Internet Marketing - Are You Reaching Your Target Audience?

To be sure you're reaching your target audience with any marekting effort and internet marketing in particular. It is important to have certain elements in place. First and foremost is to know who your public is.
Second is to know what they want from your product or service.
Third is to deliver what they want from your advertising all the way through your product or service itself.

How do you know who your public is and what they want from your product or service?
The answer is survey. Ask your public (customers and prospects) what they want with properly conducted market research in the form of surveys.

While there are many firms that perform market research and customer surveys it is important that the survey you conduct accomplish certain key objectives in order for the information to be practically useful when creating your marketing campaigns and collateral.

1. The survey must acertain what type of people are most likely to want and buy your product. If your product has a dual public, such as with children's products, you must survey both publics (e.g. children and parents).

2. The survey must find out what these people would expect your product to do for them - benefits they expect.

3. The survey must get them to tell you how best to present your product to them. This is a tricky one because your questions have to cut through a person's social acceptance mechanisms to get to what really makes them want a product. This is accomplished through careful question construction and is best done by marketers experienced in writing questions that cut through an individual's social veneer.

4. The survey should also ask questions about such things as pricing, packaging, color and name.

5. And finally, the survey should ask questions that tell you how to position your product so that consumers will find it appealing.

Even if you conduct focus groups and product testing, doing these types of surveys early on in the product development and marketing development stages can save a great deal of time and money. At the very least it will give you a direction to go in which will save many hit and miss attempts at getting your marketing right.

---- Toli Cefail

Toli Cefail is a veteran marketing executive and entrepreneur with more than 20 years experience in marketing both online and off. She is currently the Chief Operating Officer at the leading online marketing firm In Touch Media Group (ITOU.OB) - www.InTouchMediaGroup.com.