Automotive Marketing | Automotive SEO | CliqScout Search Marketing

IDENTIFYING A WEBSITE’S TARGET MARKET

Whether you’re launching a simple website or a large e-commerce website, identifying a website’s target market from the start is an important step in business planning. Successful websites put their effort into reaching a very specific target market, sometimes without even realizing it. A webmaster can increase their chances of success by identifying their website’s target market before jumping into any marketing tactics or online advertising to increase traffic and monetize their websites.

What is a Target Market?

A target market is the main audience or group of visitors (or buyers) that a webmaster or online business owner wants to visit their website. A target market can, and should, be identified and described in detail before launching a website. This is to help tailor the site’s Internet marketing plan and marketing tactics around that target group to maximize the return on investment (ROI), which basically means getting the most for your time and money.

A target market is described by its demographic and or psychographic profile. Demographics and psychographics include many personal and social details, such as:

1. Age groups
2. Genders
3. Nationalities or ethnicities
4. Income levels
5. Marital status
6. Education levels
7. Location
8. Whether or not they have children
9. Social or professional groupings (job, industry, social class, etc.)
10. Interests (could be a hobby, musical preference, favorite sport, etc.)

When choosing or identifying a website’s target market, there are a few things to keep in mind:

1. The size of the target market.
2. Whether the target market is growing or shrinking.
3. Whether or not there’s a demand for the website or online business in the particular target market.
4. Whether or not is would be easy to monetize the target market. (For example, you wouldn’t sell high-end electronics to a low-income target market, and you wouldn’t run a content site exclusively on ad revenues if your target market is traditionally “ad blind.”)
5. Things that influence members of the target market. (For example, would they be more responsive to paid advertising on other websites, or would they be influenced more by a referral from a friend, whereas a focus on viral marketing would be best?)

After identifying a website’s target market, specific marketing tactics can be modeled around their influences and behaviors, saving time and money when marketing a website or online business.

On-page optimization play an extremely important role in a website’s success. Thoughtful business web site design and well written content provide better website ROI and increased website traffic. Your websites’ objectives needs to serve your business. Your website is an extension of your business and must support your business objectives.

Evaluate a good business web site design by looking at:

* How do they make their money?
* Who is their target audience?
* What do they want the website to accomplish?
* How can the web be used to help automate their business?

Anybody looking to develop better website roi with a business web site design needs to look at this. Too many business sites are very poorly thought out and under-utilized. A good website is a lot more than good design. A good design and some content means only that a website is acting as a glorified brochure. However, beyond design, you can look at how the site will achieve increased website traffic an better website ROI.

If the majority of your business is web-based, it is much more important to identify the website objectives and how great business web site design relates to the overall business. A web-based business is going to want to be well-designed so that it does not confuse people and attracts the customers’ eyes to a clear “call-to-action” which make the business  money.

These “calls to action” become critically important to the design and to website conversions. A successful business web site design can be monitored and measured for increased website traffic.

A well crafted business web site design includes website metrics that support the core metrics of the overall business.
We’re also going to want to discuss how the web can be used to promote. A business which is not web-based would want to consider what they can provide on the web to extend their business.
Traditional brick-and-mortar businesses may have a storefront or may need to deal with clients in person, but what can they do on the web to extend their reach?

After identifying a website’s target design objectives, specific business web site design can be created around user behaviors, saving time and money when marketing a website or online business.

How To Use Twitter In The Quick Service Lane
A Honda dealership was having trouble notifying customers about the quick service lane wait times. Sometimes the quick service lane was completely open and other times it would back up rather quickly. The dealer thought about using email to notify the customers with appointments, but that would not be as responsive of a solution as using the real time capabilities of social media.
The recommendation was to use their Twitter account to post current wait times in the quick service lane. A couple of times a day the service manager tweets the wait status. This was also another way for the dealership to grow their customer base that was following them on Twitter. Another concern from the dealer was how to handle notifications to those service customers without social media access. The solution was to add a Twitter widget to the dealer website home page and the Twitter feed into the dealership’s Facebook account. This greatly increases the reach of their message while making it more accessible.
A side bonus to this arrangement was to generate business when the quick service lane slowed down. The dealer now is able to post service specials from their Twitter account that offer unique specials such as $19.95 oil changes from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM for one day only.

