I use google analytics. The service I sell online is location specific. I am getting visits clustered around various locations.

Any creative ideas on how to target visitors from specific locations? Does this make any sense?

Something like: If you are from San Diego, click here for a special offer?

Thoughts? Ideas? Experience to share?

Geotargeting your advertising messages is INCREDIBLY beneficial in a lot of cases.

For example, think about this.  If you are looking for a carpet cleaner and you start searching in Google for carpet cleaners, you will find a bunch.  Now, what if one of the carpet cleaner’s  sites that you visit has an special offer specifically for your city, but the other 5 you visit don’t?

Which business looks like it is in your city?

Which one of the 6 businesses are you more likely to call?

See the benefit of geo-targeted messages, even on your own website?

Now, let’s assume that your carpet cleaning business doesn’t just serve one city.  Let’s say that it is actually a large franchise that serves the entire country.  What then?

You can still geo-target your sales messages on your own site.  Actually, in this case it’s even more important than if you’re a small, local company.

If you geo-target your offers, it makes your business look like it is there to serve the specific location of your visitor.  And that, my friend, is HUGE!

It also keeps confusion down since you’re not showing irrelevant information.  For example, if someone from New York sees an ad for San Diego on your site, they might believe that your business only serves San Diego.  If you serve New York as well, then you probably just lost a customer.  Ouch…

If want to capitalize on geo-targeting and are wondering exactly how you can do it, there are a few options for you, depending on how you are sending traffic to your site.  The trick is to either look up where your visitors are coming from by using their IP address or some other identifying information, or tag your url links with something that will tell your server where they are from.

Here are 2 ways to do this:

The best way to do this works really well, but it is the more complex of the two.  I personally do it this way, using PHP:

1) Have your web developer program your site to look at the visitor’s IP address (With an Apache server running a PHP-based site, your visitor’s IP address is stored in $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']).

2) Set up the Net::Geo PEAR package for PHP, which allows your server to do geolocation lookups on your visitor’s IP address to determine approximately where he/she is located (at least down to the portion of the state).

Here’s a link to the Net::Geo installation instructions

3) If they are within the region of the state you are having the special offer for, then show the ad. Otherwise, don’t show it. (Using this method, you can have a series of ads that are all location-specific).  This will require some more code from your developer.

Here’s the other way to do it, but it is limited to Pay-Per-Click ads only.  It’s easy to do, but much more limited:

1) Geotarget your ads in Google Adense, Yahoo, etc. (make a set of ads that target San Diego only)

2) Change the urls in these ads to include a parameter, like this:

http://www.myurl.com/?loc=SanDiego

3) Now get your web developer to write in a simple test on your site so that if the loc parameter = “SanDiego”, then show the ad.

Using either of these two methods works very well, although I prefer the first method.  It’s more complex, but it covers all cases.

If you don’t do geo-location targeting on your website, you could be missing out on landing new customers.  Targeting your sales messages directly to your customers based on their location makes your business more relevant to what they need and gives it a more local feeling.  Those always increase sales.  Especially if your business provides a service, being in the right location (or at least the appearance of being in the right location) means everything in the mind of your customer.

Stop missing out on sales that are so easy to capitalize on!

If you have any questions or need help, let me know.  My business specializes in doing things just like this, which are child’s play to us.

Web Development, System Integration and Online Marketing by Submerged Solutions LLC

-Kris

Technorati Tags: geotargeting, ip address, ip geolocation, market segmentation

“Market Innovation”

So what is Market Innovation and why am I writing about it?

Market Innovation is a 5-step process:

1. Start by looking at a large market.
2. Identify a segment of that market that has a common, unfulfilled need.
3. Pivot the market segment – Innovate a revolutionary product that spins that market segment 180 degrees with your product as the pivot point.
4. Develop a community of consumers around your product by selling complimentary products to your consumer base.
5. Control and Grow your New Market – Through shaping the market segment and becoming the pivot, you have created an entire new market around your products.  You now control the market.  Your mission at this point is to keep them happy and grow your market.

Let me show you an example…

Before Apple came out with the iPod, there were lots of MP3 players around.  Most were cheeply made, were missing a lot of features, and required you to convert your own CDs to MP3 so that you could load them on your player.

The iPod changed all that.  In late 2001, they completely changed the MP3 player market by solving those problems for the people who were unhappy with their current MP3 players or who wanted an MP3 player but were scared off by the other players at that time.

The iPod was a very nice-looking, easy to operate and well-featured MP3 player.  Now the features and design of the iPod alone really grabbed the market’s attention, but I believe that the true market innovation happened with the iTunes software.

iTunes was Apple’s Pivot

iTunes made it REALLY easy to get songs onto the iPod, without having to go to the store, buy a CD, bring it home and convert it to MP3.  You could download them directly from Apple to your iPod.  Another problem solved.

The Podcast Built the Community

They then built the community of rabbid fans with the invention of the Podcast.  By allowing users to syndicate their own MP3 recordings to anyone with iTunes, Apple extablished itself as the center of the internet audio consumer market.  By becoming the conduit of music and information, iTunes completely took over the MP3 market as the player-of-choice for most people.

The success of iTunes, in my opinion, is what really is keeping the iPod ahead of the competition.  iTunes has become the center of the MP3 market, and through market innovation, has grown the market from a small niche into the main stream.

