Nobody gets Targeted by Small Business Advertising if Everyone is Targeted
posted in Off-line Marketing |Who you’re going after is one of the most important parts of advertising. It’s important to stand out from your competition, especially when trying to appeal to a specific audience. Also you should prove that you’re overly capable of providing the product or service that your audience needs. There is sometimes a temptation in small business advertising and marketing to try to be everything to everyone. Too often, the end result of this type of “one size fits all” marketing approach is that the audience you are trying to reach can’t recognize that your product or service is specifically geared towards them.
It is almost a given that your product will not appeal equally to everyone. Advertising to those that aren’t interested is a waste of your advertising resources. A lot of small businesses make the mistake of thinking they have a larger target audience than they really do. Instead of narrowing their advertising efforts specifically towards their niche audiences, small businesses sometimes try a brand awareness approach, in an attempt to reach customers who might be in the market for their products in the future. Although this approach can sometimes work for large corporations, because they have the enormous advertising budget to properly take on this type of effort, small businesses cannot possibly compete at this level. Advertising resources are less effective by not raising brand awareness with your target audience.
When it comes to advertising, people are more interested in the direct benefits that apply to them. An easy way to attract them as customers is to find out what type of product or service they’re interested in now. On the other hand, those who are not interested in a product will simply ignore advertisements. If you spend your advertising funds on trying to attract the second group, then you’re throwing away your money.
Finding out who your ideal customers are is the first step towards maximizing your small business advertising attempts. The ideal customer is the one that gets the most out of your product or service. They being the ones that would bring in the most profit, and that you’d enjoy doing the most business with. Finding out your “ideal customer” not only puts a face on your target audience, but it also helps you find out what method to use in your advertising, even though most advertising is aimed towards a specific niche.
For example, when considering print advertising, instead of advertising in a wide variety of magazines, ads should be focused towards the specific types of magazines that would appeal to the ideal customer, and advertisements should be fine-tuned to appeal specifically to the target audience. If using direct mail advertisements, using demographics to aim towards businesses and households that meet you target audience’s criteria. You can even develop certain landing pages that target different types of audience when using internet marketing.
If you use this targeted marketing approach, your small business advertising can be a lot more effective. There’s always a chance that you’ll attract someone outside of your target audience. But attracting your ideal customer is a lot more likely.
