a mom and pop store on the corner of town or a small business website with great potential for global appeal.

There are some basic questions you can ask yourself when directing a marketing campaign – or even when choosing what products to emphasize on your website. Who needs the product? Is it a niche product or one with global appeal? Are you trying to reach a specific age group, if so consider who else you might need to market to. For example, if you are marketing video games to children under the age of 18, your advertising needs to appeal to youth but also to parents. If you are marketing luxury goods to men who are likely to be married, you might also need to target their wives and so on.

Once you have identified your target audience you need to think how you are going to reach your audience from your small business website. What blogs might your audience be reading? What sites might they be going to where it is worth your while to spend money on advertising? If you are not sure, go to some sites and look for ads for similar products to yours. If you notice that several other websites with similar products are favoring particular methods of advertising – perhaps they’re on to something.

Don’t be afraid of exploring new technology. Viral videos are all the rage, mostly because they work. Explore places like YouTube, and Twitter, and look into using Yahoo and Google ads to see how you can improve traffic to your website. Don’t just create your own log-ins to these sites, but leave messages on other people’s sites – preferably sites that might be attracting the same kind of traffic as would like to see coming to your site – and don’t forget to leave your calling card – a link back to your website.

Because owners of small business websites are usually on a tight budget, don’t overextend the finances to invest in heavy advertising until you know it’s working. Once you know you are reaching the right audience, you will know when it’s time for a more committed investment. Remember to monitor your advertising sites and when you get traffic to your site, make yourself aware of where it’s coming from. There are many tools on the market that will help you analyze traffic and many of them come free. Ultimately who is coming to your site will drive your ongoing marketing strategy. You want to know who is buying and what they are buying. Statistics are vital for increasing performance. You need to know what is going on in order to leverage it or improve it.

And don’t give up, remember that with persistence comes learning and the more you learn the easier it becomes. If you are a new small business website owner, expect a learning curve and exercise patience until you start to see traffic, and do good research to find out what’s going on with your website.