Monday, April 23, 2007

Demographic Research Tool

With taxes, some family health issues and a touch of burnout, I haven't been on my "A" game lately (or keeping on track with this project).

My new example "guitar site" is bringing in some sales - but not what I want or expect after Undercover Profits pointed out what to promote (no problems there).

When writing copy, we have to make assumptions about the audience we're writing to - and clearly, I don't know the audience very well!

Here's my assumption about who plays guitar and looks for lessons online:

- Male
- 16-24
- Single
- High School or some college education
- No children
- Income under $24,000 per year

Accordingly, I took the "learn to play guitar and have all of the women you want" route.

Later in this post, I'll reveal a new resource that gave me a VERY different picture of who I'm writing to - and how I've been writing my copy is WAY off target.

In fact, I'm so far off target that split-testing would be a waste of time - split-testing is a great thing we should all be doing, but if your initial premise stinks then everything you try is going to stink.

Before you can hit a ball out of the park you have to BE IN THE PARK.

So, here's what I found by doing some demographic research on who visits the site of the product I'm promoting.

- Sex: Male (the only thing I got right)
- Average age: 35-65+ (my guessed age group is LESS likely to visit this site and my 35-65+ demographic probably isn't interested in becoming a rockstar sex symbol)
- Marital status: Married
- Education: No college/undergrad degree
- Children: Yes
- Income: 24-60K

With this information in front of me, I can take a better educated guess - these are guys with some money spend (from steady jobs), they're middle aged and they have families at home.

Playing guitar is a hobby and a passion - not a way to pick up chicks (as it were for me back in the day).

The tool that gave me all this terrific FREE info is http://quantcast.com

Since conversion IS the most important aspect of marketing, knowing who you're promoting to is VITAL.

USE THAT TOOL.

.X.

2 Comments:

At 1:51 AM , Blogger blake said...

I'm a bit peeved that you would just rip this resource off the Xray Domination course.

Sincerely,
Owner of ur products,

Ben

 
At 7:15 PM , Blogger X said...

Huh? Come on Ben -

When have you known me to rip off anybody else's stuff?

If you do a search in Google, you see "quantcast.com" listed on 17,000 sites - curiously, next to nobody knows about this resource, but Xray Domination isn't the only place it's ever been mentioned.

I respect Ryan and the Jerk too much to blatantly rip them off.

.X.

 

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