Using personas, geographical targeting, making use of local & regional directories.

Getting the attention of the right visitors is one of the biggest concerns of business owners. While just having a website online can attract qualified visitors, knowing who is visiting your site and catering to them makes a big difference. I mean really, who visits a plumbing site when they want to rent a moonwalk?

But what about narrowing the field and focusing on the people who are best qualified to buy from you?

The first step to focusing in on your target market is to create personas. This goes beyond just knowing that your business appeals to consumers or other businesses (or both), it's about knowing the details about the people who actually buy from you. One way to get started determining the personas you should be designing for is to have a brainstorming session with sales staff and asking them to give you various characteristics of their customers.

For example, if your product is water bottles:

Sue is a career mom, her children are active in many team sports,
she doesn't believe that her children should be drinking soda and doesn't believe in buying bottled water.

Knowing this specific information you can then structure a part of the site that speaks directly to her: "Hey moms!
be sure your kids have water on the go, use this convenient water bottles featuring . . .

Here's another example for a b2b service, an electrical contractor:

John owns a small real estate development business with under $2 million in revenues, he has only a handful of employees who are marginally experienced in electrical repairs but do not hold licenses. He is not always able to give advance notice of services required but is loyal to his vendors.

So, if you know this about the customer, you can then write copy that proves your service provides affordable services, reliability, and holds the proper licenses. You would also be sure to include comments from other developers who use your service because people like to buy from "people like me."

Notice the specificity of the personas. This is important because it helps get the site ready to receive and plan actions for each type of prospect you service.

Once the site is ready you'll want to work on geo-targeting in the site and search engines to display your information people in the geographic area you serve. Areas could be local, regional, national, or international. This is not to say that your site won't show up globally, but it does allow your site to come up among the top when your product or service is searched with a geographic locater like, "plumbing Boston." For local services be sure to have a current listing with Google Local. You can list your business name, address, link to your site, even a coupon for services. Customers can also add reviews about your product or service.

Additionally, there are many local search directories that can give you link exposure. Before paying for these services, however, you may want to check the Alexa rank, Google page rank and do a search for your product or service to see if that directory comes up in the searches. If you don't see the directory and they don't have good rankings, it's best restrict buying to under maybe a couple hundred dollars per year.

To define your market on a regional, statewide or national level, use the name of your city, state, or area you serve in text on the website, the description tag and within the front page content. This will help the search engines understand your market and they can deliver your search results to the right audience. Again, there are also directories on each of these levels that could give additional exposure. And, as with local directories, be sure you qualify the amount of money the directory may be charging. Free is always good but the better directories generally charge for listings.

One directory you should not ignore is DMOZ, the open directory project. Submitting your site to this directory is free and easy, getting your listing to appear is more difficult because each website submitted is evaluated individually by a "real person" called an editor. Each category has it's own editor and often they are overwhelmed with listings to review so be patient. The listings on DMOZ do hold a greater value to the search engines so it will be worth the wait.

If you are running a pay-per-click campaign it's even easier to dictate when your ads will show because the search engines can geo-locate by IP addresses. You can choose to have ads show in specific cities, metro areas, states or nations. This makes finding your customers even easier.

Pay per click campaigns can be expensive if the keywords you have purchased are too broad, if the ad is poorly written, or if there is not a specific landing page for visitors. This is referred to as "quality score" and the higher the quality of the ad and supporting website, the less you will pay per click while getting a higher placement for your ad. This brings us back to the idea of personas. Planning for the type of visitors who buy from your company will produce far better conversions (sales from the click) than just sending someone to a generic page on the site and will allow you to focus your ads accordingly.

Back to the website - be sure to have large buttons, call to action messages or clear instructions that "call out" to the different personas. Real estate companies do this well with "Find a home" and "Sell a home" links. As a visitor it's easy to know what link you need to select.

So now that you have the idea behind targeting on the internet you are ready to put your plan into action. As always, if you need additional information or assistance, feel free to email or call (877-644-3327). I'm happy to help.

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This article written by Teajai Kimsey Stradley, Internet Marketing Strategist, Ideas That Work - Feb. 2009
It may be reproduced and reprinted provided the author's information including web link is kept intact

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