Multiply Your Marketing Results While Slashing Your Advertising Costs

The easiest way to significantly improve the results of your marketing while cutting costs on advertising is to focus your advertising on people who are most likely to be interested in your products and not waste money on those who are less likely.

Seems simple and obvious. And yet many businesses violate this idea by paying for broadcast advertising on TV, Radio, and Print that reaches people outside their market area, and/or reaches significant numbers of people who are not in the proper demographic.

Three Stages of The Profitable Prospect Buying Cycle

Finding the Right Demographic

Starting from the bottom up, we can discuss three stages of potential buyers.

The first is The demographic pool of all likely buyers.

If you were selling a line of Girl’s Hockey Equipment to Adolescent and Teen Girls in Minnesota, the base line demographic is pretty simple to identify.

You want your advertising to be featured where Minnesota Girls of the Right Age cadre go, and ideally you would want to significantly narrow that down to those girls who had an active interest in Hockey.

(You may also want to do a second bit of marketing to “Mothers of Girls who are interested in hockey” as well.  But the messages you would send to these two groups would very likely differ.)

These Girls are prospects only. They may be interested in hockey, but may or may not be interested in acquiring their own hockey gear.

Your goal with this demographic is more about exposing your brand to them and establishing a positive image for yourself.

Now the easiest way to target such a specific demographic in the social media age is via Facebook advertising.  Not only can you focus on the age and gender and geography with Facebook, you can identify people who have “Liked” pages such as the North Stars, or Gopher Women’s Hockey or actively joined any hockey related site.

Since people on facebook are not generally looking to buy things, this brand awareness, image and relationship building is a natural for the medium.

Your goal should be to start the relationship, not close the sale.  And if at all possible get these prospects to sign up for your email list so you can keep in contact with them over time.

Discover those who are Yearning for Learning

Within your target demographic there will be those who are passive prospects and those who are beginning to do their due diligence in preparation for making their purchasing decision.

There are lots of places one might go to find information online and off about Buying Girls Hockey Equipment or any other topic.

What many businesses do not yet realize is that one of the favorite places people go to discover what I refer to as “how to do it” or “what to look for” isn’t necessarily Google, but rather, YouTube!

While most people think of crazy cat videos, when they think of YouTube, it is actually the #2 or #3 site in all the internet, depending on how you measure it.

And especially for the younger generations, it is a key venue to reach people in the research stage of their buying cycle.

And you do not necessarily need to have your own highly produced Youtube how to video to reach these people.

You can create a short benefit focused video about your products and place it on other peoples videos in your niche.

This is an extremely cost effective way of reaching highly targeted members of your demographic.

And let me assure you, that while you can pay thousands for a professionally done video, you can also get more than adequate videos to meet your needs for peanuts, relatively speaking.

Get Found by the Search Party

Within any demographic there are those who have already done their due diligence or are just Hot to Trot and want to buy now.

The guy whose hot water heated just sprung a leak and has a basement full of water isn’t likely to do hours of searching for help.  He will be online in a flash and will as likely as not do a Google Search for a term he hopes will get him to a local contractor who can install a new hot water heater in time for the kids baths. Or his wife will want to know, “Why not?”

Hot to trot buyers used to use the Yellow Pages for such searches. today they use Google.  The holy grail of internet marketing is to get your web site on the first page of that guys search results.

Easier said than done, despite all the calls you get by telemarketers and emails you get from India.

Now it is possible for most local businesses to get on the first page of results in most market areas, but the hands down simplest way is to pay for Google Pay Per Click Advertising.  And yes it will cost, but believe me you will need to pay in cash and or time to get that “Free” organic listing as well.

The good news with Adwords is that you only pay for clicks when a prospect is actually looking for the goods and/or services you are offering.

Now there is much more to be said about setting up and maximizing all three of the above approaches.

The key message on this page is that if you want to maximize your marketing results while minimizing your advertising costs you need to consider your target demographic and understand that parts of that demographic may be in one of three states of interest.

The passive ones may be prospects in the future. You can best reach them inexpensively via Facebook, and when you do  you want to go slow and not sell.

The more active ones, are beginning to do research, and many of these can be found on YouTube looking for information.  You can reach these folks with information educating they can use to make a solid decision on which features and benefits they want to look for when they do buy.

This is a great place to teach them why your product or service is superior, in a friendly manner.

And finally, for those hot to trot, either by way of emergency or impatience, you want to be found when they start doing their online search for vendors. If you are able to get your website on the first page of search, great. But the easiest way that you can have up and running as early as tomorrow is to set up an effective Adwords pay per click campaign using Google and to a lesser extent Bing and a few others.

 





Please Google + me.