Differentiating yourself Part 2.c : Research and Target Market

Differentiating Yourself Part 2.c : Research and Target Market

istock 000003471071medium 300x199 Differentiating yourself Part 2.c : Research and Target Market

Ultimately, the introduction phase is all about doing your homework and learning your target market. After all, if you aren’t going after the right people, then all the marketing in the world really won’t help you. The concept of research and discovering your target market sounds easy enough in theory. In practice, it can be a bit more tricky than you would assume. To help address the problems, this article will discuss how to define your target market, making sure they are even able to buy your goods, and some options for polling them to get as much valuable data about them before you spend a penny rolling out your production.

Define your target market

Most marketers use 2 types of attributes to define a market:

Demographics Age, Gender, Salary, Location, etc

Psychographics Values, Lifestyle, Behavior, Opinions

Psychographics are particularly important in the introduction phase because you will need to convince your prospects that they have a need/want for your product. This is also one of the only times in the marketing cycle that you will want to specifically call out product attributes. This goes against the general marketing rule that you always want to market the solution you provide (ie: better picture quality) versus the attribute (1080P). In the introduction phase, you actually need to do both- Attribute to educate and solution to create desire.

A useful trick in this stage is to create a few buyer profiles and target your marketing at satisfying their particular needs. If you did a good job in creating the profiles, you’ll find that they serve as a pretty good proxy for your full market. You can download a free copy of my exercise on “Putting a Name on your Target Market” as part of my 14 Free Tools, Tricks, and Tips.

Ready, Willing, and ABLE

While in the introduction phase, you will be marketing to your target market to get them ready, and willing. But one thing you must figure out BEFORE you begin marketing is if they are ABLE to purchase your goods once you have motivated them.

A good example is my actual business. While my main company, Evil Genius Interactive, focuses on higher-end customers and projects, EvilGeniusTV caters to beginners and new entrepreneurs. As such, it probably wouldn’t make sense for me to create a high-end VIP mastermind group here.

Why? Two big reasons come to mind. First, new business folks will not be shelling out for $10k+ programs… After all, they are just getting started and can’t afford to spend that much for the most part. Second, if you think about what goes on in mastermind groups, the biggest draw is networking with other people who you may be able to partner or cut deals with. If you are all beginners, then you probably don’t have too many connections of real value and what everybody would bring to the table is minimal.

Polling the Marketplace

Google ads and dummy products

If you are savvy with Google Adwords and have a good swipe-file to grab some known high-converting keywords, a great way to get some actual behavioral feedback is to create a dummy ad.

Traditionally, dummy ads and dummy products were a Black Hat marketing trick where Google searchers would be presented an ad for a specific product. They would then click through to the site and hopefully buy the product. At which point you would tell them that the product was out of stock. (Knowing there was never a product to begin with). What this method would show you was how well your keywords and concept converted. If they converted high enough, you would create the product, if not you would either move on or keep trying until you got the desired conversion.

This method is pretty shady (hence the Black Hat) and I really don’t condone ever doing something like that. Just not cool.

A better approach would be to do this:

Still create the dummy ad on Google, but have it point to a landing page that lets visitors know exactly what you are doing. Tell them you have a new product in development, what it’s about, and that you are going to bribe them to help you out. At this point, you can either have them walk through the dummy sales process, or present them with a poll designed to solicit what they want and what they think of your product

The key is the bribe. Remember in our last article we said that early-adopters LOVE insider information, beta products, leaked vids, etc. We’ll this is where you put them to use. Just offer them some VIP treatment and recognition that they can carry with them, and you will find that you get plenty of folks to help you out. In practice, this works nearly as well as the Black Hat dummy product trick for soliciting buyer information. And I can’t speak for you, but I DESPISE any type of shady marketing and would take a 10-20% drop in response rate any day over feeling like crap about myself and potentially ruining my reputation – just not worth it.

Surveys

surveymonkey 300x144 Differentiating yourself Part 2.c : Research and Target Market

The last topic we will cover are the use of surveys to gather information. (And yes there is another tool I have designed to create a kick ass survey in the “14 Tools, tricks, and tips”)

If you are using a standard blog or CMS package for your websites, you will find a variety of free plugins that make it possible to conduct numerous surveys on your own site.

Another free option is Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) here you can sign up for a free limited account. I think the free package includes 10 questions, and a limit of 100 responses, but you can also upgrade to fairly large packages for as little as $20 a month.

You can either upload a list of email addresses and they will do all the work, or you can host the survey on their site with a custom URL that you point people to.

I’ve used this site on numerous occasions in both the free and paid versions. For surveys going out to several thousand people, this site is the absolute best in my opinion.

Wrapping it up

Thanks for continuing to stick around. My next post will be the final section of the Introduction phase before we move on to the Growth phase. As always, I appreciate any comments, and encourage you to post any questions you may have. I’ll do whatever I can to help you out.

Jj Kennedy
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/differentiating-yourself-part-2c-research-and-target-market-747689.html

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