GuideToCraigslist.com
 

 

Targeting With Craigslist


The ability to get in touch with a targeted audience is vital for any internet marketing campaign's success. The fact that Craigslist has a huge audience does not automatically mean that you'll have the ability to reach people in target your audience. Yet, there are certain methods that can help internet marketers in reaching their target on Craigslist. This overview discusses how the forums and search feature may be used for finding your target audience.


Discussion Forums

Craigslist discussion forums offer a distinct opportunity for people seeking a targeted audience. It's important to do this, because non-targeted advertising is basically useless. Placing ads on Craigslist, with a few minor exceptions, is free. This doesn't mean, however, that you've got nothing to lose if you don't first do the proper marketing research. Your energy, time or other resources may be wasted if care isn't taken in reaching your targeted audience.

The Craigslist forums allow internet marketers to reach their chosen audience by offering insight into community members along with what they may be trying to find in goods and services. When visiting the forums marketers can lurk and make note of pertinent conversations. This may provide deep insight on what your target audience wants and may even contain information for winning them over. Marketers that participate actively in the forums may capitalize even further by joining in conversations and getting feedback from community members. Obviously this data can help create specifically targeted ads that appeal to your target audience.

Employing someone knowledgeable in search engine optimization (SEO) to help you create ads is a smart investment. The SEO specialist can offer useful information about the structure of your ads. In addition, they could have an on staff SEO writer who is able to write not only enticing ads, but also ads that are optimized for the search engines.


Searching For A Target Audience At Craigslist

The Craigslist search feature may also provide significant insights that may help marketers in locating their chosen target audience. Marketers simply start by entering related keywords based on their goods or services to be found in the different categories at Craigslist. When doing this write down notes on your competitors' ads that come up in the search results, as well as in which categories they appear. If your competitors’ ads show up in certain categories, chances are it'll be worthwhile for you too. This will help to make sure members of your target audience will find your ads when searching.

The next step is to make a careful examination of all of your competitors' ads. Take particular notice of any keywords the ads use. Smart internet marketers know it's important to optimize any of their ads for the keywords used by their competitors. Failing to do this could result in your potential customers only seeing your competitors' ads when doing searches on these certain keywords.

Employing an SEO provider could prove useful in this instance. They can provide a new set of keywords and help optimize your ads for those keywords. The ad copy should ideally be keyword optimized while at the same time being enticing and informative. Choosing an SEO provider with a copywriter on staff would be quite helpful for this situation.