As fans of the classic Australian comedy film The Castle heard: “As the real estate agent said, “Location, location, location”, and we’re right next door to the airport. It will be very convenient if we ever have to fly one day”.
Many of us have invested in property, and either purchased investment properties or family homes that represent our largest source of equity. No matter what, most of us considered those three words as one of the fundamentals of the real estate market. But what about that other important real estate – the online market for your products and services?
If you can’t identify your target market, or convey it in a form that is able to be interpreted clearly, you are unlikely to realise the full value of your online investment.
It’s pretty common for a business to have a website, ranging from “brochureware” through to full-scale ecommerce, and sophisticated integrations between social media, blogging, email and offline promotions. Most SME’s will go directly to a web designer, rather than consider the broader strategy for their product or service.
Marketing Planning: Market Share
Plenty of designers are prepared to create an “online marketing plan” using any of a number of these approaches, and a designer who has experience in marketing management or campaign strategy, such as a planner from an advertising background, is likely to have the true depth of knowledge to accurately target your market.
But for the most part, a designer should be best at designing, and be able to design for an identified market, according to your instructions, or “brief”.
At a recent meeting, my client was very pleased with the level of traffic arriving at their site, driven by directories, good backlinking and strong branding. Although little onsite SEO work had been executed, the results were already very satisfactory.
However, I could see the scope for much greater success, but had some trouble conveying what I saw as an open opportunity to secure a much larger portion of market share. Rather than comparing the performance of the website with the benchmark taken prior to redesign and SEO optimisation work, the true performance indicator was to draw a comparison with the total number of keyword searches in the targeted area.
If the site traffic had doubled in 6 months from 1,000 visits to 2,000, a quite remarkable 200% increase, shouldn’t the real test be what percentage of searches result in traffic to your site?
Out of 100,000 searches per month, the 200% increase really represented just 2% of the potential market.
We’re now working towards capturing 10% of that potential market over the next six months, beyond which my client will not be able to meet demand. At that level however, their profitability will be optimum, and they will start to look at diversification. A real result in a very soft market!
Make sure you know what you are measuring, and what you want to achieve online – only then can you begin to get the most out of the web. If you want the best result, bring in the specialist – As any builder will remind you, “Measure twice, cut once”.
I can’t resist one more quote from the film, from the family’s Lebanese neighbour, Farouk : “He say plane fly overhead, drop value. I no care. In Beirut, plane fly over head, drop bomb. I like these planes better”.
