3 replies to this topic

[000]

Basic Internet Marketing may only be suitable to an extremely large versatile - something for everyone - type of site....

However, most sites profit from DETAILED focusing on a likely demographic...
:learn:

What sources and techniques can be utilized to attain and maximize this objective?
:balloons:

Edited by Jill, 23 August 2003 - 11:50 PM.

[dragonlady7]

Excellent use of smilies!
I think even the big versatile sites tend to do some demographic focusing. I suppose most people start out by doing focus-group stuff (if they're high-budget) or taking a long hard look at their competitors (if they're lower-budget).

It might be helpful if we defined a starting point... I'm finding this too general for me to have too many ideas about it.

[dimok]

Big sites should be divided into smaller parts and then each part can be focused on their specific audience.

BTW, "4 small sites is better than 2 big"

[torka]

What sources and techniques can be utilized to attain and maximize this objective!

I don't know if this is the sort of thing you have in mind...

But in usability circles, they talk a lot about the concept of "personas". Basically, when you're trying to make your site more usable, you're supposed to imagine a specific individual using it -- not generic, like "an older person who's not vary familiar with computers" or "a teenaged boy who's into gaming", but really REALLY specific.

As described on Jared Spool's site, UIE.com, in an article entitled "Personas: Matching a Design to the Users' Goals" by Christine Perfetti: "A persona is a profile of a typical user; it is a description of an archetypal user synthesized from a series of interviews with real people and includes a name, a social history, and a set of goals that drive the design of the product or web site."

Notice they go so far as to recommend that you construct a name and social history for your personas. I told you, they're SPECIFIC.

You can have more than one persona. In fact, you should have one for each class of user. The trick is to make useful divisions into classes so that you've covered each basic type of visitor you have (or would like to have) but not so much that you've got dozens of personas. Then you start making up specific individuals to represent each of those classes.

If it works for usability, why couldn't it work for SEO and marketing? The more you know about the people who are visiting your site (or the people you'd like to have visiting your site), the more it would seem to me you could determine a copy style that they would find appealing, locate search terms that they might be likely to use, identify sites that they might be likely to visit (from which you could try to obtain links or reviews or on which you might advertise) and so forth.

Just an idea... As usual, YMMV.

--Torka