Marketing Systems

If you want to succeed at Internet marketing then you need to know who you are marketing to. Who is buying your product? How can you sell a product to someone if you do not know who they are? Back when someone had to meet you in person, aka a brick and mortar store, you always knew who your customer was so this was a non-issue.

If you do business exclusively over the Internet and do not have a brick and mortar store, you need to do a few steps to find out more information about your prospects.

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.

It was a terrific success! I no longer received those “stupid” emails. I had suffered for some 6 years responding to “stupid” emails. I must have spent thousands and thousands of hours over the years answering “stupid” emails. It turned out that I was the stupid one. I thought I had it all figured out but in reality I did not even know who my customers were! Do not make the same mistake I did. Know who your customer is.

So here is how you find out about your web visitors and prospects. Use a free tool on the Internet 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.

A younger, heavily female, more Asian audience visits my website. Most of my visitors are between the ages of 13 and 18. Most of my visitors live in a home where the household income is less than $29,000 a year. The next biggest group of visitors to my website are Hispanics. Then, there are African Americans. And last, there are Caucasians like me. So what I thought were my primary visitors were actually the smallest. I could not be more wrong about who I thought my target audience was.

I also learned that most of my visitors come from the Los Angeles area.

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.

I can not stress enough how important it is that you know who your prospects and customers are. Do not think you already know and make the same mistake I did.