Life of an Internet Entrepreneur

They say that during a recession, people flock to education to survive. In that spirit, I’ll be covering topics in my marketing glossary in the coming months. Today’s topic is one of my favorite, because it is very powerful when used properly, and doesn’t require any upfront costs.

One of the hardest jobs of a marketer is to find a targeted audience for his/her message. After all, the odds of someone outside the targeted audience buying are very low, and probably not worth the communication and sales effort, until you have exhausted all likely buyers.

This is where an Audience Aggregator comes in. An audience aggregator collects a large quantity of people from your target audience, and has either their contact info in a database or another easy way to communicate with them.

Let’s look at some examples of an audience aggregator:

• Your local car garage is an audience aggregator for people who own/drive cars.
• The National School Supply and Equipment Association (NSSEA) is an audience aggregator for sellers of school supplies and school equipment.
• A pediatric doctor’s office is an audience aggregator for reaching parents.

I think you’re starting to get the point. Now let’s look at what you can do with an audience aggregator.

Uses of an Audience Aggregator

Great, so you’ve found an appropriate audience aggregator for your marketing goals. Your next steps should be one or more of the following options:

• team up with them in a partnership
• buy their list
• advertise with them

And now, for the benefit:

You can reach many people with low cost, all of whom are “pre-qualified” for something you targeted. The worse the economy gets, the more important reaching pre-qualified leads will be.  During good times, you can spray your marketing dollars everywhere, but in a drought you need to conserve your “marketing water” and only use it on the “plants”that will respond best to the water.

A Client Example

A massage therapy instructor client of ours who had been doing very well until this recent economic mess asked us for some ideas on how to reach more prospects for the seminars they run around the country.

Determining the target audience

The only people who would even think of taking the course were licensed massage therapists, since the course counted as continuing education units (CEUs). Furthermore, CEUs were not required by each state, and some only during certain years.  We knew that people are likely to push off a $380 course for as long as is legal, given the economic climate, so we focused on seminar locations where CEUs are due this year.

Finding the audience aggregators

We then found the largest massage chains with locations within 50 miles of a seminar location, and mailed flyers to each of them.  Each location had on average 20 licensed massage therapists, giving us the most value out of each mailing.  Even if a massage therapist didn’t need to or want to take a seminar this year, we asked for their contact info to stay in touch through our email marketing.

The results

The feedback on our effort has been fantastic, and the massage chains were actually happy to hear from us.  Imagine that – people who want to hear from advertisers.  We’ve just sent out email newsletters to the largest group we’ve had yet – and the client has been in business for 24 years!

An audience aggregator will help you weather the storm and make up for the lower interest of buyers, without costing you the farm.

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