Monday, January 7, 2008

1 Demographics

Demographic information provides an in depth profile of your potential customer. There are two ways to acquire demographic information, and two separate motives for each method.

Acquire data from consumer data mining companies such as MarketShare Online ? Acquire data from your existing customer base

You should also acquire as much demographic data as possible from your existing customer base and mailing list. Even when you possess the resources to pay for this information you should still query your own customers.

Internet Marketer Must Learn From Mail Order To Increase Their Profits

Understanding that the Internet is another vehicle for direct response marketing can potentially make you rich!
Every Internet Marketer would benefit from studying the mail order industry. The basic marketing principles and practices employed by the industry translate naturally to the online environment.
The five core priorities of successful mail order companies parallel those of the online marketer. They are: demographics, targeting, testing and tracking, up-selling and customer follow up.

Outsourcing Your Web Marketing

You may be thinking about outsourcing your Web promotion to an expert who is immersed in this world as their fulltime occupation, rather than trying to acquire this knowledge yourself, and cope with the pace of change in-house.

Choosing The Consultant
The consultant should be very clear about the specific goals of your site.

It's possible that there could be different markets for each of your objectives. The consultant should show that they clearly understand the demographics of the audience you want to attract. This includes whether your markets are currently online, whether they are comfortable using e-mail, etc. It's also important to clarify any restrictions on your marketing - for example, if you're only targeting specific locations.
So, the consultant should propose to you a wide-ranging plan
Search engine strategies
* Paid (bid for placement) listings
* Review sites and directories
* Linking with other appropriate sites
* Advertising / e-zine sponsorships (depending on your budget)
* Online public relations opportunities
* Integration with your real-world marketing

Good Web marketing is a team effort! Hire a consultant who you feel very comfortable with, who asks lots of questions to really understand your business and your goals, and who seems genuinely interested in promoting you. But then be prepared to work with them - respect and consider their suggestions, and allow them to be creative in their approach.

Increase Profits through Internet Marketing

Understanding that the Internet is another vehicle for direct response marketing can potentially make you rich!
Information marketing has much in common with the 'old school' mail order business. In fact, many of the practices you see online today such as two page direct sales mini-sites, mailing lists and unique products, come directly from the mail order model.

Disadvantages of Internet Marketing

* Can leave the businessman feeling isolated
* Hard to tell if people are lying because you can't see their face
* And you can be overloaded with information.

Can leave the businessman feeling isolated:
This is very common. Because the world wide web is faceless (In most cases), it can appear cold and inhuman. This can leave you feeling isolated and very inward. Not a nice feeling at all. Everyone likes to socialize and meet people, but in this case, its quite difficult to, in business anyway.

Hard to tell if people are lying:
There is so much information on the world wide web now, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between crap and quality. A lot of the crap is targeted at newbies. Here's an example "Make money fast by doing NOTHING", sound familiar? I bet you've had a ton of emails saying something similar.

Information Overload:
Once again we get to the part of there being a lot of information on the world wide web. There can be too much good information too. There can be a lot of competition for an industry, this can leave you more confused than if there were presented with loads of crap. You might not be able to tell who to chose. If you are a veteran of the net, you wont have much to worry about, however if you're a newbie then this is a problem.

Advantages of Internet marketing

* It's on the internet so it's low cost
* Very fast
* And you can reach a global audience

Low cost:
The internet is made up of electrons, so there is not really anything physically to grab hold of like in a brick and mortar business. This considerably reduces your costs as you don't really need many materials or buildings. Just a computer with world wide web capabilities : )

Very fast:
A great advertisement I saw once said "If you were an electron, you would be there by now". This was an ad at an airport. It's referring to the internet. It's made up of electrons so it's VERY fast. Click a link, and you could be looking at an Australian website, click another one and you could be in America. If you wanted to get information any other way from these countries, you may end up having to go there.The world wide web eliminates the need for this. Go any where you want with the click of a button.

You can reach a global audience:
By this I mean, you don't have to set up shop somewhere and sell to the locals. You can set up an online shop, and sell to anyone in the world. This means a huge increase in potential revenues and a fraction of the cost it would take for you to set up shops all over the world.