Affiliate Marketers: How to Appeal to Your Target Market

Affiliate Marketers: How to Appeal to Your Target Market

A **target market** (n): A group of folks who are the prime focus of a marketing plan.

Understanding your target market is perhaps the single most important aspect of any online selling and the first thing you should define for your business. Even you don’t sell any of your own products, your target market is very important. It’s what gives you a handle on what type of products to offer as an affiliate, what content to provide and how to attract the right crow for your offers.

When determining your target market, there are two basic areas to explore: Demographics and psychographics.

 Demographics can include your target market’s age, gender, geographic location, income bracket, and other statistical type of data.

 Psychographics are more vital to truly understanding your target market. Psychographics define your market’s interests, lifestyles, opinions, values, and so on.

Psychographics can be harder to nail down than demographics, but are significantly more useful to understanding your target market. The more you understand your target market, the easier it will be to sell to them. Understand their point-of-view, the problems they have and what kinds of solutions they’re looking for.

You can learn more about the psychographics of your customers by paying close attention to their behavior, asking them questions, reading their discussions (whether it’s comments on your blogs, their own blogs, forums, etc.), observing other companies that sell to a similar market and continually making an effort to grow your understanding of your target audience.
What Motivates Your Target Market
To help you further understand what makes your target market tick, here are some important human motivators that have been identified by psychologists. They will help you in understanding what motivates your readers to take action:
 Fear
 Exclusivity
 Guilt
 Greed
 Need for approval
 Convenience
 Pleasure

You can use this information to craft your affiliate promotions. Always keep these motivators in mind when choosing a product to sell and when writing promotional text for your unique audience. The individual products you promote won’t likely incorporate all these motivators, but maybe you a few.

Imagine Your Typical Reader Who Buys Products You Recommend

What are her wants and desires? What problems does she need solved? If you don’t already know that, try surveying the readers that you already have. Ask them a few questions about themselves, why they buy certain products, what they like about them and what they don’t like. In return, offer them a coupon or a free report or something, just to get that feedback. This information will be very valuable to you.

Think About the Products You Promote:

What is the single most important reason your target audience would want to buy these products? You need to be able to empathize with your target market, identify their problems and show how your product solves that problem. If you think too generally about your target market, the passion is lost in your promotions and it’s tough to get anyone excited about anything.

For example, if you promote an ebook about getting rid of acne and you simply talk about the embarrassment of acne, you might get some sales. But if you know that your target market for a specific promotion is teenagers, talking about being teased at school, worrying that they won’t find a date and having a case study of a teenager who overcame that – your promos will be much more powerful.

Define Your Target Market:

If you need a hand, here’s a checklist of items to consider in defining your target market. They may or may not all be applicable:

 Gender
 Age
 Geographic Location
 Income
 Marital Status
 Nationality
 Religion
 Education
 Occupation
 Number of Children
 Interests
 Opinions
 Values
 Hobbies and Activities
 Problems They Face
 How Often They Buy
 How Much They Spend
 Motivators for Buying

Keep this information in mind the next time you write an article, blog post or product endorsement. It will do wonders for your results.

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