Marketing on the Internet is more than simply creating a Web site. You need to understand how your message reaches your customers. You need to provide information using their vocabulary. You need to be able to answer their questions, preferably before they recognize that they have a problem. You need to be the expert that they are looking for; the person they trust to be there when a problem arises.
Identify your Customers
To do all of this, you must be able to identify your customers. For some organizations this task is easy, while for others identifying customers may be quite difficult. When identifying your customers there are the main questions you will ask yourself about each visitor:
- What are they buying and why are they buying it?
- How does their position affect their need?
To help answer these questions, look at the following example for a Pizza Restaurant
On the first look a Pizzeria caters to everyone, and while that may be true, there are specific groups of people that use their services more often than others: singles and teens, busy families and party organizers
- Singles and Teens
- What are they buying and why are they buying it?
Pizza, Pizza, Pizza. This is your group of hungry individuals on a limited budget that either don’t want, or don’t have the time, to cook. Pizza is a great food that keeps well and feeds a person for more than one meal, while costing less per individual serving than many other fast foods.
- How does their position affect their need?
Teens are hungry all the time. They typically work at minimum wage jobs, and therefore have a limited budget. To them, pizza is as much a status symbol, as it is nourishment.
- Busy Families (aka. Busy Moms)
- What are they buying and why are they buying it?
Pizza is a fast take home meal for the busy mom. She also will get breadsticks, maybe some hot wings, or some to-go salad. She is interested in giving her kids something that they will eat without complaint. She needs to not waste any time in the kitchen so that she can catch up on her busy schedule, without feeling like she is feeding her family pure junk food.
- How does their position affect their need?
She is responsible for the welfare of her entire family and needs to balance the needs of her pocketbook with the need to feed her family, while creating a little bit of free time for herself.
- Party Organizers
- What are they buying and why are they buying it?
Your typical party planer goes for the basics: Pizza and drinks. This person may be planning a birthday party for 12 kids, or a business luncheon for a department brainstorming session. Pizza allows them to reach a wide variety of taste preferences while costing less per individual serving than many other foods.
- How does their position affect their need?
The party organizer needs to not only ensure that everyone they feed is satisfied with the amount of food, they also have the need to leave a good impression on those they were serving. A kid birthday party organizer is going to be focused on the amount, whereas a business person is also going to be concerned about presentation.
Now.. What do you write?
Once you have identified your primary customers, you can start writing content for your site that meets their needs. For instance, a teenager visiting your site may want to know that you make an effort to cover every inch of the pie with pepperoni. A busy mom may want to know that you can ship a pizza to her child that just moved away to college. A party organizer may want to know that you deliver pizza to their location.
Start making a list of every topic you think may be of concern to your customers. If you have a physical store front, then start asking your customer’s what they think. Take unofficial polls of how they think your toppings stand up to the competition, or how they like your pizza sauce.
Once you have a thorough list of topics you will need to organize it by grouping similar subjects together. For instance, you don’t need to write one article on pepperoni counts and another on marinara sauce quality. You can write one article and cover everything about how your pizzas are made, your thoughts and philosophy’s on toppings, and hint about the secret ingredient in your sauce that makes it so delectable. Write a separate article about how to prepare a pizza for shipping across the state.
Once you have your topics narrowed into groups, and the articles written, go back through them and edit for vocabulary. For instance, if you are in New Jersey your customers may call pizza a “tomato pie”, something that is unheard of on the West coast. If your store is located in New Jersey, then you need to ensure your article uses both common terms for pizzas. If your store is located in Oregon, then you can probably safely leave the “tomato pie” reference out of your articles.
Edit. Edit. Edit
Once the articles are written and you have ensured you are using the vocabulary of your customers, you are ready to set the article aside for a day. When you look at an article with fresh eyes, you will be able to more easily see your grammatical errors, erroneous vocabulary usage and misspellings.
Read your article out loud and listen closely to what you are actually saying to your potential customers. Edit the content until you are happy with the results. Keep in mind that although you never want to knowingly post messages with errors or misspellings, it is easy to fix a missed comma tomorrow.
Now… Get to brainstorming! Your customers are excited to see what you can offer them.
