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.

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.

At CliqScout, search engine marketing is our specialty, with an emphasis on search engine optimization and paid search marketing. We provide many other online services that compliment a powerful web search engine optimization strategy including key metrics for web performance analysis, copywriting development, keyword development, and pay per click optimization.

Synergistic SEO isn’t easy. But in our opinion, it’s essential; your search engine marketing initiative should always integrate with your overall marketing mix. We do it every day for our clients and ourselves. We’d be happy to do it for you as well.

How would you like CliqScout to grow your business today?

• I want to convert my website traffic into more sales…
• I want more return on my pay per click investment(ROI)…
• I want search listings on the first page for my keywords…

Our Professional Search Marketing Services
Because your search engine marketing goals, experience, and needs will always vary from our other clients, our first step will be to understand your needs in greater detail. We employ several different tools to give us a holistic and detailed view of not just your traffic or website needs, but more importantly your overall marketing mix and how SEO or pay per click marketing can enhance it. Here are some proven successful examples that provide more information on improving your web performance.

Common Client Search Engine Marketing Strategies
1. Keyword Term Development and Analysis

CliqScout provides you with a thought provoking keyword development tool to start. Once you return this list of keyword terms back to us, we will do in depth market research to determine the hundreds-to-thousands of keyword terms your target audience searches to find companies like yours. We will analyze these terms to find those with the best ranking potential and traffic volume for your targeted niche. Once we’ve compiled our master list of recommended keyword terms to target, we will provide you the list so you can provide any feedback necessary. This often triggers more deep digging research on a few choice targeted keywords.

2. Competitive Analysis

Ever wonder how your website stacks up to your competition or the “big guys”? We can show you with our competitive web performance analysis. See your strengths and weaknesses through the eyes of search engines, and use the results to formulate a stronger search engine marketing strategy.

3. Content Optimization

Content is the primary key to any successful search engine marketing campaign. One of the primary content areas that we will target is existing website optimization, this includes visible content and source code. We will analyze your site code for errors that may prevent search engines from properly spidering your site. We will also analyze your site’s code-to-text ratio and other coding elements. Based on completed keyword development, we create optimized pages to support the keyword results. Lastly, we will review and edit your visible content for optimal keyword density while maintaining search engine optimization effectiveness.

4. Tracking and Analysis

You will receive detailed reports on your rankings across the major search engines, as well as site traffic and visitor behavior (we can only provide site and visitor data if you provide us access to your own statistics program). We can also provide web quality audits to ensure that your web performance is at the superior level you expect.

5. Pay Per Click Search Marketing Optimization

CliqScout knows that paid search can get wildly expensive quickly. Our goal is to optimize your existing accounts (or create new ones) based on ROI. The “set it and forget it” approach does not work well in the rapidly changing pay per click arena. We focus on the right keywords, the right markets, with the right ad messages to maximize your ROI.

CliqScout prices all search engine marketing services on a per-client basis. Pricing is based on the amount of hours you wish us to dedicate to your project each week, as well as which strategies you’d like us to implement. However, we are more than happy to work with your budget and can accommodate a variety of pricing models, including: hourly, per-project, weekly salary with a cap on hours, etc.

Our Guarantee: We cannot guarantee a certain number of rankings or that particular keywords will get ranked with particular search engines. There are simply too many variables and uncontrollable influences to consider, and anyone guaranteeing such should be avoided at all costs. However, we do guarantee the quality of our work.

The CliqScout focus is to generate quality converting traffic to your site. Choose from any variety of our services to create your recipe for success – or to learn more about how you can grow your business, contact us.