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The Secret Weapon of Good Marketing

December 12, 2018 by Susan Paige

If you have something to sell, whether it’s a physical product, a less tangible digital or financial one, or your services as a consultant, you need to make some efforts to market it. However perfectly designed and priced your product is, however well optimised for your chosen market, if the people don’t find out about it, they can’t pay you for it and that means no revenue.

To survive you need to make sure you’re marketing what you have to offer: you’ve got it, you need to flaunt it. It’s not enough to simply throw money at the problem. Your marketing needs to be as optimised for your market as your product. There’s a secret weapon you can bring to bear on this problem: specificity. The specific understanding of who your customers are what appeals to them means you can get the maximum results from the minimum spend, and ensure your marketing is doing its job and not eating up all that valuable revenue.

To begin with you need to look into the demographics of your market: if you don’t know who’s buying what you’re selling you can’t sell to them effectively!

It’s tempting to think of your market as a great homogenous mass of people, and use whatever descriptor applies to the biggest proportion as a shorthand for everyone. This is convenient, but it’s not accurate and it lacks that specificity that makes for a successful campaign. If your audience skews older it means exactly that: a sizeable proportion of your customers are aged fifty and over. There will be other customer groups that don’t fall into this category, and you ignore them at your peril.

This process of dividing up your market into different groups is known as market segmentation, and it allows you to decide which groups are a higher priority, and who needs the most attention and the most budget to convert from browsers into buyers.

Appealing to different segments of your market needs work: in some cases it might be enough to make sure you’re advertising in different places to catch different people (Guardian readers are demographically decidedly different to Telegraph readers, for example). A lot of the time, however, you’re going to change the creative side of your adverts as well. That Guardian reader isn’t looking for the same things as someone browsing the Telegraph on a Saturday morning.

Choosing a message that resonates with the market segment you’re trying to target, and placing it where they can see it, with different ads and different locations for everyone you’re trying to reach will, if you work with specific data, help you grow your revenue and press on towards success in the future!

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