Do you use market segmentation? If you’re an Internet marketer, you probably don’t. More off line business owners use market segmentation than do Internet Marketers. Why?

One reason is because Internet marketers often target markets by key words and phrases and don’t know the demographic characteristics of the people who search for those key words.

Internet Marketers
Need Demographic Information
On Their Target Markets

If you’re an Internet marketer, you may not know enough demographic information about the people using your key words to utilize market segmentation. But if you learn, you can improve your marketing and increase your sales. And it’s not that hard.

Getting demographic information about your target markets requires some research and will likely cost you some time and/or money. But the results of market segmentation are worth it.

The simplest way to learn the demographics of your target market is to survey its members.

If you’ve already built a good list, it will be easier and cheaper to conduct research and determine your target market’s demographics than if you have to advertise for people to take your survey. So you can relatively easily and inexpensively utilize market segmentation with a list.

How To Get
Demographic Information
On Your Target Market

To conduct demographic research for the people who use your key words, you first need to have something to offer them in return for providing you with their information. Digital information products work well because you can deliver them instantly for no delivery charge.

How To Get Demographic Information
Through Pay Per Click

If you don’t have a good list, then you will have to use pay-per-click. You can get people who search for your key words to click on your advertisement and trade their demographics for your free digital product. That is if your product is something they want enough to exchange their contact information for it.

Pay-per-click advertising can be costly, and it may not reach the same people who click on organic search results for your key words. I recently read research indicating that the people who click on pay-per-click ads are usually younger and less likely to purchase a product than people who click on organic search results. They comprise two different segments so getting information on clickers to use for searchers can distort your market segmentation research.

How To Get Demographic Information
Through Forums

You may get less distorted information by joining forums that your target market members are likely to join and post your proposal there.

Whichever, technique you use to get demographic information on your target market, you have to have that information before you can use market segmentation to get personality characteristics and buying behavior.

The next post in this series will guide you to get demographic information with surveys. Then you can use information from the surveys to get even more information on your target market using market segmentation. You can access that post below:

Market Segmentation For Internet Marketers 2

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Posted 6-25-08:
Market Segmentation
For Internet Marketers 1

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008 at 6:29 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Market Segmentation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.