Bullseye!
That’s what you hope you hit with all of your marketing activities.
Unfortunately, I bet for most of you that your marketing spread looks like a mess.
Why is that when you have all of this data?
All of this information on buying habits?
Everything that you should have to make your marketing efforts much more effective!
Well, if you have ever heard the old maxim: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) you are on the right track to making sense of what the real situation looks like.
To translate this into plain English, most of the time you are pointing your marketing engine at the wrong targets.
Why?
Because you aren’t even really certain of who your buyer is.
To quote Donald Trump’s tweets: SAD!
So how do you beat that?
You have to focus.
But focus on what?
Its actually a pretty simple formula, but the focusing itself is the big issue.
Let’s break it down to 3 simple questions, shall we.
1. What is the value you are working on creating?
Everything in marketing should begin with a thought about value!
Unfortunately, too often the thing that jumps out first is features and benefits.
That too is SAD!
So lead off your marketing efforts by doing some considerable thinking on the nature of the value you are looking to create for your clients and prospects.
This is going to help you figure out who your buyer is and where your marketing should point.
2. Who is the person with the budget? Or, who is the person with responsibility for the outcome?
You need to figure out who the real buyer is.
In too many cases, it is very easy to just take a meeting with anyone.
But in most cases, that is a waste of time.
These may be fine people, but if they can’t advance you towards a sale, you may be better focusing on someone or something else.
So make sure you are looking for people that can appreciate your results or who have a budget.
3. Do you know where to reach these people?
This might be the point where the biggest failures of marketing budgets come to roost.
You don’t know what your value is. You don’t know who your buyer is.
So you make a decision to just start spraying your message and your advertising everywhere.
But that is just a bad idea. Because you are wasting money on stuff just to say you did something.
The better thing is to spend some time focusing on the people you are trying to reach and how you can teach them that your service or product is great.
That’s likely not to fit into the “everyone else is doing it” bucket.
It is more likely going to be a little more individualized, but if you are focusing on a limited number of buyers and some of your top targets, you don’t have to take on mass advertising because your impact will be much greater.