Your customers are waiting online!

Posted by Brian | Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Every day tens, hundreds, thousands of potential customers are searching for your products or services on the Internet. They are out there waiting to engage, enquire and spend. But are you where they are? Not sure? Well you can easily find out.

You can utilise simple and available tools like Adwords Keyword Research Tool to type in key words or search terms relevant to your business offering and this will tell you the number of individual searches for that term. Or, more importantly, the number of potential customers wanting to buy what you sell.

Let us take an easy example like ‘iron bed’ and ‘iron beds’. In May 2009 these terms were searched for 8,100 and 4,400 times respectively. That is 12,500 prospective customers searching for what you sell (if you sell iron beds of course-like our good friends at Feather and Black www.featherandblack.com).

Interested? Well you can use factual investigation to determine who buys your product and, as the above example shows, you can identify how many searches there are. Use this for all key terms related to your business, regardless of what you do, and you are starting to develop an online strategy.

In line with this, you can investigate and detail who currently buys what you sell. What makes your typical customer; age, sex, likes, dislikes and so on. This information is vital to allow you to start to target the exact demographic that represents your ideal customer.

From here you can look at where your ideal customer may be most represented online. For instance, if your research indicates that your ideal average target customer is 35 years old, lives in a 3 bedroom house and drives a blue Ford Mondeo you must start to consider where you can find these types of people. Arenas like Facebook are great for this as online profiling will allow you to place your product in front of your ideal customer

You can drill down to as niche a result as you like but remember, all levels from the top may be buyers so do not distance them and these are just averages but can assist in targeted marketing.

Are there products that your target market already buys and you could develop relationships with those providers to cross sell to each others customers?

You can even gauge how much approximately it may cost you to get the customer. The tools will also outline the cost of key terms and therefore how much an enquiry or sale may cost you to get onto your website. This allows you to plan what will work best relevant to your business model and profit margin.

How much is a new customer worth to your business?

You can access the free Adwords tool here

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal