Who buys your stuff?

One of the first stages of designing a website involves really understanding our clients brand and market (as well as their competitors!).  Only a handful of times have clients come to us armed with a branding guide and a real sense of their own target market.  They might know their product inside out and back to front  – but when we ask who the target market is we frequently get answers like “old people, people who visit the website, mums, children, people who want building work, anybody really” etc.

How can we create an effective website, one that works for you and your target market if you are unable to define it yourself?

Lets say that you provide jewellery making classes at children’s birthday parties. 

1. So who’s your market?  Children, Girls?
2. Lets go a bit further: what age are your parties aimed for?  between 5 and 12.
3. A bit more: so are your parties expensive?  Yes, about £20 per child.

So now we have “Girls aged between 5 and 12 with reasonable wealthy parents”. Right?

Wrong.  The product is aimed at the children but the children are not buying them.  Your online marketing campaign in unlikely to reach the children directly at all.  Your market is working mums, cash rich and time poor.  (unlike me – cash poor and time poor  !!). So whilst the product needs to appeal to children it needs to be marketed online primarily at the mums.  The Mums need to know why they should purchase from you, why their little princess will adore the jewellery birthday party and mums need to know how much time and effort it will save them in organising that special day.

We can even take this a bit further.  I presume that you can only deal with parties locally?  So lets include that in your list too, we are left with a website that is aimed at appealing to “local working or affluent mums of girls aged 5 to 12″.  Now that is much easier for us to work with both in terms of design and also in terms of SEO and should be easier for you since you now have a better idea how to market your website online.

So – who is your market?

Digital Marketing | 17.11.2009 22:03 | No Comments