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Article Title: Take Dead Aim At Your Target Market
Author: Andrew Pritchard
Word Count: 1966
Article URL: http://www.isnare.com/?aid=110173&ca=Marketing
Format: 64cpl
Author's Email Address: info[at]inspire-consulting.com (replace
[at] with @)
Easy Publish Tool: http://www.isnare.com/html.php?aid=110173
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What's the single most important factor in the success of a
marketing campaign? How clever the advertisements are? How good
the product or service is? The price being charged?
If you said "none of the above", then I have to agree with you.
The most important factor in marketing is targeting.
You simply have to know what to sell, and to whom to sell it.
If you're selling something that doesn't appeal to the people
you're speaking to, then you can forget about a good return.
Regardless of how good your product is, regardless of how
brilliant the advertisements are, and regardless of the price
you're charging, if your targeting is off, then your whole
marketing campaign will be missing the mark.
Moldy Grape Juice or Heavenly Elixir?
If I offered you a bottle of 1995 Domaine de la Roman�e Conti
La T�che for $500, would you buy? For the non-oenophiles among
us, the Domaine de la Roman�e Conti is a producer of wine in
Burgundy in France. They make some of the finest and most
highly coveted wines in the world, and La T�che is one of their
finest. But at $500, would you buy?
Some people might, but many others wouldn't. And fair enough.
Some would argue that no wine is worth that kind of price. Some
people just don't like the taste of wine and wouldn't buy no
matter how highly esteemed the wine was. And others, for
whatever reason, just don't drink alcohol.
But if I make my offer to some serious wine-lovers, to people
who have no problem dropping a hefty wad of cash on a great
bottle, then however many bottles I have available will be gone
soon. That's because a bottle of 1995 La T�che for $500 is a
steal.
But it's only a steal to the people who are interested in that
sort of thing. So if I want to sell my bottles, I have to do
everything I can to make my offer to people who are interested.
Targeting: The Key to Effective Marketing
So how do I get my offer in front of people who are interested?
That's where targeting comes in.
If I were to advertise the bottles of wine that I wanted to
sell in Car and Driver magazine, I'm sure you'd agree that I'd
be wasting a lot of my advertising dollars.
I'd have a better, more targeted audience if I were to
advertise in a wine-oriented publication such as Wine
Spectator. This magazine's readers are obviously interested
wine, and many of them are probably even interested to the
extent that a mere $500 for the wine I'm pitching would have
them licking their lips and dusting off the Riedel glasses.
All this stands to reason. You're obviously going to get a
better response advertising high-end fine wine to an audience
that is at least predisposed towards wine. But can we do
better?
While Wine Spectator caters to wine-lovers, not all of them
will be sufficiently loaded to seriously contemplate dropping
that kind of moolah on a single bottle of wine. In other words,
I'll be paying for the privilege of advertising to Wine
Spectator's millions of readers, when all I really want to do
is advertise to the five percent or so who are likely to be
interested in my offer.
With Car and Driver I was way off-target. Wine Spectator is
on-target, but I'm using a shotgun. To get the most bang for my
buck, I want to find a way to put my offer only in front of
people likely to be interested. I want to use a rifle to hit my
target and nothing but my target.
There are several ways I could do this. Obviously if there were
a publication geared more specifically to wine-collectors, that
would be a good place to advertise.
Another excellent alternative would be to send a mailing to my
existing customers. I could search through my customer database
and select only those customers whose buying-history indicated
an interest in the wines on sale, and send the mailing to them.
If I didn't have a large customer list, I could find additional
prospects by arranging for access to a related business'
customer list. In this case, a company specializing in wine
cellar installation might be a good choice.
As you can see, the mailing would be going out to a very select
group of people. By zeroing in on my target market, I can get
the results I need much more cost-effectively than if I either
failed to target altogether, or took the shotgun approach.
And that's really all there is to it. The more you can target
your offer, the better your response will be.
How to Target Your Marketing
As you can see, the concept of targeting is pretty simple. Take
your product or service and offer it to people who are likely to
be interested. But there are a few things you'll want to keep in
mind.
Narrow Your Niche
I don't care what you sell; your market is smaller than you
think. A large percentage of the population owns a car, but a
much smaller percentage is in the market for a new car this
month. Many people use an accountant, but far fewer are looking
to switch accountants.
If you blast away with the shotgun approach and try to hit
everyone, you won't like the results.