The difference between on-page optimization and off-page optimization

Search engine optimization is one of the first key steps that will help improve a dealer’s website. Many companies offer services to do this for a website, but not all of these service providers are created equal. SEO is a generic term thrown about by many and understood by few. Often auto dealers are sold SEO as a service but it’s never clearly explained what they are getting for their money.
There are two main components of true search engine optimization, on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is what is done on the pages of a website to maximize its reach and performance in the search engine rankings for targeted keywords. On-page optimization factors are related directly to the website content (what the user sees) and structure of the website (what the search spiders see). This is commonly sold as a complete SEO package and one of the reasons users see many automotive dealer websites jammed with crappy content stuffed with keywords.
Off page optimization is everything else that can be done off the website and website pages that maximize search engine performance and rankings. This is much more labor intensive and challenging and is less likely to be easily manipulated. For this reason, most search engines discount the weight given to on-page factors and value off-page factors more highly. This is also why off-page optimization is much more important and valuable for overall website performance.

Some of the key factors in on-page optimization include:

• Relevant keyword research and selection
• Original unique content
• Keyword density
• Clean code
• Unique index-able URL’s (page names)
• Page title optimization
• Meta tag optimization
• Header tags (H1, H2, H3)
• URL structure
• Internal text linking (page rank sculpting)
• Sitemaps (XML and Text)

Some of the key factors in off-page optimization include:

• One way inbound links
• Deep page linking
• Keywords in anchor text
• Various page rank sites
• Directory placement
• Site submission
• Social media
• A variety of links
• A gradual long term improvement process

Another easy way to think of this is to consider introducing yourself during an employment interview.  Your resume (website), your portfolio, your appearance, and your words are all carefully crafted by you to put your finest forward and represent yourself in the best possible light. While it carries a lot of weight, the employer (search engine) will still not just take your word for granted. The employer will do a background review and check references (read inbound links) to find out what others have to say about you. This confirmation process is what builds credibility that you are an authority on the subject (relevant keywords).
On-page optimization and off-page optimization go hand in hand and to do just one piece and not the other is not the wise solution.

Organic website traffic offers a different mix between sales and service customer opportunities. Working with a Toyota dealership to review their website analytics and measure the performance of their internet efforts. I have partial data for the month of April that includes website visitors and various engagement metrics.

For this time period they had 2,704 total visitors and 265 phone calls. They are using track-able phone numbers on the website for new sales, used sales, service and parts. They do not have accurate goal tracking in place on their site analytics, instead we referenced web contact from specific page urls for the contact us form, quick quote page and the service appointment page. These page visits totaled 164. Add that to the total phone calls of 265 and the total represents about a 15.86%.

Total web visitors    2704
Total Phone calls    265
Totals web contacts 164
Total Engagement    429
Conversion percentage 15.86%

While this doesn’t appear to be too bad, there is much room for improvement. The current site design greatly impacts performance of these metrics. Most users to a dealer site are look to inventory and specials once they land on the home page. In this case the dealer site does have links to inventory and specials in the top navigation, but nowhere else on the home page.
One other observation regarding the conversion numbers above, is that all of this traffic is organic, none of it comes from paid search. Because of this fact, there is a bias towards service customers. The numbers support this fact;
Total Sales Engagement     127 opportunities or 29.6% of total engagement
Total Service Engagement 302 opportunities or 70.4% of total engagement
This split of 60/40 to 70/30 between service and sales from organic traffic is quite common. The split for paid search traffic is the exact opposite with sales traffic gaining the bigger share of web visitors. For this dealer to increase sales from the  website, a paid search marketing campaign is in order.