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.

Target Market

As a professional service provider, how can you differentiate yourself from competitors who offer similar services to you?

Differentiating yourself from the numerous other providers that offer similar to identical services as you can be quite challenging. As an attorney, you can’t prove that you write better briefs, or as an accountant, you can’t claim you do better audits. Those claims would be virtually impossible to prove!

Common Differentiating Factors Firms Try To Use

Often, firms resort to the standard “we offer superior service” or “our firm has been in business for 75 years” but with everyone saying something along those lines, your statement doesn’t do much to separate you from the pack.

Others stress that they are technically superior, but many firms are catching up quickly. A recent book by Harvard professor, Nicholas Carr entitled Does IT Matter? recently addressed the question whether IT can deliver a sustained competitive advantage. A growing number of people think that IT is simply a framework. It’s your business processes that deliver the sustained advantage.

Focusing on your services such as bundling offerings together or adding freebies to increase value can drive prices down and make freebies the expected not the exception.

How To Differentiate Yourself Meaningfully

So how do you differentiate yourself? The answer is to focus on your core characteristics. No one is exactly like you, meaning no one has your unique set of characteristics, knowledge, and expertise. Your personal experiences and problem solving skills are the key to adding value to your customer experiences.

Now I don’t mean marketing yourself as the #1 attorney or accountant or realtor in your area. Don’t plaster your picture on your advertisements and only talk about how great you are. That’s not going to do you any good.

What will differentiate you, however, is how well you can apply your knowledge to help out your prospects and clients. How can you become more than their vendor - to partner with them and genuinely help them grow their business? Your own creativity and problem solving can lead to greater value by helping them solve their own challenging business issues. That’s what will create value.

In fact, a Legal Week article cites a study of in-house counsel in FTSE 100 companies:

From a list of 12 different service criteria, ‘understanding the client’s legal requirements in a commercial context’ came out as the most important. It was more important than ‘responsiveness’, ‘depth and breadth of expertise’ or even ‘price/ value for money’. It may have topped the importance ratings but when firms’ performance was measured, far from being in the top spot, it was only seventh equal.

“If you take the basic legal advice as read, then [the lawyer] needs to demonstrate greater commercial understanding of your business and where and how they can add value,” said one in-house counsel.

This finding isn’t unique to law firms but has been found consistently throughout all industries - clients want to work with business partners that can help them with their business. How can you, personally, add value to your client’s business?

Branding/Positioning

There was an article about a month ago on Clickz.com by Bryan Eisenberg that discussed segmenting your client base into two categories:

• angels: those that are a pleasure to do business with, are low maintenance and would rather pay a little more to save time and hassle
• devils: the penny pinchers that will go to extreme lengths to nickel and dime you, who would rather waste time than money, and will do whatever possible to find the lowest price

His conclusion? To stop catering to the devils and start focusing on adding value. Devils often suck up all your resources, making your company less profitable. Angels rely on building relationships. They want to trust their partners to help them accomplish what they need and then leave.

We all want to work with angel customers, but there is this persistent fear that people will only judge your services on price. Price, of course, is a factor, but as long as you price your services fairly, it’s the value you bring to the project that will set you apart from your competitors. If you can’t set yourself apart, then customers won’t see any difference but price. And they’ll go for the lowest price out there.

Read Article: Climbing Out of the Lowest-Price Trap

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