Segment Your Target MarketingOK, it’s been a while since I hit the topic of marketing, so I figured it was time again.  Plus, I read a pretty good article titled Small businesses use targeted marketing to contact specific customers

It amazes me how many small business owners don’t know who their customers really are!  This is the #1 reason they cannot take full advantage of target marketing and don’t get content marketing.

Inability to target your customers is a huge killer for many businesses.  But, why is it so important?  Here is a quick and simple example.

First, if you don’t know who you’re talking to then your message is not be targeted.  It tends to be general and doesn’t really speak to anyone specifically.

So, you talk to 10,000 people but only 10 are really listening to what you’re saying.  So, have you really accomplished anything?

If however you broke the list of 10,000 up into 10 chunks of 1,000 specific groups, each with a specific problem.  Then you created a message that spoke directly to each of those 10 groups and 10 listened from each group.  Guess what, you now have 100 people listening, 10 times what you had in the more general approach.

Is it worth the extra effort?  Most people would say YES!  But, it depends on your ROI (return on investment).

For most businesses it only takes a little bit of effort to slightly modify the message.  You may tweak a few words and change the problem because of what each group really wants.  But, overall it shouldn’t take 10 times longer to make the updates and get more specific.

We use this approach ourselves at DE, Inc. all the time!  A good example of what I am talking about here is our the Affiliate Page of our website.

You’ll notice we used general information on the main page then branched out for organizations and trusted advisers.  We did this because they each have a different set of problems.  So, each page help us talk directly to each group.  But, we bring them both back to the same pages for the solution because the solution we offer solves both of their problems.

So, have you taken the time to segment your target market(s)?  If not, you need to!

Tune in next week as segmenting your marketing will be our topic, as we discuss the concept of creating personas.  This a great trick I learned from one of our contributing writers, Bob Linger, who has spent more than 30 years in the marketing and advertising business.

Until next week, happy marketing!!!