When you create an advertising piece, especially online, every aspect should reach out and grab your target customer. This means copy (especially), design, colors, photos, graphics, packaging (if applicable), ordering process… absolutely everything.

Segmenting Your Broad Market One trouble that often plaques businesses is fact that their target audience is so broad. If that is case with your company, try segmenting market and appealing to each segment's behavioral traits.

For example: perhaps you're a Real Estate agent. You need a Web site and want to appeal to several segments of Real Estate market. What can you do to incorporate behavioral traits and other preferences of so many people?

Divide your site into smaller areas specifically targeted to each segment. You might choose to have a link on your home page that says "Need to sell your home? Click here!" In that section you can speak specifically to needs and concerns of home sellers. (Who are usually women!)

Another area might be directed toward home buyers. These people want lots and lots of information, including pictures. Be sure to give it to them along with some articles dealing with hiring a moving company, transferring your utilities to a new address and how to prepare children for a new school. Get it? Major decisions require lots of information.

Keep Focused On Customer Above all, keep focused on your customers and their needs. Resist temptation to use your favorite shade of pink as a primary color in your Web design if your customers are mostly men. Remember that you can choose to include an optional flash presentation within your site if you're dealing mostly with women. And always, always address your target market's concerns and needs with benefit-oriented copy.

By combining information within 3 parts of this series, you can truly make your online advertising more powerful… and more readily received by your customers.

***The initial survey (about which I have written this commentary) was conducted by Jupiter (www.jup.com), a worldwide authority on Internet commerce.