Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

There are 2 ways to figure out who the ideal target market for your particular brand of widgets is likely to be.

The first method is the one I learnt about in marketing school and involves lots of inaccurate census figures and speculation. This method is also likely to lead you to consider suicide. We’ll call this method ‘Academic Target Marketing’ for lack of a better phrase. I suggest you forget about Academic Target Marketing immediately.

The second, fun method of target marketing is what I like to call ‘Micro targeting‘ (I just made that up. Eat your heart out Maslow! This method is for those of you who run a home business and don’t have time to spend a week in the local library.

Micro Targeting answers basic questions about your target market. It doesn’t tell you what color underwear they’ve got on, but it does show you where to look for new business.

Allow me to illustrate

My sister runs a curtain making and cleaning business. She’s really good at what she does and she’s growing a pretty good client base. You’d think that homeowners would be her target market, right? Wrong. She targets her marketing to:

• Interior decorators who decorate high-end homes and offices
• Hotel groups who clean and/or replace their curtains frequently
• Architects, who design homes and corporate buildings, and who work with end users and interior decorators all the time
• Property developers, who build large numbers of homes, usually for high-income owners
• Furniture-makers who not only deal with homeowners and interior designers, but who also make furniture that needs upholstery and cleaning

My sister knows that homeowners are likely to buy once, maybe twice. But people in the business of building and decorating homes will buy, or recommend her, every time they start work on a new project.

With only 5 niche markets to target she doesn’t need to waste time on prospects that aren’t going to grow her business in the long term. That’s pretty smart.

Moral of the story: You need to know who you’re building your micro business for. And you need to know a lot about them. You should be able to craft a voodoo doll of your perfect client and know exactly where to stick the pins.

Still haven’t subscribed yet? Loads of other people have. Now they officially know more about micro business marketing than you do.

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In his book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, and in just about everything he’s ever written, marketing god Seth Godin emphasizes being remarkable as the only way to really grow a business in the Internet age.

For us mere mortals, being remarkable is also known as having a Unique Selling Proposition (USP), or answering the timeless question “why should I buy from you?” In short, your USP is that one little thing that sets you apart from all the other people peddling the same products as you.

And because it only takes 2 seconds for Google to tell a customer who those people are, you’d better find a way to stand out from the crowd.

No USP? Write one now

Because micro businesses generally deal in niche markets their USP’s ought to be pretty easy to figure out. Break up your USP into 2 segments:

1. Why should I buy?
2. From you?

If your take-away guarantees a 30-minute delivery or it’s free, that’s your USP. If your graphic design business specializes in menu design for up-market restaurants, that’s your USP. My USP? I help people with very little money grow a micro business online. You get the idea. Now go get yourself a USP.

Repeat after me: My logo is not my brand

If you think your shiny new $500 logo plastered on the side of your van, on your shirt, your cap and your invoices is branding, you’re wrong. Your logo is simply an image customers use to identify you. It tells them who you are, not what you stand for.

Branding is far more than image. It’s the way you answer the phone. It’s the level of customer service you offer. It’s the way you go out of your way (or don’t) to help customers solve their problems. And it’s the way you do something totally unexpectedly simple, yet brilliant, to get your customers talking about you.

Your business brand is everything you do right, and it’s your USP. The better you are at doing everything right, the stronger your brand. That’s how you become remarkable.

Moral of the story: Unless you know who you are and why anyone should care enough to give you some of their money, you’re going to get lost in a sea of websites and online businesses that just don’t matter.

There’s more where this came from. Subscribe today if you don’t believe me.

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For the foreseeable future, we’re going to be looking at online marketing strategy (which is a fancy term for website planning) here at thinkdave.com.

When I started this blog last year, my first article was a little ditty called “Website Planning 101“. While the title of the post may be somewhat inspiring, the article itself was a boatload of rubbish. Why? I didn’t know what I was talking about.

I’ve worked with some great micro business owners in the past year, and they’ve really helped me to understand what a website needs to be in order to make money for it’s owner. I’ve known how to build websites for years but I’ve only recently learned what it takes to make them work.

So I’m going to re-visit Website planning/strategy/marketing or whatever you want to call it, in depth, so you can all understand what’s so very wrong with the way you’re marketing your business online (unless of course you’re doing everything right, in which case you can take the rest of the year off).

Because marketing is a somewhat complex subject (I know this because it took me 6 years to finish a 4 year marketing program at college) I’m going to break phase 1 of the series, which I cleverly refer to as ‘Strategy’, into the following posts, to be added every couple of days:

1. The Internet is no place for an identity crisis.
2. Website? Check. Target market? Umm…
3. Me me me. What’s in it for me?
4. I am website. Hear me roar.
5. Either you’re with us, or you’re against us. You choose.
6. Nostradamus’ guide to website management.
7. If you build it there’s a 1 in a billion chance they may come. But they probably won’t.

Once you’ve knocked together an online marketing plan worth reading, which really isn’t hard, we’ll move into phase 2 where we’ll start working on the content, functionality and super-cool features our website needs to get people to whip out their credit cards.

And finally in phase 3, just to really shoot myself in the foot, I’ll teach you how to build your website from scratch (well, sort of from scratch) without having to hire a web designer.

At the end of this series, which could end up taking 3 millennia for me to finish writing, you’ll have a micro business website that people actually consider worthy of visiting. It might even make you some money.

Because I’ve already written all the posts in phase 1 of this series, I know how good they are. You won’t know unless you subscribe. Go ahead, you know you want to.

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