Web 2.0 Strategies: Know Your Audience

One of the recent projects we've produced and are promoting is a website that's been in existence for over ten years. The website strategies it relies on are off line trade shows and not web 2.0 marketing strategies. These shows are very important in giving access to see and touch their gift packaging products that include wholesale ribbons, clear paint cans, gift tins, gift bags mainly made out of natural eco friendly materials. Their gift wine bags are worth noting for the wide variety of styles and materials. The website over time, ranks highly for Simply Satin Bags, upscale decor ribbon, self sealing flat bags and sinamay round bags to name a few. It certainly helps but none of their top keyword phrases receive significant traffic, so all 20 top ten phrases don't add up to much search volume, they need hundreds of low traffic phrases in the top ten to become significant.
After much keyword research that was focused on the products and materials, a further study of their business model revealed that their target audience is a narrow group of influential people who manage the purchasing for retail stores, chain stores, wedding, floral industry buyers, mainly purchasing managers and distributors. This explains why the trade shows are an integral part of their marketing while their website, though thousands of pages deep, has only a supporting roll, working as an online catalog of wholesale gift packaging products for professional buyers. So the keyword research needed to be focused on what these pro buyers would be searching under to locate factory direct wholesalers such as my client. There were no keyword phrases that the client was being found under that these buyers use, so a concerted effort of building content and backlinks to support relevant web pages had to be devised and carried out. In under five weeks, we put the client on the map for 'packaging suppliers' and another targeted phrase, 'wholesale packaging suppliers' ranking #11 and #12 respectively. It's our opinion that with the content and optimization we are undertaking, both will break into the top ten in a couple short weeks. Then, it's a matter of maintaining position. The latter phrase is more narrow in describing what a person is searching for and better matches the pro buyer demographic while the other phrase reaches tens of thousands. Once the targeted audience was properly identified, we put together an organic search campaign and are going to couple it with a pay per click campaign to seriously raise our client's visibility through search. Another strategy we put in place is a business fanpage on Facebook. One website strategy is, we will see if we can drill down to the demographics needed to drive visitors to like the fanpage and be invited from there to the main website. There may be community or groups worth joining and participating for our client on Facebook as well. We believe putting a webpage on Linkedin is going to pay off in connecting to professional corporate buyers and distributors. Linkedin is likely to become the social network where the desired connections will be made. I'll followup and let you know how the client's business progresses, which social network pays off the most, and how targeting a narrow group through search works out in pay per click and in organic search efforts.