You might argue that even if people aren't in the market yet,
you should still try to expose them to your advertisements so
that when they are, your company's name will be at the top of
their minds. This is a really dangerous approach for a small
business to take for several reasons.
1. The response to your advertisements (if there even is any)
won't be immediate and will be much more difficult to track.
You'll therefore have a much harder time determining whether
the advertisement is working for you or not. Anytime you can't
tell if your money is well-spent, you're dicing with death.
2. The investment required to effectively achieve top-of-mind
awareness is usually enormous. There are cheaper ways to get
good results.
3. People are really good at ignoring advertising. When an
advertisement does finally get their attention, it's frequently
because the advertisement is selling something that will be of
immediate benefit to them. In other words, good luck getting
them to pay attention to your advertisements and remember your
name when they aren't even interested in what you're selling
yet.
To avoid these problems, do yourself a favor and take dead aim
at a much smaller target by narrowing your niche.
In the above example, we went from advertising a wine to
millions of Wine Spectator readers, to sending out a mailing to
only those people whose buying-history demonstrated an interest
in the specific wine we were pitching. We went from everyone
interested in wine to only those interested in high-end red
Burgundy. That's a much smaller niche!
The accountant mentioned above might market to people who are
unhappy with their current accountant for one specific reason.
Alternatively, she might narrow her niche by marketing directly
to one specific type of customer, such as dentists.
Narrowing your niche doesn't mean that you won't also do
business with customers outside that niche, it just means that
a given marketing campaign or an individual advertisement might
not be aimed directly at them. Instead, your marketing takes
dead aim at a much more specific target that is a whole lot
easier to hit.
Determine Your Ideal Customer
One of the best ways to get your marketing aimed at a smaller
target is to identify your ideal customer and market only to
prospects that fit that profile.
This is actually one of the healthiest things you can do for
your business. We all end up doing business with customers who
are not ideal. In many cases we do business with customers who
are far from ideal. These customers are often difficult to deal
with, unprofitable, and extremely hard to please.
Now imagine an influx of your ideal customers. More angels who
always pay their bills on time, who revere the work you do for
them, and who provide word-of-mouth recommendations frequently.
Wouldn't that help your business?
If you don't know what your ideal customer looks like, think
about which of your current customers are most profitable. With
whom do you most enjoy doing business? Who can benefit most from
your product or service? It shouldn't take long to form a
picture of your perfect client.
Putting It into Practice
Start taking dead aim with your marketing today. Here are some
suggestions:
Targeting Your Website
* Review the content on your website. Are you addressing
everyone or are you zeroed in on your target market?
* Make some changes to your pay-per-click advertising. Don't
just use the same advertisement for everyone. Instead, create
different advertisements for the different types of prospect
you're targeting.
* Experiment with different landing pages. Landing pages are
the pages that people who click on your advertisements are
taken to. You should create targeted landing pages for each
type of prospect in your target market.
Targeting Your Print Advertising
* Don't run the same advertisement everywhere. If you're
targeting different types of customer, create an advertisement
that addresses each customer type directly and then do
everything you can to get the advertisement in front of the
prospect it's targeted on.
* If your advertisements reference your website, you might
consider setting up different landing pages for the different
versions of your advertisements. Doing so would enable your
prospects to continue experiencing highly-targeted
communication.
* Experiment with different publications. One publication might
have a smaller circulation, but it could be much more targeted
for your advertising.
Targeting Your Direct Mail
* Break your mailing list into segments based on demographics
such as the type and size of business or the income level of
the household. Any actual buying-history data should also be
factored in. You can then target your mailings based on these
factors. If your offer is likely to appeal to customers who
have purchased a specific product before, you can extract those
names from the list and send the offer only to them.
* Establish relationships with non-competing, but related
businesses and get permission to market to their clients. In
the wine example above, I suggested building a mailing list by
gaining access to the customer database of a wine cellar
installation firm. If you can arrange for a letter from the
other company introducing you (and recommending you) your
response will soar. Just be sure you've agreed details such as
a commission on any sales and what happens to the list after
the campaign is over. Typically you'll get to keep any
customers who respond to your mailing, but the master list
stays with the other business.
* If you direct people to the website for more information,
don't let the targeting stop with your letter. Create
mailing-specific landing pages so that prospects continue to
experience highly targeted communication.
About The Author: Andrew Pritchard is the owner of Inspire
Consulting, a marketing company in Michigan. They offer several
free reports on marketing more effectively both online and
offline. The reports can be downloaded from their website:
http://www.inspire-consulting.com
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