Aiming the Bullet for Success

Are you making the mistake of thinking the whole market is your market? Are you advertising with the thought of reaching everyone? Then you are overspending on your advertising budget and with this buckshot approach you are missing your target market.

The small to medium sized business tends to select advertising mediums that are designed for mass marketing rather than micro marketing.

Think about the last advertisement you placed in a newspaper. Can you answer for yourself what was the readership percentage? In other words, did the specific people you really wanted to reach your ad even see it? Did you spend your hard earned money on a great looking ad, hoping and praying you'd get some response from it? There's a great probability it ended up lying on the living room floor along with the rest of the Sunday paper!

You can make smarter and more effective use of your marketing and advertising dollars if you utilize the micro marketing rather than mass marketing approach. Micro marketing is an approach to targeting, or better aiming your advertising bullet, if you will, to a specific audience. It targets your message to a specific profile of customer who has a high level of need or interest in your product or service. For example, upscale outdoor furniture advertising targeted at people who own summer lake homes is more apt bring you a customer who has a higher incentive to purchase rather than the casual shopper or "dreamer". Again, a savvy luggage dealer might consider taking out an ad in a travel magazine. An up-scale kitchen cabinet design group may advertise in a gourmet-cooking magazine. In selecting the media for micro marketing, you must define how close to a pure percentage of your customer that media reaches. The next time you want to put an ad in the newspaper ask yourself if you can clearly answer three critical questions.

Of all the people picking up the newspaper, how many of the circulation are actually:

• Enthusiasts for your product
• Proven investors or customers
• In a buying cycle that is close enough to the seasonal appeal of your product to actually make a purchase (selling real Christmas trees in July is not smart micro marketing!)

Businesses who micro market tend to utilize some type of data base marketing including direct mail or door hangers. The business may effectively use door hangers in a neighborhood where your database shows you have previously sold your product. If you have some very satisfied customers in a specific neighborhood, there's a high potential that other people in that neighborhood by their location profile would be interested in your product and service. The key is to target a specific customer. National consumer list companies can provide lists of people in your targeted market area with similar characteristics to your current customer profile. You will need to provide them with critical profile information about your target customers such as the type of magazines to which they subscribe, the kind of cars they own and the economic strata they are in. With the right kind of data, a good consumer mailing company can identify by these characteristics, specific people you want to reach.

There is no one medium that is less or more effective than the other. The wise business owner isn't using just one format; the key is to use a good mix of several formats, then applied with micro marketing techniques. . Newspaper tends to be one of the most "mass" driven rather than micro marketing driven mediums. Television by network alone is very much the same. You can be more micro driven in TV if you select programs that your customers tend to watch. Your sales account representative can give you detailed information about listener demographics, including what the average age is of a viewer at a certain time of day, the income, occupation and lifestyle. Radio, by it's listener profile can be used more effectively in terms of micro marketing if you target customers that listen to certain types of programs at certain times of the day. Radio programs are quite effectively formatted around specific listener demographics. Cable advertising tends to be a reasonable investment because currently, the cost of an "avail" per viewer is less expensive and you can use the same technique of program or entertainment selection to pinpoint certain types of viewers. For example, ESPN attracts a different viewer than MSNBC.

The business owner who has a well-defined customer profile has made the first step toward micro marketing. Knowing your customers' lifestyle, for example, what kind of cars they drive, what sports they enjoy, what organizations they belong to, what their leisure time activities are, will help you narrow down your profile. Each time you find something out about a customer lifestyle, it makes your target purer and smaller. Lifestyle marketing in essence, becomes micro marketing. It may seem that making that target smaller will make it harder to hit. However, if you work hard to aim your bullet at a specific customer, so to speak, your micro marketing will become much more successful and you'll get the bigger bang out of your advertising dollars.

ARTICLE TAGLINE FOR THOM WINNINGER

Visit Thom's website at http://www.winninger.com

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