Target Marketing: Why it’s a matter of life and death
One thing we hear in business as business owners all the time is “who is your target market”. If you’ve asked this question sometimes to other business owners, what is the response you generally get? You usually get something like “Men and Women over 30” or “small and medium companies”. I sincerely believe that the biggest issue and the biggest area that business owners slip up is not clearly defining or understanding their primary target market. In fact just the other day I asked an internet marketing newbie what his target market was, the answer “Home Business Owners, Entrepreneurs and anyone interested in Internet Marketing”
When you start to really think about and evaluate the marketing that you do as a business owner it’s very easy to slip into the trap of newspaper advertising or other forms of paid advertising and basically wanting to get the most out of your advertising. So what do you do? You create an advertisement that is potentially going to open the door to different markets, and you end up not appealing to anyone in particular. The result? Less effective advertising because you’re not appealing to the needs, wants and desires of anyone.
Again, I’ve been there and done that! I’ve run ads in local newspapers that have cost thousands of dollars (I hate to think how much money I have blown doing this) with very few leads to show for it and a horrible return on investment! Looking back I entirely put this down to broad focused marketing and not knowing my target market well enough.
When it comes to marketing it’s not so much the defining of the target market, because that is really the easy part, the hard part is doing the research and actually finding out what the target market wants! Often what you think they want is very different to what they actually want. If you go into marketing thinking you know what they want and start to advertise you put your dollars up to chance. Make sure you do your research and start understanding and eventually thinking like your target market, this will make your marketing appealing.
A client I used to train in my fitness business, was a very successful landscaper, so I asked him what his target market was and how he got his clients. Turns out his target market was “Outdoor landscaping for Doctor’s gardens” and his marketing was almost entirely word of mouth. That’s pretty incredibly don’t you think? Plus he has as much work as he wants, never had to worry about where his next job comes from.
If you think about this story above it makes complete sense. He has clearly defined who his target market is, he’s very good at what he does so delivers a very good service, then his target market talks and recommends him whenever they hear of another doctor that needs to renovate or build a new garden.
The tendency of when you are new to business is that you sit back and say ok, I’m going to try to get clients from anywhere and anyone; you just need to get critical mass before you worry about target marketing. Sure you might reach critical mass however your clientele may not necessarily be your target market, therefore word of mouth advertising is not going to be working perhaps as well as it should be.
There is a lot to be learnt by the story of my client above, if you can have a clearly defined target market like him, then you know what they are thinking, what they are looking for and how to interact and be valuable to them. Ultimately you become very appealing to your target market, additionally you can target your advertising a lot more specifically and you’ll be amazed at how successful you can be.
It’s easy to pass off a niche as too small (I would have thought my clients was) but this small niche could just be your ticket to an incredible business. I’m not saying that you can’t take clients on outside of your niche because you will appeal to people outside your niche to, but to simply target your advertising that way, because ultimately you can be everything to everyone.
For more information please feel free to check out previous posts or check out my 7 Step Sales System for Explosive Growth.
