Affluent Marketing

At last week’s Mal Emery Platinum mastermind get together, we briefly discussed how there’ll be a massive transfer in wealth in the coming decade or more, as the parents of baby boomers pass away and wealth is transferred in greater amounts to the baby boomer generation.

That transfer of wealth will generate an increasing amount of spending on products and services aimed at an increasingly affluent generation who are no longer prepared just to sit out retirement, but want experiences, services and products to actively enjoy life after work.

Here’s one indication of the amount of wealth being transferred, at least in the US:

“The numbers are staggering. According to the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, over the next 50 years, the wealthiest Americans will leave behind an estimated $27 TRILLION dollars.”
– High Net Worth on CNBC, 16 August 2008

(On the CWP website, the figure is even higher — they’re reporting intergenerational wealth transfer of $41 trillion by 2052 — in 44 years).

It certainly reinforces that discussion … so what can you do in your business to make the most of this opportunity? How can you package and present your products to attract affluent baby boomers to your business?

If you haven’t already done so, you should be taking note to ensure this lucrative market is not overlooked.

24 August 2008 | Filed Under Ideas and Trends, Marketing | Leave a Comment

Target Your Click Throughs Carefully

With ad services like Google Adwords, having control of the page a viewer sees once they click on your ad means you have the advantage of presenting a targeted message.

One of the worst mistakes you can do is to create a compelling headline and brief description, and then just send someone to an all-encompassing home page — that momentum is lost and a visitor is often confused by their choices.

The message on the home page — unless you have a very lead-generation specific website with only one presented message — is not often an extension of the ad message that had the visitor interested enough to click in the first place. That confusion is a “road block” to converting that visitor to your objective.

So it makes sense that the page they see accurately reflects the advertising message … you should use a page that specifically meets this purpose.

However, be careful to TEST that it works!

I clicked on an ad on a web page yesterday (from within Google Mail) … for a bookkeeping company. They had created a specific page for that ad. However, the page I saw had this message:

You are not authorized to view this resource.
You need to login.

Oh no … lost sale. Road block. Crash. Wasted money spent on that click!

Most likely, the person creating the ad landing page was logged in, and didn’t even realise the potential for this type of error. How much money will they waste until they realise this problem?

Admittedly, some visitors may then use the navigation to click on the home page and track down what they were after. But you’re at the mercy of their resourcefulness, and that’s a dangerous place to be, especially when your home page is not prepared to carry that same targeted message.

So … don’t just use your home page as an ad landing page, unless it is very consumer targeted. And make sure that if you do have a specific page, you logout of your web content management system and test the page just as a visitor would see it!