Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 241

Choosing the Right Traffic Platform
Before you craft a marketing message, decide what traffic platform your audience is
using, which you do by determining where your market is “hanging out” online. The
traffic platform you make your offer on is essential to the success of your campaign. Even
with the perfect marketing message, if your ad is placed on the wrong traffic platform,
your entire campaign will fail. For instance, if your target audience doesn’t use Twitter,
you shouldn’t be spending money advertising on it.
You have thousands of traffic stores to choose from, but what traffic store is the best match
for your business? If you’re looking to buy traffic, do so from a source that can help you
reach your market. To reach your market, you must first define your customer avatar (see
Chapter 1 to learn more about creating your customer avatar).
Traffic stores such as Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and others have aggregated millions of
users, and each platform has slightly different demographics. Use broad demographic
information (such as age, gender, and income) to help determine the correct traffic store
that your audiences use, and thus the best store to reach them on. To help create your
customer avatar, use research tools, such as the analytics software company Alexa. This
type of tool gives the user demographics of traffic stores and websites. Also, research
your audiences’ specific interests (such as their hobbies, the books and blogs they read,
authority figures they follow, and the pain points they have) to determine how to target
your audiences after you’re on the platform.
This research takes time, but when done correctly, it helps you determine both the correct
traffic store to advertise on and the message you use to reach out to your audiences. The
next section examines the Big Six traffic stores that you can reach your audiences on.
Introducing the Big Six traffic platforms
We say it earlier, but it’s worth saying again here: You have thousands of traffic stores for
businesses and marketers to choose from. In this section, however, we discuss the six main
traffic stores on the web today:
Facebook
Twitter
Google
YouTube
Pinterest
LinkedIn
Chances are, your market hangs out on one or more of these traffic stores, allowing you to
effectively reach out to your target audience. The Big Six are effective traffic stores