If your marketing agency tells you that your target market is ’15-35-year-old males who like sport and live in Australia’, drop them.
There are so many people in that market that you may as well stand outside the MCG with a logo on your tshirt on game day for all the effect it will have on promoting your brand.
Having a broad target market might be appealing. It means lots of people are potential customers, right? But trying to be everything to everyone means you dilute your message.
To get to the real gold, you need to go granular. The more research you do to laser target your market, the better your return on investment.
More than search terms
Ranking well on search engines for relevant keywords is an excellent start, but finding your laser target is more than landing them through words, it’s about answering their questions. This is where an experienced SEO agency cuts through the noise.
Superficial research will show you what keywords are trending; deep research will tell you what people are saying about those topics. For example, when we do research for our clients, we might investigate platforms such as LinkedIn and YouTube and look at not just the content doing well there, but also the comments. We go to forums like Quora and Whirlpool to see what questions people are asking.
Bullseye content
Once we identify what people want to know, we then ask the questions of Google to see what comes up. Take ‘MCG Ashes’, for example: are people looking to buy tickets to a game? Do they want to know the team lineup? Are they researching transport options? Are they after Ashes memorabilia?
After that we combine this research with a review of the enquiries you receive from your ideal potential customers. This allows us to spot pain points and frequently asked questions. We can then create content that targets those potential customers.
Multiple targets
After pulling together all this information, look for patterns to see what keeps coming up. You might find pockets of people keen to buy team attire to go to a match, or those looking to purchase cricket memorabilia as a gift, or others wanting to invest in memorabilia specific to an Ashes win. Evaluate whether certain groups match certain demographics. You can then identify multiple target markets and the different information to offer each of those markets.
Basic level SEO practice tells you to make sure your landing pages are keyword-rich. Lazy agencies will create one landing page filled with as many of these as possible, but the secret is to create a landing page for each separate target. They’re looking for different things, so why would they be interested in a generic page? If you include too many keywords, they lose their impact.
Warm leads
A person who searches ‘cricket bat’ might have a passing interest in cricket bats, perhaps trying to settle a bet about what kind of wood cricket bats are made of, but in news that will surprise no one, someone who searches ‘cricket bat’ and ‘buy’ is ready to purchase this piece of sporting equipment.
You can target warm leads with keyword combinations and even use advanced targeting tools on platforms such as Facebook, where you can create a custom audience for your ads based on income, whether they’ve purchased something from Facebook before, and even their average spend.
Go for seconds… and thirds
What’s more valuable than someone who buys from you once? Someone who buys from you again and again, and is a loyal customer! These people may look slightly different from your potential market and finding out what makes them different will unlock nuggets of gold that you can use to sharpen your targeting.
Perhaps you have the best range of cricket gloves for left-handers, or stock the only helmet with a grille that will fit over sunglasses.
Pin the sale
Most Australian businesses often start with ‘Australia’ as their target market, but what if you could zoom in on location and identify the specific suburbs where you’re likely to convert sales?
You could use existing sales data to figure out hotspots, or perhaps identify the characteristics of a location that makes a good market. For example, if you’re trying to sell cricket gear, look for suburbs within a certain radius of a cricket ground where local teams are likely to play.
What all of this should tell you is that ’15-35-year-old males who like sport and live in Australia’ is too broad to be a meaningful target market. If you instead target ‘left-handed batsmen from East Melbourne who earn more than $75,000 a year’, you’re far more likely to strike a vein of gold.
Sabri Suby is the founder and Head of Growth at King Kong, Australia’s fastest growing full-service digital marketing agency that uses true ROI and only charges for success. Based in Melbourne, King Kong has clients across Australia and overseas. Its services include SEO, CRO, PPC, Facebook Advertising, web design and landing pages.
