Audience Quality: Hidden Key To Business
There’s a huge metric that a lot of online writers don’t think about. That metric is glossed over by a lot of internet gurus, lifestyle gurus completely neglect to mention it (mostly because they don’t know about it) and those irritating entrepreneur forum case studies never mention them.
That thing is audience quality. It’s incredibly important.
Audience Quality Will Change Everything
I’ve been dipping my toes in some direct response marketing classics in anticipation of completing Gary Halbert’s 30 Day Copywriting Challenge in January.
What I notice about these texts is that they talk about buying lists of interested buyers.
On reading this sort of stuff, my brain screams, “Jamie… How much easier would our job be if we quit SEO and warming traffic up entirely and just bought a list of people who already wanted to buy our products?”
The answer is… it would be a lot easier to do the above. Buy a list of people who love “Make Money Online” products and throw them a few guides about how to write excellent copy and build online sales funnels. Then you could use the already warm traffic to get down into the features of your product faster and in more detail. You don’t have to waste time telling them that making money online is possible, you don’t have to give them the 101 class on it and you don’t have to convince them it’s not all rubbish.
You’ll have a smaller list than, “The whole of the internet” but you’ll get more sales.
More Traffic == More Sales
Internet marketers, SEO gurus and people who’ll try and sell you “social media brand awareness” services will tell you that traffic is the be-all and end-all of success online.
Obviously, you don’t want ten visitors to your website… in most cases.
Traffic is absolutely useless if it doesn’t make you money and it’s even more useless if it costs money to get that traffic in the first place.
If you have a website that gets a hundred visitors a month, then you can go to Fiverr right now and buy traffic for $5. You’ll get hundreds of visitors to your site… possibly thousands. (Research for this article is, I admit, limited to the contents of my brain.)
That traffic will be junk traffic. It’ll be bots, people from India (no offense) and people who –for either the previous two reasons or something else – are never going to spend money on your site. They’re not going to buy your products or click through to your affiliate ads.
If you have a website that sells Octopus-print ties to people with really thick necks, you don’t need millions of visitors. If someone at Buzzfeed saw your site and said, “Hey… we’re putting this through the viral machine today!” your servers would crash, everyone would share your product on Facebook with the caption “LOL” and you’d make no more money.
It’d be better to have 100 visitors with a 5% conversion rate than one million visitors with no conversions whatsoever.
But You Can’t Change The Quality Of Your Traffic?
You can buy traffic with all kinds of demographic information. Adwords and Facebook Ads are so complicated with all the different options, I’ll often go to start a campaign and get bored and close my laptop after five minutes.
However this isn’t the limit to your options. Copywriting and online marketing aren’t all that creative as professions. But you can get creative with customer acquisitions.
You don’t have to rely on SEO and target people through your blog. You could:
- Pick up the phone
- Use direct mail and send letters to interested parties
- Invite people to an actual location (this is for extroverts)
- Use PPC ads
- Use email marketing – either your own or by networking with others in your niche
There are tons of options, providing you stick to one key rule: Find high quality traffic that converts.
I’m writing this on December 27th, and we’ve all been through the trenches this week with advert bombardment from all corners. The more you learn about direct response marketing, the more you’ll realise that the quirky, weird adverts that advertising agencies love are useless.
I’ve sat through adverts that seem to go for minutes at a time without actually knowing what the product being advertised was.
You want your marketing to be the opposite of that. Don’t throw something weird at a million people and hope one looks you up on Google.
Instead, do the footwork and find high quality customers. Then hit them with a piece of marketing that describes what you’re selling, why they need it and how they can get it. If you do all of those things, your marketing will outperform massive companies with huge budgets and no clue.
Final Thoughts
We started this article talking about how not many people talk about audience quality – instead using massive traffic numbers as the key metric. This is a ploy; you can buy junk traffic, expose millions to your adverts and play the guru. Ultimately though, that traffic is worthless if it converts at a terrible rate.
Sadly, loads of would-be business whizzes get stuck in the “how do I get more traffic?” mindset, when they could reframe the problem and target fewer eyeballs and still make more money and have more success.
The two key ingredients to that success are firstly to find better potential customers and secondly to give them a great product wrapped up in great, functional marketing.