A good goal of marketing is to identify the individuals who are most likely to purchase your product and attract them to do so by developing appropriate market messages delivered to them in places they frequent. Easy?... I wish!

Traditional Segmentation
Working out the best target audience has almost reached the point of a science. For example we might use customer segmentation techniques that use data about demography (age, gender, lifestyle, income...), about the behavior of your potential customer towards your product (price sensitivity, impulsive or rational, light or heavy user, frequency of purchase...), if you're targeting business then company information (number of employees, turnover, growth, ownership...) and so on. Given the right data and a good data analyst we can target our prospects brilliantly.
The only problem is that there's almost never 'enough' data or data of right kind, let alone a good marketing data analyst. Fortunately direct response marketing through the internet gives us an additional approach - a rapid feedback, test driven approach.

Test Driven Marketing
By combining three specific approaches with the rapid feedback of the internet we get another marketing option. The three approaches are keyword or search based advertising, split testing and permission marketing.

Search based advertising: This completely turns traditional advertising on its head. Rather than working out where you're prospects 'hang-out', your prospect type keywords into a search engine and they find you. You don't have to segment your user base and painstakingly seek out the right place to advertise in order that they will see your ads. They type in the keywords for a search and if your product is relevant to them, your advert appears - amazing!

This is why Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing (previously Overture) have been such an incredible hit. Well, that plus the pay-per-click model so you only pay for the adverts a prospect clicks, plus the advertisement split testing, plus the.. well it goes on. Suffice to say, this model is worth using!

Split Testing: Google AdWords gives you the ability to split test your adverts. That is, create three adverts and see which one gets clicked the most. Of course you can use split testing on your web site too. Use it to work out which pages sell the best or which pages generate the highest number of prospect enquiries - dynamically discovering what your audience responds to.

The challenge with a traditional approach that relies on data collected at some point in the past, is its age. If you haven't gathered it yourself at best it's only months out of date. Split testing web pages can give you instant feedback that you can react to hourly if you want to!
Permission Marketing: In traditional advertising you pay for advertising space where you think your prospects will hang out, or send mail-shots to names on a targeted list you've bought. Both of these are examples of no-permission marketing. What if your prospects told you they were interested in your product and invited you to market to them? Well that would be permission marketing. The idea certainly isn't a new one, but the medium of the internet gives it new legs.

The best example is opt-in email lists; they work. Almost every internet marketer I've heard speak agrees that the 'the money is in the list'. Building a list of names and email address (and ideally other data you can use to segment them) through opt-in, permission based email marketing is, like the other two methods mentioned here, cheap and effective.

Finally
In direct response marketing there's a saying that goes "there's no such thing as failure, only testing." If your adverts aren't working, your opt-in page isn't gathering prospects and your splits aren't effective - you've learned something valuable about how not to target your audience and you learned it quickly. Now you can tweak and change your messages instantly and almost for free, continually circling in on the perfect customer or client.

ValuedClientSystem.com provides permission marketing and split testing tools for effective online marketing. Try the 30 day test drive for just US$3.95 (approximately £2.40 or 3.40€). You can also get an email permission marketing short course, for free while you're there!