If you don’t know exactly who your communicating your sales message to, your internet marketing is doomed to the land of low conversion rates.

Online dating services – you know the advertisements.

It started with two big sites, EHarmony and Match.com. Pretty much anybody looking for a relationship could go on one of these sites to see who they paired-up with.

Inevitably, competition surfaced.  Other businesses wanted a piece of what looked to be a pretty large pie.

There’s some smart marketing going on in this space.  Most new online dating services are not directly trying to compete with EHarmony.

Instead, they identified and targeted a more specific audience, including:

• Farmers/people who live in rural areas (farmersonly.com)
• Black people (blackpeoplemeet.com)
• Christians (christiansmingle.com)
• Singles over 50 (ourtime.com)

This industry provides a good example of buyer persona targeting.  They identify a specific target audience, then build their marketing campaigns around that audience.

There are some clear needs to target with online dating.  Singles over 50 need to be paired with people in their own age group.  People in rural areas may have a strong need to meet singles who share their work hours and who are located away from the urban areas, where singles traditionally go to meet people.

But even when the need is harder to qualify, it’s no less important.  With internet-based marketing, there is probably no more important step than knowing the specific needs of your target audience.  It allows you to:

1. Know who you’re designing your website/landing pages for.  High converting landing pages are built around the needs of the target audience, not what the business wants to say about itself.
2. Develop a unique, creative, compelling value proposition.  This is one of the great challenges of online marketing.  Every professional service out there offers a “free consultation”.  It’s commonplace and general.  When you target a specific problem, you can craft an offer to solve that problem.  This is what generates conversions.

Online conversion rates are, frankly, poor.  Across the board numbers are 2-5%.  If you could get 2 out of 10 people who visit your website to convert, you’d be a rock-star.

Impossible?  Yes, if you’re trying to be EHarmony when EHarmony is already established.

But not if you target a new audience with a specific need.

Take a lesson from the online dating industry.  Target a need and make a creative offer.  Nothing else has more potential to improve your conversion rates.