- Image by Evan Hamilton via Flickr
A very wise person once said that you have to get into your target customer’s head, if you are going to market anything successfully. Obviously, you will have a very hard time marketing baby stuff to people who have no children. And just try and market books to people who can’t (or hate to) read. You would find that you’re wasting your time, as much as trying to climb a piece of glass with nothing to grip onto. That simile is especially useful when you consider that not only would you not get very far with such an attempt – you could end up hurting yourself very badly. So you should probably not try to market to people who just plain don’t want what you’re trying to sell (and climbing glass is also probably not a good idea, either).
So how do you make sure you’re selling to people who actually want to buy? That question is both simple and complex. It’s simple in that a person can simply tell you to “get in your customer’s head” or “niche it down.” But these are cop out answers, if that’s as far as they go. And the work can get very complex. Simply telling yourself to find a niche and know it well is sort of telling yourself to go run a marathon – if you actually go out and train every day, you may end up doing very well. But if you just sort of sit around thinking, “I’m going to run a marathon,” you may end up actually dying on the day of the race itself.
You can niche down your target market by doing some research. What are the people who are most likely going to be searching for what you sell, actually searching for? These are the keywords and phrases you are going to need to target in your SEO efforts. If you end up targeting words and phrases that people aren’t searching for, you’ll end up wasting a lot of time and energy to accomplish essentially nothing at all. Remember to keep on thinking.
