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Any intro marketing textbook teaches the importance of defining and targeting specific market segments. Understanding your market is key to selling into that market. But do you understand your meta-market?

The meta-market

For online businesses there are two meta-markets: consumers and resellers.

Consumers are the traditional meta-market, the end, er, consumers of a product or service. To sell to them you must sell them on the features and benefits of the product. Show them how it fulfills a need or a want. All the usual marketing stuff.

Resellers are the other meta-market. Resellers take products and sell them to consumers. Or, more likely, other resellers.

So which meta-market appeals to you?

An example

Say you wrote an e-book on dog training. It’s a good book, and you’ve got some promotional material written. So which meta-market do you target?

The consumer meta-market is actually very hard to sell to. These are the same people that most marketers — online AND offline — are chasing. Lots of competition. Lots of money to reach them. Of course, if you have a high-traffic site about dog training or you’ve built a large mailing list of dog lovers, your job will be much simpler. This is why building a reputation and a following is important if you want to be successful at consumer selling.

Or you could go after the reseller meta-market.

Resellers are always on the lookout for products to sell, either to consumers or (more on this shortly) to other resellers. If there’s something unique and appealing about your product, if there’s a money-making angle you can exploit, the reseller meta-market can be extremely profitable.

Primed to spend, easy to reach

There are two problems with the consumer meta-market:

• Consumers are hard to reach; and
• Consumers are not easily convinced to spend their money online

The reseller meta-market, on the other hand, is almost the opposite:

• Resellers are actively searching for new products to promote; and
• Resellers are eager buyers of online products

Even though the reseller meta-market is much smaller than the consumer meta-market, it’s a much easier sell. I touched on this before when I talked about turnkey AdSense site economics, but it goes way beyond AdSense.

So what’s your meta-market?

Understanding which meta-market you’re actually targeting is one of the keys to succeeding as an online entrepreneur. The strategies you use to go after consumers are different than the strategies you use to go after resellers. There’s a lot of overlap, of course — you must convince resellers that what you’re offering is of interest to consumers, or at least other resellers — but you focus on different things.

We’ll pick up this discussion later.

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