Apple is still innovating with the iPod and iTunes and finding new things to sell to its consumers.  iTunes is regularly being updated and new features are added.

They now have a 75% market share of the MP3 player market, and iTunes has become the 4th largest music retailer.

So what does this mean for you?

I could go through a similar process with every current market leader & long-lived successful product.  Google, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Lowes, the Apple Macintosh, etc.

Market Innovation is at the core of every market leader, but you don’t have to be the leader in order to start.  Nor do you have to the be market leader in order to pivot the market.  Each of these companies started small at one point, and they found the market that they could pivot.  Once you pivot the market, even if it is a small niche, you become the center of it.

At its simplest, I really see it as a 5-step process:

1. Start by looking at a large market.
2. Identify a Segment of that market that has a common, unfulfilled need.
3. Pivot the Market Segment.
4. Develop a Community of Consumers.
5. Control and Grow your New Market.

I am putting together a video series on how you can do this in your own market, from market research to launching your product.  If you would like to get on the insider’s list and learn how to innovate and control your own market, watch the video at Submerged Solutions:

What are your thoughts?

-Kris

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, itunes, market innovation, podcasting

I am putting together a COMPLETELY FREE video course on online marketing, and I am looking for what your biggest problems are so that I can craft this course to have the most impact.

I will also be touching on some of the ninja tricks I’ve used with one of my current clients which are responsible for increasing their conversion rates by 766% and slashing their lead acquisition cost from over $50 lead to under $8 per lead.

Now, I am looking for business and online marketing problems from anyone and everyone, and will be building this course to solve the most common problems that everyone is facing.

Here’s a quick video with explains everything:

http://www.submergedsolutions.com

Also, if you know of anyone that this new FREE video course could help, make sure you let them know too!

Thanks!
-Kris

Technorati Tags: internet marketing, internet marketing course, marketing course, marketing video, online marketing

Ed was commenting on how last year’s 30 Day Challenge was the biggest one to date, yet he didn’t see any increase in the number of people that sent him success stories. He’s been beating himself up trying to figure out why.

Click here to read his original write-up.

I’m posting my response because I think it may resonate with a lot of new marketers out there. When you get into the IM world, there are WAY TOO MANY different offers, each one “promising” to revolutionize your life. It’s easy to get stuck in a trap where you just buy and learn, but never DO.

Here’s my response…

Great post Ed. I’d like to give you a bit from my side of the fence…

I went through 30DC last year, and it was awesome.

I know that this might be contrary to your intent, but I believe 30DC hit me at just the right time in my marketing career… Early enough to learn from and use to develop my business (which was a web development firm at the time), but before I had the experience to know what gaps were missing in my knowledge.

Perhaps it’s my roots in R&D, but the more I learn, the more questions I realize that I haven’t answered.

The 30DC was GREAT for be because it started answering those questions I knew I needed to solve, but there was SO much GREAT info that it actually overwhelmed me at the time because I saw so many new gaps open up.

It was because of the 30DC that I’ve spent the last year focusing on learning copywriting and PPC management, because those were my greatest gaps in knowledge. So here’s what has happened since then:

START OF 30DC 2008: Early in my web development business, and used the techniques for some of my clients.

END OF 2008: Realizing that “web development” isn’t where I want to be. While I still do it when it’s a CRITICAL project, I am now focused primarily on marketing.

TODAY: I’m charging roughly $200 usd/hour doing coaching, teaching and managing marketing campaigns for clients.
I also grew one of my clients 7-fold over a course of 6 months, and they are doing somewhere around $3M worth of sales/year now. I have taken this “system” that I have developed for the client, and am now applying it to other cosmetic surgeons, where I do the work for them and they can focus on taking care of their patients: http://www.physprofits.com

Anyway, I’m rambling now…

To wrap this up, it took me a lot of time to get to this point, and it involved a LOT of people and information. I even read “My Life in Advertising” by Claude Hopkins (talk about old-school) in addition to TONS of current-day stuff from Sugarman, Joyner and Carlton to name a few.

Don’t get disheartened by the lack of feedback and successes. 30DC was a perfect stepping stone into this whole IM market for me, but it wasn’t the only thing (sorry to disappoint). =) It took time, effort, anguish, learning, dissecting, evaluating, and trial-and-error to even get to this point, and I’m nowhere done yet.

The biggest issue that I see in the IM space is that there is SO MUCH NOISE! Everyone is saying that this product is great, and that product is great, and when you’re new to the IM world it seems that the only way to succeed is to spend all your time learning, and then you don’t have any time left to DO!

I think it was Dan Thies from StomperNet that said in the anti-LSI video that you need to be a “wizard”. Corny, but I think he’s right. 30DC can teach you where to start, but it’s up to the individual to actually learn, become the master, and fill those gaps in knowledge that they find during their journey. When you’re helping out at the beginning of that journey, sometimes your students have instant success. But probably most times, you are one of the first spokes in their wheel. And it takes a lot of spokes to make a make a wheel round.

Best wishes, and looking forward to some more great 30DC material! Keep your chin up, my friend!
-Kris Hardy

Technorati Tags: 30dc, internet marketing, learn internet marketing, thirty day challenge