Marketing 101 – You can have the best product or service, but if you can’t get the right message to the right people your most likely outcome is failure.

There are many great products that are no longer available or sitting in a warehouse somewhere.  Why? The simple answer is the company that sold those products did not make the right marketing push to the right people, at the right time.  Sometimes it is simply a matter of giving up too soon and even though all the rest was right, the repetition wasn’t there.

Internet marketing is no different. First it takes time to find out where the target customer hangs out.

• Do they participate in forums?
• Are there particular web sites they frequently visit?
• Is there a product, or service, that is complimentary to your own where a customer may be found?
• What newsletters or ezines are they receiving in their inbox?
• Where online do they shop currently?

Knowing as much information about your prospective customers online behavior is just as important as knowing the general demographics of your customer.

This information can be very elusive and without it creating a targeted online marketing approach is no more targeted than randomly picking websites to advertise on.

Where do you start to find this information?

1. Ask you current customers – offer them an incentive for providing you with the answers you need…their online habits.
2. Survey on your website – again there could be an incentive for answering a few questions, these visitors may not be your customers yet, but knowing how they found you is a very important piece of your puzzle.
3. Analytics – web analytics software installed on your website is crucial and the prices range from free to the very expensive.  At minimum, find one that will tell you where your visitors came from and where they went to after visiting your web site, in addition to what they did while they were on your web site.

Test these techniques to see where you get the best information and continually monitor this information for the hidden nuggets of continuity and patterns that will start to emerge in your customers patterns.

Remember, your current customers, as well as visitors to your website hold the keys of information to where you will find more people like them…more of your target market.

Knowing where to put your online advertising, which social networks to belong to, and what pages on your web site are the most interesting to your customers is worth the small investment of time and money it will take to gather the information.