On-site targeting: not just for the big guys

A recent con­ver­sa­tion with a friend I have had since sec­ond grade, Joel who now lives in Min­neapo­lis, illu­mi­nated the fact that seg­ment­ing and tar­get­ing on web sites is not the sole domain of big busi­ness.   The idea that you must be a big com­pany with many prod­uct lines for tar­get­ing to be applic­a­ble and valu­able is sim­ply not accu­rate, and it came out clearly in our con­ver­sa­tions about his business.

A cou­ple of years ago, Joel pur­chased a beau­ti­ful hotel and events cen­ter right on the Mis­sis­sippi River, just out­side Min­neapo­lis, MN.  The River­wood Inn hosts busi­ness con­fer­ences dur­ing the week and beau­ti­ful wed­dings on the week­end. He just dis­cov­ered that his river­front loca­tion offers some of the best drift boat fish­ing in the coun­try, so he’ll soon begin mar­ket­ing to anglers, as well.

We were talk­ing about the next iter­a­tion of his web site and what he wants to do with it, and as I explained what I had been doing over the past cou­ple years work­ing with the Test­ing and Tar­get­ing solu­tions at Omni­ture, it became clear that tar­get­ing to his main cus­tomer seg­ments would be incred­i­bly valu­able to him.  Joel has three clear and dis­tinct cus­tomer seg­ments: busi­ness and cor­po­rate con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers, engaged cou­ples and wed­ding plan­ners, and com­ing soon, fishermen.

Joel can’t real­is­ti­cally cre­ate and main­tain three dif­fer­ent Web sites, each tai­lored to a seg­ment, because of the amount of time and expense involved.  Of course, he could cre­ate a web site offer­ing all three options at the high­est lev­els of nav­i­ga­tion such as the home page or top and left nav­i­ga­tion bars, and allow vis­i­tors to self-select, but while this is com­mon, it’s not an ideal solution.

As you can imag­ine, a con­glom­er­a­tion of wed­ding images, corporate-friendly  bul­let points and fish­ing tales coex­ist­ing on a home page could be rather con­fus­ing.  If a bride and her mom were look­ing for wed­ding sites and saw a fea­tured photo of a great con­fer­ence room com­plete with white­board, they’d be more likely to look else­where than if they saw a pic­ture of the per­fect wed­ding venue.  In the same way, if an exec­u­tive seek­ing a spot for a con­fer­ence or meet­ing was greeted with pic­tures of flower arrange­ments and sun­sets, he might not take the facil­ity seri­ously.   And nei­ther image would get fish­er­men load­ing their tackle boxes.

Seg­ment­ing and tar­get­ing to these seg­ments with a vari­ety of pos­si­ble rel­e­vant con­tent options com­prised of images, text copy, and pro­mo­tions would be a per­fect solu­tion. By deliv­er­ing the rel­e­vant con­tent to each group spe­cific to their inter­ests rather than a selec­tion of things they may or may not be inter­ested in, Joel is far more likely to con­vert vis­i­tors into inquiries and even­tu­ally into bookings.

There are a cou­ple of ways Joel’s site could do this: He could use a tar­get­ing solu­tion that would detect what key­words a vis­i­tor used to find the site. For exam­ple, if the vis­i­tor searched for “fish­ing in Min­neapo­lis,” he would be served con­tent about the top-notch fish­ing con­di­tions avail­able at the Inn.  Another vis­i­tor per­haps whose search phrase was “out­door wed­ding venues in Twin Cities,” would see infor­ma­tion about the per­fect venue for a river­front wed­ding with a beautifully-tented reception.

If the vis­i­tor came directly to his site unaided by a search engine and their eas­ily detectable key­words, the solu­tion would watch for the first click and once a vis­i­tor effec­tively “chose” their area of inter­est, the con­tent would be tai­lored to that area sub­se­quently.  On all future vis­its, it would promi­nently fea­ture that rel­e­vant con­tent, car­ry­ing on that con­ver­sa­tion, in essence.

It’s easy to see that this new promised land of tar­get­ing dif­fer­ent con­tent to dif­fer­ent seg­ments has a good value propo­si­tion for all sized com­pa­nies, not just the For­tune 500. I’d be will­ing to bet that if Joel imple­ments a seg­mented tar­get­ing solu­tion, he’ll see a strong increase in inquiries for wed­dings, meet­ings and fishing.

(By the way, if you’re inter­ested in a Min­neapo­lis area get-away, meet­ing or wed­ding, Joel’s Web-site is River​wood​inn​.com).