Internet Marketing: Knowing Your Customer Will Explode Your Sales
In Internet marketing the most important step you can take is to find out who your customer is. How can you market a product to people if you do not know who those people are? Back in the days when there were only brick and mortar stores, this was not an issue.
You need to take a few extra actions to find out who your prospects and customers really are, especially if you do business exclusively over the Internet.
I made a big mistake when I first began in Internet marketing back in the early 90s. I figured that most of my customers were like me, a white male who speaks English. I would get frustrated with emails I thought were stupid. I mean really dumb questions like how do I order and are you going to ship your software to me by mail?
After months and months of putting up with frustrating emails I discovered that most of my prospects and customers were Asian females! I never would have guessed that in a million years. It now made sense why I was getting those frustrating emails. I had used the “kings english” on my website, real big words and impressive language. This was a big mistake because it confused my biggest customer base, Asian females.
I had to re-write the sales copy on my website. I dropped all the big words. I started using smaller words and shorter sentences. For my blog, I started buying articles that were written by females or Asian females.
As soon as I made the changes, I stopped getting all those stupid emails. I had spent hundreds if not thousands of hours of my life replying to these stupid emails. They were not stupid emails. I was the only one who was stupid. I did not know who my customers and prospects were and so my sales copy was targeting the wrong segment of the population.
An incredible, free tool exists on the Internet that will tell you all sorts of juicy details about your customers. The website is called Quantcast.
Quantcast is the only open internet ratings service. They provide advertisers with audience profiles for millions of websites and services. The service is free to everyone.
This is what Quantcast told me about my website.
I learned that most visitors to my website were Asian females between the ages of 14 and 20. Most of my web visitors live in a home where the annual income is less than $28,000. After Asians, then came Hispanics. After Hispanics, there was African Americans. Finally, the smallest visitors to my website were Caucasians like me. So my reasoning that most of my visitors were Caucasians like me was completely the opposite of reality.
I discovered that most of my visitors come from California’s Los Angeles. So if I advertise offline, I should do so in the Los Angeles market.
My entire world was rocked when I learned who my customers really were. The entire view of my business and the services I provided changed after that. It was a low point for me. For then, I truly realized, I didn′t know Jack. My own arrogance hurt my sales for some 6 years and cost me thousands of hours of extra work responding to emails that I really did not need to had I known who my customers really were.
Do not make the same mistake I did. Do not assume that you already know who your prospects and customers are.
Written by Lance Jepsen. Discover a step by step approach to squeezing out the profits that lie hidden in your website. This step by step approach will increase the profits of your website. For more information see internet marketing book
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