A market profile is based on what you can learn before and after you enter the market. In both cases you will need to collect information about your target customer, where they go online and who your competition is. The collection of data and information that forms the basis of a profile is called demographics.
The general approach is to do research about population, location and economic disposition to discover who is buying what, where, and how. Alternatively, if you already have a product or service, then you would seek specific data about the location, buyers and competition in your market.
The main objective of a demographic profile is to know your market reach and learn what to exclude from your marketing campaigns. Market reach is calculated by taking the number of unique visitors to your site relative to the total potential customers in your market.
The process of exclusion will help you save money by focusing your marketing efforts. The more you know about what your prospects don’t want or use, the more focused your ads can become and the more likely sales conversion will increase.
Locating your prospects on the Internet then is to discover where they hang out because you want to get your message in front of the people most likely to buy. However, you will need to know out what they want. The distinction here is to know the difference between a feature and a benefit. Your prospect is not looking for your product in particular. What they really want is what your product does to solve their problem or make their life better.
The benefits your product can offer are based on knowing what the key problems or desires are, and how they are expressed. Furthermore, what they currently buy is important to help differentiate your product from similar products or to position your product as complementary to what is already being used.
The data about needs, benefits and solutions are for the most part already available in many places all over the Internet. While there may be little or no demographic studies specific to your product, there are certain types of places your prospects will go online to get information. So, you need to go where they already are in order to divert them to your site.
For example, online communities specific to your product may be found in forums, blogs, user groups, and ezines. In some cases, participation is enough to pull traffic but not a good venue for advertising. As you research your market building bookmarks to the best locations is important to discover where to pull traffic by posting and where to push visitors to your site with advertising.
One of the best-recognized ways to pull visitors to your site is with articles. Although article directories can be quite general in classification, they are a source of content for more specific sites. Searching on keyword terms is one way to find the chain of custody from directory to niche sites where networking or ad opportunities may exist.
Market profiling is getting to know more about your customers, where they hang out, what they read, what videos they watch and their likes and dislikes. As your market profile starts to develop changes to how and where you represent your product or service becomes easier.