This post is all about targeted marketing and why YOUR marketing needs to be targeted, if you are serious about developing your business.
Here’s a great example of targeted marketing for you. I am around 99% certain that you are a business owner. In fact, I believe you either own a business, or are a consultant or a freelancer.
I was spot on or pretty close, wasn’t I?
How was I able to be so sure?
Targeted marketing
I have grown the readership of this site, via targeted marketing. Everything I have done in order to develop this blog, has been based around attracting the attention of intelligent, small business owners who want better sales results for their businesses. The content here is also targeted, with everything I have written, focused on the subject of marketing and business development.
As a direct result, I have a highly targeted readership of small business owners; the exact profile of people who use my marketing services.
Targeted marketing and time wasters
Just as targeted marketing delivers targeted results, the opposite is also true. Small business owners, who use a less focused approach to their marketing, tend to attract a little of everything. As a result, they typically get fewer business inquiries and many of the inquiries they do receive, are from the wrong kind of people.
For example, I spoke with a business owner recently, who told me how frustrated she was with all the time wasters who contacted her. I asked her what she meant by time wasters. Was she referring to people who were asking her for free advice? No. She said she was referring to the number of people who contact her looking for help in areas that she doesn’t cover. Similarly, I receive emails all the time, from people who complain that their prospective clients are too fee sensitive. With a little investigation, I often find that they are marketing a premium quality service, to people who buy bargain bucket services. That’s what happens when you fail to target your marketing correctly.
If you find that you are attracting the wrong kind of inquiries, or enquiries from the wrong end of the market, it’s entirely possible that the focus of your marketing needs to be improved. If you use social networks to randomly connect with people because they look interesting, that’s a GREAT strategy for socialising; however, it’s less effective if you are looking to build a targeted network of great business contacts and prospective clients. It’s like attending a networking event and randomly talking only to the first 10 people you see; rather than being a little wiser and connecting with the 10 most suitable people in the room.
Targeted marketing messages
When you write, do you write for as wide an audience as possible? Do you try to tell everyone who could possibly buy from you, every benefit of your services? If you do, you are making a mistake! Your marketing needs to be targeted to your prospective clients and their needs. That’s all. By trying to be vaguely relevant to everyone, your message becomes weakened. In order to compel or inspire people to call you, visit you, email you or click your links, your marketing needs to motivate them to take action. This means delivering targeted marketing messages to the right people!
If you want to be able to confidently predict who sees your marketing, and therefore contacts you, get specific. Don’t focus on the size of your network or the number of leads you generate, until you are attracting the right people.