In
early days of developing my home business, I went for
numbers instead of focusing on targeting prospects. It took me a while to appreciate
importance of targeting (quality) instead of just going for
big numbers (quantity).For online marketing, it helps greatly to get your website in front of people who are actually looking for
product, service, or opportunity that you are offering. This refers to
concept of marketing your sites to your target audience, rather than wasting your time, effort, and money on people who are not already interested in what you have to offer.
Be wary of “massive action” techniques in this era when many ISPs feel their hottest marketing theme is
blocking of incoming emails, which they decide their customers do not want to receive (they are
self appointed “information police”).
Many of
sources of cheap, high volume leads supply you with leads that have absolutely no interest in your particular business (or product or service) and furthermore, have been put into
list in such a manner that can get you into trouble with your ISP because you are unwittingly spamming (many of these bulk lead lists are created by robots that crawl
Internet and harvest email addresses)
recipients.
In order to be effective in promoting your particular proposition, whatever it is, you have to seek out your target market. This is as true online as it is offline. Just because you are able to reach huge numbers of people with your message on
Internet far more cheaply and quickly than you can offline, does this necessarily mean you should?
What’s
point of devoting your time and energies to marketing to a massive group of people without first knowing whether they, as a group, have a general interest in what you are offering?
It is much more efficient and effective to first find out where your prospective customers congregate, and then target that congregation, than it is to use a shotgun approach and hope that one of your pellets will somehow find its target (you know…throw enough up against
wall and something is bound to stick). You will find that by selectively targeting your prospects before marketing to them, your conversion ratio (the proportion of your target market that takes positive action and actually purchases your product or service) will be much higher than
results you would otherwise achieve without first taking
time to target your prospects. Once again, quality wins out over quantity.