blog-post-4One of the keys to crafting the right message is making sure you are aiming it at the right market.

The best possible offer made to someone who is wholly unqualified or wholly disinterested in it is not going to work.

You’ve got to match your offer with the right people to receive those offers.

You want to find good prospective customers for a business that:

  • Can be reached affordably
  • Are likely to buy
  • Are able to buy
  • Preferably already know you or are likely to trust you

You may think you know who your customers are but truth is we find this rarely bears out in reality.

Too many businesses have a tough time enunciating exactly who their customer is and what that person is all about.

This means they have a tough time producing advertising and marketing to reach these people.

A few years back, Dan Kennedy was working with an individual in the carpet cleaning business. This business owner was doing a lot of the right things in terms of crafting messages and using good advertising media. But he said none of it was working and couldn't figure out what was wrong.

They only worked out the solution when Dan took a drive with him around the area they were targeting. It was quickly obvious why he wasn't getting a good response from his reasonably good messages.

If you looked around the homes in the zip codes he was marketing to, the lawns were poorly kept, the yards were untidy, and many of the driveways had old cars jacked up on them.

It was obvious these were not the kind of people who would be likely to pay money to have a carpet cleaning service come and clean their carpets.

He could have delivered the best marketing message. He could deliver a tremendous, irresistible offer – a great widget – to the people in that neighborhood and still get very poor response.

Right message, wrong market.

If you are in one of those areas, you short-circuit the whole process.

You're guaranteed to waste money and you are likely to
have an abject failure of the marketing effort.

To get the right answer, you have to pick your target market with more sophistication.

There are several ways that most small businesses can approach this whole issue of target marketing.

For example you can target according to the geographic area, the demographics of the type of people, or the membership of an affinity group.

The more you know about your target market, the easier it is to identify them so that you can reach them with your message.

_______________________________

This is an excerpt from my book, “9 Rules For Business Prosperity in the New Economy”.  The book may be purchased in both printed and Kindle editions at: http://arizonamarketingassociation.org/9-rules-business-prosperity/