Making the right connections

ARTICLE:

How to Find the Right Places for Your Marketing Money and Effort: Two Key Insights:

The location of any marketing message - or activity - is critical to its success. You don't sell many cups of tea at a coffee-lovers convention. But knowing 'where to pitch what' is not easy…

There are essentially two approaches to marketing and promotion: behaviour and demographics.

Demographics is just a word for the study of groups of people with similar characteristics. For example, the over 60’s, or businessmen with overseas interests, or young professionals.

Demographic-based marketing is all about figuring what these groups do - and part of that is where they do it.

To do this well you need to know your target market inside out - an essay all in itself. But once you know who you are tracking, you can begin to look for them.

In some cases this is incredibly easy. If you are selling replica Lamborghini car kits, then events for car kit enthusiasts or Lamborghini fan magazines are a good bet.

Online it is even easier. Google can deliver hundreds of targets for you to look at - drawing on websites, blogs and social networking pages.

By comparison, behaviour-based marketing looks at what someone is doing rather than who they are.

This is a subtle distinction. Not everyone shopping for a digital camera is a photography enthusiast. But anyone shopping for a digital camera is the right market for say, photography software.

It is the action of shopping for the camera you are looking for, irrespective of who is doing it. Grandparents buy cameras. Young people buy cameras. Business people buy cameras.

For internet marketing, the trick is to be able to display your ad when someone shows a specific behaviour. Again, search technologies can be critical here...but you have to shift your thinking to what is being done rather than by whom.

Smart, tactical use of online ads can really exploit these approaches. In the run up to major sporting or film events new groups of people appear practically overnight. Harry Potter is a superb example, or the surge in tennis fans in the UK when Wimbledon takes place.

Likewise, you can also really capitalise on what you know about the behaviour around a given product. The classic example is ring-tones and lyric sites. If you are hunting out a given ring-tone, chances are you are enough of a fan to want to hunt out lyrics too. So a ring-tone ad on a lyric site makes sense.

Big businesses have been learning lessons like this the hard way. Small, agile internet businesses can often capitalise on their knowledge and passion for a given subject and get you and your product in the right place at the right time.

For more articles on how to boost your internet marketing and see results fast, visit www.mavericksmoneyzone.com

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