Can Target Marketing Provide Entrepreneurs an Edge?

What’s the biggest shift in marketing over the past several years? Successful entrepreneurs today understand how important it is to target their message to their best clients and markets. These entrepreneurs understand the importance of creating a message that resonates with their key clients and customers.

Target marketing can increase the effectiveness of your business growth strategies. The more you understand your clients’ wants and needs, the more likely you will succeed when you choose to sell them.

Big Data makes it possible to know as much as you want about your customers’ lives. There is so much information available, your challenge may be how to take the large volume of information in and then create a marketing campaign that supports your customers’ unique wants and needs.

Since many of my clients are selling new products and services, I work with them to create a profile of their best potential customer. I find that once we know the target we are trying to hit, it becomes easier for us to decide how to reach them.

During this initial stage, I target my questions in three key categories to help my clients get a better understanding of their best clients’ profile. A common error among many entrepreneurs is they try to sell their product or service to everyone. Most entrepreneurs do not have the money to make this work. To increase their sales, they must target their marketing efforts.

If I can get them to target their message early, they can increase their effectiveness by 100%. If you understand who your best clients are you save significant money and time that could be wasted by aiming at too many different targets.

The other shift that has to occur is investing time in understanding you sell your products and services to people, not companies. Many startup leaders talk in general terms about what companies they plan to sell their products to with little thinking going into why customers buy new products and services. Just because you have a great service doesn’t mean a customer will leave their current provider for another. Does your product or service provide significant motivation for a client to change providers?

Let’s see what we should know about the target customer we are selling to. We should know their demographics. B2B marketers are better served knowing more about who their client is. Demographic information includes:

• Level of education
• Ethnicity
• Income
• Age
• Where they live
• Gender
• Family size

This information helps you better understand who will be buying your product or service. This information also provides insights into where to market your products.

If you are selling your product to senior leadership, you might want to add psychographic information to your target profile. This could include:

• Lifestyle
• Attitude
• Values
• Interests
• Political views
• Personality
• Hobbies

These attributes help you better create a message that resonates with your target market. It should be noted that many people feel that knowing this information may be invasive when selling products and services. I see it as a way of better understanding the clients’ view of the world. The more you understand these elements, the easier it is to develop a target message that resonates with your best potential customers.

Finally, you should look for information on how your product or service can make their life easier. Successful target marketing understands and speaks to many of your customers’ biggest challenges or fears. There are many factors that go into creating an extraordinary connection with your market.

I find the more I understand my clients’ lives, the easier it is to connect my service to what they are currently thinking about. Today, it’s easier than ever to understand what is going on in your client’s lives. You can see what ideas resonate with them and then determine what you share about your product or service.

If you do your research correctly you should be able to easily answer the following questions:

• What keeps them up at night?
• What do they see as their biggest problem?
• If they could change something about what they do, what would it be?
• What unspoken need do they want a solution for?
• How do they want to be treated in their role?
• Are they recognized for what they accomplish on the job?
• Who inspires them?
• What are their hopes and dreams, both personally and professionally?

These questions allow you to step into their conversation where they are. It shows your customers that you understand what they are going through. These questions provide a bridge to your target market’s wants and needs. When you begin to develop this information about your clients, the faster you become at building a stronger, more trusting relationship.

Even with all this information, you may feel like you’re unclear about how to apply it to build a stronger connection to your market.

Would you like to learn more about building a breakthrough brand? You might enjoy our new series at Developing Serving Leaders called “How Do You Create a Breakthrough Brand Today? “

Next week, I talk about how you can break this information into market segments so that your message hits the target. See you next week.