Targeting Your Audience

By Author: Mike Sean
Total Articles: 22
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Many online marketers often would want to know more about the visitors that come to their sites daily. This is order for them to better focus on the ones that do patronize them. And one of the most important information that these marketers would want to know is the location of their client in order to better target these.

However, with the nature of the internet, it is often difficult to determine the exact location of clients. But there are still some ways available to the web marketers to track their customers. Geotargeting is one such method that allow online sites to determine the location of their visitors.

Geo-targeting is basically a method of determining the whereabouts of a particular customer and delivering content to him based on that information. The process relies on the web marketer determining the actual physical location of a client based on the IP address of the computer he is using. This might sound impossible, considering the number of computers and IP addresses in the world today.

However, one can, in fact, deduce the geographical location of a client this way. This is due to the fact ...
... that there are a fixed set of IP addresses set aside for each location in the world. Once you determine the right IP address block of a particular client, then you can narrow down his estimated location. This can be a quite tedious taske, considering the number of addresses that you have to sift through. But there are several sites online that provide inexpensive geolocation services for everyone.

One thing that you do have to note with geolocation, though, is that it might often be not that accurate. However, the geolocation method provides you with enough information to be useful.

Once you have gathered enough geo-location data about your customers, then it's time to make use of it. In order for you to do so, you need to gather up additional information about the localities. Include such technical details as the population of the localities that you are targeting, as well as the actual number of people that have access to your site in that area. Also, you need to know more about the particular nature of the people in the area, such as their language and their customs.

Once you have completed your research, then it's time for you to design your site in order to suit your targeted audience's preferences. You can simply customize your site for each user, if you are targeting a small group. However, if you have a large audience base coming from a wide variety of locations, it would be better to come up with a general design for your site, and let viewers customize it according to their preferences or have a an automatic system do it for them. Lastly, be sure to continuously update your information in order to better target your audience.

References:
Click Z
http://www.clickz.com/831601
iMedia Connections
http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/8950.asp

Mike Sean writes about the tricks and tips of web design, web development and search engine optimization at http://www.teamcreatives.com.