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Banner Advertising – 4 Steps to Reaching Your Target Audience
Determining your target market is an integral part of any marketing strategy. Unfortunately too many businesses bypass this step and waste precious marketing dollars on communicating with a wide audience. First you need to consider who you want to attract, giving you vital insight into how to impress them.
1. Forget Mass Marketing
The rules associated with traditional mass media marketing don’t apply to the online world. With the vast selection of interest groups and audiences online, it doesn’t pay to advertise on highly trafficked generalized sites unless you’re a mega brand looking for vast appeal and broad distribution.
Luckily for the smaller players, the internet provides more targeting-oriented marketing opportunities than the traditional options of newspapers, television and radio advertising. That’s where the crucial point lies; don’t just go after as much traffic as possible, the aim is to attract highly focused and qualified visitors.
For example, there’s no point spending exorbitant dollars advertising your local hardware store on Yahoo’s homepage. Such a broad campaign would be very costly and counterproductive. You’d want to appeal to potential customers though smaller more targeted sites like DIY or home improvement blogs.
2. Finding places to advertise
Try to diversify your web marketing approach. Don’t rely on just one source of advertising. You should be constantly trying and testing possible avenues to gain awareness and new customers. A good place to start looking for Ad Space is at a Banner Auction website, where you can focus on your specific industry, search for Ad Space by keywords, deal directly with website or blog owners and either bid on or buy out your choice of affordable ad spots.
You could also contact niche websites who come up for your desired keywords. Blogs are particularly valuable as they have keyword rich content and many haven’t discovered the great advantages of monetizing their blogs through accepting advertising.
You may be able to negotiate some bargain Banner advertising deals with those site owners who haven’t got any advertising on their site. Not only could you gain a high ranking link, there won’t be any competing advertisers on that site (until the owner starts selling more space).
3. Defining the Target Market
When making marketing choices, businesses must always be asking curial question “who is my target audience?” Answers like “anyone over 50’ or “everyone who likes sport” might seem specific but they’re certainly not. You may have several different types of customers and for each type you should identify a combination of these factors:
• Demographics – by age, income, gender, occupation.
• Psychographics – including hobbies, personal interests, preferences, music.
• Geographic – this can be as general as worldwide or a specific city or country.
• Use-based – how often the customer would want or need your product or service.
Say you’re a plastic and cosmetic surgery clinic and want to boost cash flow by selling dermal fillers. You may describe the target market like this:
• Women.
• Over 30 years old.
• Living in your city.
• Combined family income of $40,000 or more.
• Buy anti-ageing skin care at least once every quarter to maintain a youthful look.
Note the target market would be quite different for the clinic’s rhinoplasty services. When you know your audience, look to advertise on websites or blogs where such customers frequent. In this example, this could include anti-ageing or skin care blogs.
4. Exceed Their Needs, Wants & Expectations
For each target audience group, work out their needs, wants and expectations and try to surpass each in your Banner. Look to your competitors for ideas. Try to get the ultimate attention grabber for each targeted audience.
The beauty of lower cost and almost immediate advertising in the online sphere serves a huge advantage to niche and local businesses. It’s time to grasp the opportunity and capitalize on the rewarding possibilities offered by the internet advertising marketplace.
Byline:
Dita Bednar is a co-founder of Bidswamp.com, an Ad Space Auction website which helps advertisers and site owners connect to buy and sell Advertising Space.
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