Will narrowing my focus really make my marketing successful?
There has been a trend away from the mass media advertising of old - away from tv and radio and even print - towards marketing to smaller, focused groups and even individuals (a concept coined by the Pepper and Rogers Group as one to one marketing.)
There are a number of reasons for this.
- A Forrester 2003 study found that in the US, consumers who own personal video recorders admit to skipping 20% of all tv ads. (Forrester Research. “Guide To Integrated Marketing Success,” Sept 2004)
- 83% of consumers say they do other activities while watching tv. The figure jumps to 90% among the 18-34 year old age group. (Forrester Trends. “Multitasking Dilutes Media Attention,” March 2004)
- Consumers have far more choices than ever and are overloaded with information. A Forrester Research 2004 study (Forrester Research. “Left Brain Marketing,” April 2004) found that in the 1960s there were on average only 5.7 tv channels per home, 8400 magazine titles, and 4400 radio stations. In 2004, the average home received 82.4 tv channels and there are 17,300 magazine titles, 13,500 radio stations, 25,000+ internet broadcast stations, and Google has indexed over 8 billion web pages.
Consumers today are exposed to so many messages that they’ve become pretty good at filtering out the irrelevant content from what they want to know. If an offer isn’t directly relevant to them, they won’t even notice it.
Marketing Is In A State of Transition
Marketers have learned they need better tactics for reaching consumers, and in this regard, they’ve turned to understanding their customers and developing customized offers for very specific target audiences. Marketing is transforming from companies pushing their message at consumers and hoping consumers buy to companies creating a dialog with their customers to learn what their interests are and what they’d be interested in buying.
Marketing As A Science
The transition means that marketing is becoming more of a science than an art. Companies are now collecting consumer data and using that data to make their business decisions. They create extremely specific personas (fictional profiles of ideal customers) and try to understand how someone fitting that description would buy the type of product or service they offer. And they test their assumptions, always looking for ways to improve their results.
The concept of science based marketing has been around a long time. Back in the 20s, Claude Hopkins penned his famous book, Scientific Advertising. Today, the principles are even more appropriate because it’s extremely difficult to find and reach consumers now that tv and radio offer far more choices. And commercials airing during highly watched programs have become extremely expensive. The price of a 30 second commercial to air during the Super Bowl has nearly doubled between 1996 and 2004.
Reaching Prospects Cost Effectively
So how does this relate to you? Well, unless you work for a Fortune 500 company with a huge advertising budget, a Super Bowl commercial is probably out of the question. That’s ok. It probably wouldn’t pull in the results you hoped for anyway.
The real question is how can you reach prospects on an affordable budget? The answer lies in picking a narrow target and focusing solely on them. When you only look at your average client or “anyone who might need my service,” you get trapped in generalities. And no one sees themselves as “average” or “typical.” They all have very specific problems and are looking for solutions to those problems.
Picking a Specific Target
However, when you pick one very specific target market - for instance, renters living in a specific building complex (for Real Estate Agents) or technology startups ready to patent their software (for Intellectual Property Attorneys), then you can better think of where these people might be and how you can educate them about your services in a way that is meaningful to them.
When you narrow your focus, you can think like your prospect might. You can assess what their concerns might be and offer a tip sheet, free guide, or seminar to further address their concern. You also will do better at predicting what media channels - advertising, website, postcards, sales letters, mailers, email, etc - you should use to reach them.
If you don’t have a clear picture of who you’d like to target, your marketing efforts are more “hope and pray” than strategic. Instead of speaking directly to a highly specific group of people, you speak to no one. And speaking to no one usually means you’ll get no responses. People have better things to do than read your ad. If it’s not relevant to their life at that moment, they won’t take notice. And if they don’t notice, they won’t remember you and you’ve just wasted your money.
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Categories: Target Market
