I thought the cartoon above was funny because how often do we find ourselves trying to sell someone on something that they never even wanted, may never want, and just find annoying? If you are like a lot of people I talk with, it isn’t an uncommon thing…and also uncommon is the fact that despite this never-ending and ceaseless negativity brought into their lives by this strategy, they soldier on.
Good for them.
But, when you are looking to maximize your marketing and revenue reach, a better strategy is to focus on the people and prospects that best meet your buyer profile and actually look for ways to talk with them about your product and service where they are likely to be receptive to your message.
Yesterday, I wrote about how to target your market.
The gist of that is that you need to do two things:
- You need to understand the value that you want to deliver and create for your clients and prospects.
- You need to have an idea about who your buyer is and what is important to that buyer.
Today, I want to help you reach those people once you have worked out those first two things.
Because reaching your market can be cumbersome and often needs a bunch of course corrections, here are 3 general rules to help you define and decide on a course of action.
1. Don’t try to do everything:
It has become popular for so called gurus to preach about crushing it and being on all of these different platforms and other crap that is almost meaningless without some core understanding of who you are and what you are trying to achieve.
So the first key to reaching your market is to not try to do everything.
You can’t.
You likely don’t have the budget or the manpower to do everything and, more importantly, if you know your market, you don’t need to be everywhere at once.
Instead, spend some time picking 2 or 3 places and actions that will reach the people that you are trying to reach and communicate with.
2. Do as much personalize, one-to-one marketing as possible:
If you haven’t had the chance to pick up Stu Heinecke’s new book: How To Get A Meeting With Anyone you should get it immediately because his discussion of contact marketing is absolutely a must for today’s professional marketer, seller, or business person.
But to go a step further, practice more one-to-one marketing. I know that it is popular and easy to blast out email campaigns, endless cold calls with a script, and other things, but most of those are going to have very low ROIs.
A better way to approach your target market is by identifying the people and companies you want and need to speak with and creating a plan that is specific to them and their challenges. In some instances you may have a buyer profile that is similar and allows you to do a little more of a mass marketing approach, but more likely that not, your more specific approach that focuses on each individual will get you a much higher ROI.
3. Maybe you can reach more than one person at once:
This may seem to go against what I wrote above, but hear me out.
Look for ways that you can talk to multiple members of your target market at the same time.
How?
Well, can you write a book, blog, magazine piece, etc that touches an industry or role?
What about speaking at a conference where several of your potential prospects will be?
Can you get interviewed on TV, radio, or a podcast that reaches members of your audience or that you can share?
The ideas here isn’t to limit, but to think of how you can use something that you do once to create multiple points of engagement.