Also, many "newbies" spend way too much money on pay per click without a real appreciation of the finer points and strategy behind PPC management. For example, strategically placed ads targeted to a site's customer, based on their browsing habits, is more effective than a blanket campaign.

This goes to show that knowing your online customer is as important as knowing the customer who walks through the front door of your shop. If your target customer spends time online in the evenings and weekends, then that's when you should concentrate your spending online. So you can maximize your PPC spending, making it a more effective marketing channel.

Conversely, on the organic side, knowing who your online customer is can help you more effectively write content that will catch their eye. You can also improve your sales by ensuring the conversion path suits them. Knowing where they are in the buying funnel (research versus purchase stages) also can help you determine what they are looking for and assist you to serve them the information they want. They may not buy from you at the research stage, but if they are satisfied with the information they got from your site at this time, there is a higher likelihood that they will come back to buy from your site.

Running an online business is much like running a brick and mortar business. Knowing what your customer wants, and giving it to them where, and when, they want helps to increase your sales. That is the premise for all retailers. Wal-Mart stores are designed and laid out months in advance of a store's opening. Much time and effort is put into finding out what the customers want and where they expect to find it in a store. The same holds true for an online business.

In the "olden days" when the web was young, you could simply throw up a website and start selling, but today's web users are more sophisticated and have more resources at their disposal.

Realizing that your online business doesn't operate in a vacuum is an important first step to ensuring the success of your venture. Next is to properly identify your target audience and what it is going to take to reach them and ultimately what it will to take to get them to buy from you.

This will help you maximize your online investment, ensuring that both your organic and paid marketing components complement each other to drive the most qualified traffic to your site.

Rob Sullivan
Production Manager
Enquiro.com

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