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.

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.

Many dealers remain distant from adding social media marketing into the overall brand marketing strategy. These dealers mainly fall into two groups, those who think social media is a passing fad, and those who don’t even know where to begin. The Internet savvy dealers are fully engaging in social media marketing as an incremental strategy to build their business.   As an alternative to traditional advertising, social media is uniquely valuable to auto dealers.

Social Media Marketing is definitely not a fad.

There’s quite a bit of data that clearly shows the fantastic growth of this new communication medium. Compare these growth rates to reach 50 million users:

• Radio – 38 years
• TV – 13 years
• Internet – 4 years
• iPod – 3 years
• Facebook had 100 million users in just 9 months!

Social media is a unique venue to build a measure of trust between your dealership and customers. No longer restricted to the larger companies with vast budgets, social media is much more about brand strategy and the proper use of engagement than grandiose budgets. Social media marketing for auto dealers is a terrific tool to strengthen existing relationships with customers, while strategically building your online presence as well as generating traffic and leads. The key to success is in your messaging, if you are only out pitching “the deal of the day”, you’re not really listening. Many new car shoppers demand a more engaging shopping experience when it comes to researching new and used vehicles. These same new car buyers want to review other customer purchase experiences when determining the best dealer to do business with, and social media marketing can have an immense impact on your online reputation. Just like in real life, first impressions online are important too!

Not convinced that your dealership should integrate social media into your overall marketing strategy?

Here are a few more eye opening things to consider:

• Social networking sites have overtaken porn as the Internet’s #1 activity.
• Twitter has seen an increase of almost 1500% over the last year.
• 2 out of 3 people on the PLANET visit social networks.
• Time spent on social networks is growing at three times the overall Internet rate.
• 100 Million YouTube videos are watched every day and every minute 20 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.
• More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day and more than 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook daily.
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.
• If YouTube were a country, it would be the third most-populated place in the world.
• 7.8 billion tweets and counting.
• 68% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email.

These are some of the social media statistics that astonish many people. So don’t wait for the fad to pass, set up some online profiles in your favorite social networking application.  Many of the top social media sites are becoming their vertical portals recognized by the search engines. Most of the search engines even show relevant social media results within the search results page.  If that isn’t convincing enough to get started, then what will move you to take action today?

An average internet depart has some software in place to track the leads and respond to customers. It may be something as simple as an email box, or as complete as lead management software such as AVV or Salesforce.com.
Average automotive online metrics come from many different sources such as:

• Franchise Website (Cobalt, Dealer.com, Dealerskins.com, factory website, personal website)
• Search marketing campaigns (Google, Yahoo, Bing)
• Third party lead providers (Edmunds, Autobytel.com, Cars.com)
• Internet sales department tool (email, AVV, who’s calling)

All of these sources provide their own metrics creating a large quantity of data points, but what does it mean to you and how do you use it? How does it relate to your dealership’s marketing plan, your Internet Sales Team, and your profits? Are you returning a positive return on investment?
Simply start at the beginning
First, you need to get a solid idea of what you know and what you don’t know—what you should be tracking and analyzing, and ways to use that information. Once you gather the data, the next step is to identify what’s important to your business. The metrics that drive success and profits are the ones that become the metrics to benchmark.
Establish your baseline performance using your own online marketing intelligence that you already have access too. Establish a baseline before you integrate any changes into your marketing or sales process with search engine optimization, pay-per-click marketing, sales training or other system enhancements.

Be Your Own Lead Provider – Get better leads

Most internet savvy auto dealers know they need to use PPC advertising, but they don’t know where to begin. What the lead vendors don’t tell dealers is that search engine marketing is their primary resource for capturing buyer leads and selling them back to dealers. So why continue to buy leads from vendors when you can generate them yourself?
Lead providers are in competition for your customers using pay-per-click advertising. Their staff of search engine experts knows how to grab leads and sell them to you. They can control the PPC traffic in your market and send these new car leads where they decide it should go which may or may not be to your dealership.

Buy the same traffic as they do, without paying the markup.  Why pay for leads outside your market area, when they have little to no chance of converting into a sale?

Don’t settle for diluted leads – Dominate your own market!

• Create a literal flood of consumer traffic to your web site.
• Cut expensive third party internet lead costs by 40%
• Maximize your co-op dollars with better website ROI

Paid Search Marketing  for Auto Dealers

We have years of automotive and online marketing experience. We understand that auto dealers want quality online leads that matter and will turn into sales. Let us use our PPC knowledge to help you deliver targeted online traffic to your internet department.

We offer our clients customized solutions, optimizing your campaigns, and supporting your offline marketing efforts to boost your Internet sales to new heights!

What automotive paid search marketing can do for you

• Localize researched keyword phrases to increase local brand recognition
• Target your market for improved quality car leads
• Allocate online campaign media budget
• Aggressive bid management
• Monthly reporting and analysis

Learn how our remarkably cost effective automotive paid search marketing options can reduce your cost-per-lead and drive traffic to your website. Talk to us today for a FREE evaluation of your PPC Campaign performance!

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.