Search marketing will only succeed if you know your target market

For the non-search marketers reading this blog, Sphinn is a niche search marketing social media site - it's essentially Digg or Reddit for those of us who work in search. The "What's New" page of Sphinn on Friday afternoon inspired me. Around lunchtime in the UK you always start to see a lot spam submissions. Today's submissions, however, were a bit different - less spam and more a case of "What are they thinking?"

The following examples come from search marketers submitting real content - to the completely wrong market.

What do I mean? Well...

Ok, so you reckon that it's a good idea to have a button advertising your blog's RSS feeds on your blog. Of course it is. We have one on ours. Why are you explaining what RSS is to an audience of professional bloggers? Is this your target market? Nope. So what do you expect to achieve?

Sphinn has content about affiliate marketing, right? So obviously if you have an article trying to sell affiliate marketing and the benefits then Sphinn is the place to promote it! Of course, because professional affiliate marketers need to be told the basics of what they do - because maybe, just maybe, they'll hire you to run affiliate marketing on their websites.

Well maybe Sphinn is the wrong place to explain RSS feeds or advertise affiliate marketing, but surely SEO professionals could use an SEO company to do SEO reviews on our sites selling SEO? Umm, probably not, no. Why would you advertise SEO consultancy services to SEO consultants?

It really is important to know your target market when you're marketing, otherwise  you're not going to succeed. But hey, what do target markets matter when....

Well now, even search marketers want to know an easy way to make money fast online! This is definitely the target market - people who work on the internet making money for other people don't already know how to generate income online.

But hey, once us search marketers have our RSS buttons, launched affiliate marketing on our sites, had a thorough SEO review and plugged into new ways to make money fast; for once, Sphinn's spammers have a suggestion as to what we can do with our millions: