I’ve been noticing the herculean marketing efforts people use to bring people to generic sites. Marketing gets people to your site, the site does the selling. Everybody is doing this web thing backwards and getting them there is only half of the equation.

Website owners are so into getting the right tools to make a website and the right channels to market it, they’re forgetting the most important step.

Isolating and identifying a target audience who will pay, join, click or call is what will set you apart from your competition and help you carve out a niche. Once you get them to your website, you need to have a goal that you want them to follow and you need to lead them to this goal. Do you think major brands roll out a new product without defining a target market and a “call to action”? No way. EVERYTHING they do is tied to presenting their product or service to a target and inspiring them to meet some goal.

Take Gatorade. Did they just roll it out as green drink for thirsty people? No. They targeted an audience and sold it as a sports drink that replaces electrolytes. They targeted the sports crowd even though non athletes may like the taste. And PowerAde sports drink that followed? They carved out a niche that it was a performance drink for athletes.

EXAMPLE:

Let’s say you have a vitamin that boosts the immune system. Do you decide to market it to people who get sick a lot, build a generic website and put photos of pills all over the place?

How about drilling it down a bit? Could you market this immune system supplement to the health nut crowd? They are typically the ones who value and purchase such products.

You focus on your natural ingredients and the tie in with Middle Eastern medicine and how it’s been used there for centuries. (provided this is true) Perhaps you even position the product as the staple in middle eastern medicine for preventive medicine and your site adopts a Asian cultural theme. Your packaging has an Asian Temple sort of theme. What else does this target value? Are they yoga enthusiasts? Do they wear organic cotton? Is a large part of your audience vegetarian? What would you add to your site to cater to this market?

This is not a one hour project. Identifying and speaking to your target audience is laying the FOUNDATION for success. It gives you a spot you call your own and a segment of the audience who will be loyal to your product or service. It’s not a get rich quick sort of approach but a get rich slow approach. It’s also not a linear scientific sort of project but more ethereal. You’ll write things down and go all sorts of ways before narrowing it down. You’ll do some testing with ppc ads and keywords to see which ones are bringing people to the site who are staying. You finesse, you try different things, you tweak. Those with no persistance will give up and go away. Good. Less competition for you.