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Demographic wakeup call! Know your market...

by ajensen
5 replies
This is geared more towards beginning affiliate marketers, but I thought I would share an experience I just had.

You think you know your market? You’ve made all the right assumptions?

I’m not sure I was quite that presumptuous, but I was caught way off guard. I’m not going to tell you my exact niche. I’ll just make up an analogous example of what happened to me.

I was in the process of improving my ROI and thought it would be really useful to follow up with people who had actually signed up for my offer. When I did this, I found out the people signing up for the offer were the exact opposite of what I thought my demographic was! The people buying were actually the people who didn’t even need my product!

Here’s a made up story. It’s exactly what happened to me, I’ve just changed the niche and offer.

Let’s say your offer is “How I made $1 Million in 10 months”. As a smart affiliate, you market mostly to people with a lower income. However, when you follow up with your buyers, you find out the ones buying all make $2 million a year (not people with lower income)!

The above story isn’t true, but it's almost exactly what happened to me in a different niche. I marketed to the obvious audience with my own unique angle just to find out I hadn’t even picked the right audience. I had actually picked the exact opposite.

I'm surprised I made any sales at all...

The moral of the story is, don’t make assumptions, follow up with people signing up for your offer, and Test Test Test!

Hope this helps somebody out there :-).
#audience #call #demographic #market #market… #offer #wakeup
  • Profile picture of the author KC-Coop
    Good advice - there's always going to be a market that you think is the right one.

    When you're marketing most affiliate offers you can check a variety of places to get an idea of the demographic. You can check Quantcast, Google Ad Planner, ask your affiliate manager etc.

    All of those are great ways to get a rough idea but there's no substitute for testing every demographic and seeing which one works for YOU. Just because someone else is marketing an offer to a certain demographic - doesn't mean that it will be the same for the way you market it.
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  • Profile picture of the author ajensen
    Good point KC-Coop. It is probably best to go with the demographic data you dig up from various sources.

    I guess the key is to make the most of the data you collect and see if it jives with your research or if there is something you can do to improve your campaign. Most of the time I bet it jives but you never know until you test :-)
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  • Profile picture of the author KenThompson
    Did you investigate why they bought your offer? Or maybe ask them
    what appealed to them about it?

    I think I would be more intrigued to know those answers more than
    anything else.

    I know you can't talk about your niche, but if you can provide anything
    it would be cool.

    Thanks,

    Ken
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  • Profile picture of the author williamrs
    Very nice thread!

    Knowing your audience is not only important when buying traffic and choosing placements, but also when creating landing pages and sales copies. If you don't know who you are marketing to you may put emphasis on the wrong point and end up not telling people want they want to hear to buy your product.

    I always make a lot of research by analyzing similar sites and offers in order to determine the demographics of my campaigns, but the best way to find out exactly who I should target is testing. Actually, this is one of the main reasons why testing campaigns with paid traffic can be expensive, finding a perfect combination between lander, offer and audience can be tough.


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    • Profile picture of the author ajensen
      KenThompson, yeah I need to do a bit more follow up. Your questions are good ones. I will let you know if I discover anything interesting.

      williamrs, good pointers. Based on my experience I'm beginning to think you can start just about anywhere with a campaign. You just have to be aware the less you know, the more it's going to cost to get profitable. This is a good argument for going after something competitive. You know people are making money at it and you start with a vague idea of what's working for them. This is bound to reduce the "startup" cost and the amount of "original research" required.

      Thanks.
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