How Demographics Will Help You

If we were to brainstorm benefits for any one product or service, the list could be endless. The problem with this approach is that a benefit is only seen as beneficial if the customer has that need to meet. If you are brainstorming benefits for a new toothpaste, and you come up with the possibility of using it to patch nail holes in the wall, you'll probably elicit peals of laughter, not a sale. Is it a benefit of white toothpaste? There are some people who do use it like a compound, but not that many people would solely go out to buy your toothpaste based on that. The demographics that have a need to fill a hole with toothpaste is pretty small. Obviously, it's not a benefit that you would choose to list online. How do you decide to pick one benefit over another to list on your sales page then? In one word: Demographics.

What Benefits To Highlight

Every website has a specific demographic that it is trying to attract. Your core audience may be comprised of people within a specific income level, educational level, or heritage. You should know as much as you can about the demographics of the people you've attracted so that you can market to them better. If you don't know who is visiting your site, set up some surveys to help you define the demographic better and to reward people for participating with a sales coupon or discount.

The demographics will tell you the amount of money your customers have and what their most pressing concerns might be. It will also give you ideas of what products and services are most important to people who visit your site. If you don't have any idea about income levels, you can always set up three different product lines: cheap, mid-priced, and expensive product lines. You can see which are selling best and to whom and then set up your customer lists this way.

If your demographic is young single professionals and you are selling office supplies, you would want to include the latest electronic gadgets that they might use, from phones to laptops. The benefits you might highlight are trendy and technologically advanced solutions. If you are looking at a demographic of parents with young children, their top concerns will be child-rearing, safety, and convenience.

Understanding your demographic is going to help you pick out the top benefits that you will use to hook your reader into reading the rest of your sales letter. You will only have a few seconds to grab the reader's attention, so you have to know what the top benefits might be for that demographic to have a strong sales letter.

Promoting The Top Benefits

After careful consideration, you might decide that your demographic is single parents and that their top concerns are convenience and money. The products that you are selling might be anything from disposable diapers to an online babysitting service, but the top benefits should clearly be triggering the basic psychological needs of this group. In order to do that, you are going to take the top-most benefit and phrase it as the heading of your sales page. This is your “hook” to catch their attention and to get them to read more of your sales letter.

The Eye-Catching Headline

If the product is a monthly-disposable diaper club, you might want to include convenience as the top benefit. In that case, your hook might show an image of a mother trying to balance a load of diapers up a flight of stairs while she holds her baby crying in the other arm. The look of distress on both their faces might accentuate the benefit of joining a monthly diaper club. Your hook might ask, “Trying to juggle career, house, and potty training at the same time? The Fantastic Diaper Club frees up your hands and mind for the things that really count.”

The font on your headline benefit should be larger than any other font on the page. It should be placed at the very top of your Web page, in the first four inches of the page for maximum exposure. Some Internet marketers even use a bright red font to set it off from all of the other text.

The Expansive Subheading

Directly underneath the main headline should be a supporting subheading, with the second largest benefit being listed. In this case, it might be cost, and you can say something like, ”For the price of two Starbucks Cafe Lattes, you can change your baby's diaper three times a day and still have a spare for special occasions.” In other words, they'll never run out when they most need them.

By supporting the main heading with an expansive subheading, it anchors the benefit in the mind of the consumer and teases them to read a little more. Have we said anything about the program, the type of diaper, or how it all is going to be done? Absolutely not. That would be selling features and not benefits, and we still haven't found out what the objections to the product might be. In fact, even the Web visitor might not even know what objections he/she will have until he/she reads further. That's why the next step after engaging the reader through a personal story or entertaining quip is to list all of the benefits that can overcome any objection that comes to mind as he/she is reading.

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