How to define your target market (part 10 of The Web Marketing Process)

This article is part 10 of a series. You'll find part one here. And part 9 here.

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Take a look at the Campaign Planner introduced in part 5 of this series. You'll see there's a section where you can define each of your target markets.

The purpose of this section is to make notes about each target group. Let's go through the sheet...

• Name:
  Give each target market a unique name. Ideally, this name will summarize the main points
• Description:
  Use bullet points to outline the main features of this market. At this point, you may have more questions than answers. If so, write down your questions and research the answers later
• Where found online:
  Which sites are likely to already attract your target market. Can you advertise on those sites? If you have questions rather than answers, write down your questions
• Motivation to respond:
  What do you think will motivate your target market to respond to a marketing offer? Why will it have that effect? If you can't answer these 2 questions, it's a sign you need to do more research into your target market. If it's an existing target market, it's a sign you need to start exploring this issue with your clients and/or with your sales team
• Offer ideas:
  What can you offer your target market? As with the above question, this is very important. It's worth taking your time with these last 2 questions, and revisiting them. Ask other people what they think of your answers. Ask your clients what they think. Ask what they'd like you to provide

You may come up with a number of different ideas. It's perfectly acceptable to try them all, testing each one against the others.

If you're getting the idea that you never really stop testing in lead generation, you're right. Your ratios might improve, but anything can come along and change all that.

The ability to quickly detect a problem, such as falling conversion ratios, is a competitive advantage. The ability to quickly test new ideas in a changing market is also a competitive advantage.

And both these advantages are possible only if you're tracking your results. In web marketing, doing the maths is essential.

The Web Marketing Process Step 1 Summary: Objectives

You've now completed step one of the Web Marketing Process. You've looked at how to set objectives for an online marketing campaign.

You've looked at how keeping track of our objectives can save both time and money.

You've looked at the role of market research as a source of information about the size of target market, and as a way to find out more about the people in that group.

You'll come back to this as you move through steps 2-5. And in particular, you'll look at how an analysis of our campaign results can be fed back into the objectives you set for your next campaign.

The next task is to take a look at step 2 – sourcing visitors for a campaign.

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