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Digital Marketing To Baby Boomers

So, you created a website, an online marketing plan and executed it. You’re routinely watching your online marketing activity, wondering if you could be doing better in Baby Boomer markets (50 to 68 years of age) because you believe you have an attractive product or service for them, and you know that’s where the money is. 

You’re thinking about how you can improve site traffic and sales. You’re wondering if there’s more you can be doing, how you can improve efficiency and effectiveness. Two years ago, I wrote an article on Designing Your Website for Customer Convenience that you may find informative. What follows are some additional considerations worthy of exploration, if you haven’t already, to improve the appeal and effectiveness of your site to Boomers and increase sales. 

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing (SEM, also known as Pay-Per-Click) has revolutionized how all customers find products and services by promoting your website through a combination of advertising and increased visibility in the search engines. The fastest-growing demographic online is the Baby Boomer. SEM strategies can be used to enhance your current online marketing program or as part of an overhaul of your entire website and marketing approach. 

Leading search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask are now the most common way potential customers will look for your products and services. If they can’t find your website, then you will receive no visitors. Marketing a website correctly is the best way to encourage Boomers to visit.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the most popular terms thrown around when discussing any type of online marketing strategy — including specialized marketing for Boomers — is search engine optimization (more commonly known as SEO). SEO is the process of improving your website’s visibility in places like Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. 

Ranking high and ranking often is a great goal, but it’s important to realize that Boomers don’t interact with search engines the same way younger users do. They may use different search engines, enter different types of search terms and follow different paths to get to your website.

Organizations that want to market and advertise to Boomers can take advantage of these differences in a positive way. By targeting your marketing strategy to include specialized keywords and methods adopted by older generations, you can see better results with a lot less competition. And, that’s good news for your bottom line. 

Analytics Reporting

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales. It's the most widely used website statistics service. The basic service is free of charge and a premium version is available for a fee. 

Google Analytics can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines and social networks, direct visits and referring sites. It also tracks display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing and digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.

A good SEO management service will provide you detailed reports on each of your webpages or websites so you’ll know which keywords are working well and how the overall site pages are performing in the search engines. Their reports help you determine which areas of the site need attention or improvement. 

Website Conversion Optimization

Anyone can promise high volumes of visitors and focus on putting the numbers on your side — but more important than high traffic is high-quality traffic. You want the users accessing your site and online information to spend some time with you, getting to know your product/service, building a relationship and ultimately converting to lifelong customers.

You need to utilize techniques that make the most of marketing strategies, allowing you to reach Boomers more easily and then more easily convert those customers into sales. Conversion strategies should be created as part of your overall marketing plan and rolled seamlessly into your website and social media platforms. By making your website streamlined and easy to use, you can reduce the Boomer’s frustration quotient and increase his/her satisfaction quotient whether you’re providing content/information online or creating a sales portal for immediate income.

Social Media

Social media has begun to take a pivotal role in the marketing of websites and products. You should take full advantage of the social networking avenues such as Facebook (the 800-lb. gorilla), YouTube, Pinterest and Twitter. Social networks work with you to maximize your exposure to potential Boomer customers who are spending an increasing amount of their time online and on social media networks. These avenues allow you to target them rather than waiting for them to come to you. Used correctly these social media arenas can serve up almost overload amounts of traffic through to your website in an instant.

Successful marketing to Boomers requires concentrated and ongoing website promotion. Again, if Boomers can’t find you online easily and effortlessly, chances are they aren’t going to find you or what you have to offer.

1 comment about "Digital Marketing To Baby Boomers".
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  1. Mike Greco from Indy App Systems, December 1, 2014 at 5:22 p.m.

    Boomers are also said to be highly engaged with ads that appear to be higher quality than most. So, for example, a bland old irrelevant banner isn't doing to win many clicks, whereas a native ad from Facebook or Abstract Banners from Airpush will likely do the trick.

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