Find your Customers

Looking for the Forest through the Trees
-Using Target Intelligence to find your customers:

It does not seem logical that having a practically infinite audience sitting in front of your message is an ineffective way to market your wares.  Information technology has advanced to a level that allows billions of prospects to see your message, your product, your click-here-for-more-info button.

Target Intelligence is the tool used by savvy online marketers, most of whom got into the online marketing game early.  Understanding that your message can set idle in front of those billions of online eyeballs, or, it can reach the hundreds-of-thousands of people who are actually your customers is the difference between effective marketers and those just lost in the cyber masses.

Mark Schaefer recently wrote:

Become a beefy marketer.  An ability to navigate Facebook or YouTube might be enough to get you an entry level job at some places but to really build a career you should become proficient at the fundamentals of marketing.  Star performers will be able to apply their love of the social web to marketing research, consumer behavior, product development, personal selling, and brand-building.   Get a degree if you can. If that’s not possible, join the American Marketing Association and immerse yourself in their journals and webinars. Read all you can, attend free webinars every day of your job search, create an effective RSS feed for yourself.

Done correctly, target intelligence allows marketers to take the data, click ratios, sales figures, and demographics and put the information into contextual format, allowing you to market your product to the people who are most likely your customers and not the billions of others who are by and large, ignoring your message anyway.  Why waste valuable resources when the technology is available to you to get in front of only those who are looking for you?

The recent emergence of online media such as Facebook, Twitter and possibly the pioneer in massive online communication, Myspace, although, it is now very specialized for the music industry, have made the possibilities for businesses to get in front of unlimited numbers of prospects a bit dizzying.

On one hand, the platform is there- the audience is there- the marketing budget is there.  But then there is that.. other hand.  It is a bit too massive.  Target intelligence is the only way to cut through the mind-boggling numbers of people online- and find the ones looking for you.