Horizontal Marketing - Kick It Up Another Notch

This is a continuation from Targeting Your Best Audience Before Your Ads Fail.

So you narrowed your audience down to a refined targeted niche and you can definitely see an increase of actions with an intended interest in your business. Where do you go from here? How can you make this experience better for them so they keep coming back?

Come on now, this is not the time to be experimenting, that was during the broad phase of finding your audience. You have to be very serious and careful with how you handle this. People are not as  gullible as statistics make them look, and you might be even losing the leads that you had and you don't even know it. Its OK though because I am about to show you how to go about this so that doesn't happen!

-This post contains affiliate links. When any of these links are clicked and a purchase is made I receive a small commission at no additional expense to you.

Realignment

You are entering a different part of the advertising agenda that you probably crafted before you even ended up reading this. Since you are entering a new phase, your goals are going to need to be realigned slightly.

Try to gain as much feedback as you can from this audience that you worked diligently to find! This should be your number one objective right now. Feedback can be obtained in many ways which lead me to the next part of this.

Embrace

Extend an arm out personally to a select few in this niche audience to receive a free product or preview. Conduct a give-a-way or run a contest to select a random winner or choose someone according to your own advertising needs in exchange for feedback that you specifically inform them that you want a no-holds response for critical remarks! This can be done by a survey or surveys at different increments of time, reviews not published online but sent back to you or your company only,

Communicate to them and be very clear that you absolutely need their methodicalness (I hope that's a word) so that your business can improve (notice I did not say change) what you are offering on the market.

Listen

Take careful notes of feedback that you receive as this is going to be constructively critical because you asked them to be very honest therefore do not get bent out of shape and let it ruin your day. You will improve where things need to be enhanced much quicker if someone in this audience is telling you your business sucks than someone walking randomly.

Upon receipt of this information, take out a notepad and jot down your first impression of what you think needs fixed from what they have said. Such as if they received an original painting that you sent to them and it was damaged during shipping then you should be jumping over to my post about Shipping Artwork! If someone says that your pop-up gets in the way of reading your blog and interferes with their user experience then change when the pop-up appears like when the user is clicking off of your page entirely.

Change

Changing anything about what you are already doing is the very last step that I'm listing because I do not believe in this unless you are trying to improve your business for your own mission and vision. If you are improving a customer experience then yes this is appropriate, however, do not start changing your entire business purpose!

This instead should get your mind to rethink in another direction. I will help by revealing what I promised in yesterday's post about the conclusion of the consulting internship I did during college.

The team that I was working with presented to the client during a presentation to the CEO a direct path to:

1.) A joint venture

            &

2.) A strategic alliance.

Referencing back to the Mixed Media Artist series, a joint venture and a strategic alliance are key relationships and the client from the internship ended up going in this direction. This is a horizontal marketing approach as well that could increase your success.

I hope you enjoyed reading and this information enlightens your journey further! Add me on Twitter!