We are often asked: “How do we reach out to new customers?”
Well the answer, for businesses large and small, is the same.
The value proposition in your marketing must be relevant to your target market…to the audience you are trying to reach. This means, your target market must be clearly defined. And you’ve got to buy into their ‘worldview’ – those things that are important to them.
Smart marketing doesn’t try to change someone’s worldview.
You’ll never sell a Rolex to someone who has no money, or doesn’t want to spend their money on an expensive watch. You’ll never sell a Harley Davidson to someone who believes it’s dangerous riding the road that way. You’ll never sell an airline ticket to someone who’s afraid to fly. And you’ll never get someone to buy a smart phone when all they want to do is make telephone calls.
Instead, you need to identify a group of people – an audience – with a worldview that matches your product or service. And communicate with them. And frame your branding/product story with words and images that reinforce the existing worldview they already believe in. Or, the harder course, convince them that your product or service is an option with benefits that they should seriously consider.
I was recently paging through an issue of hip Details Magazine. Departments there include Culture and Trends, Style and Advice, Celebrity and Entertainment and Sex and Relationships. According to Wikipedia, Details is an American monthly men’s magazine published by Condé Nast Publications, founded in 1982. Though primarily a magazine devoted to fashion and lifestyle, Details also features reports on relevant social and political issues.
The magazine has dozens of ‘lifestyle’ ads throughout. And I was struck by the wide range of target markets the ads focus on in one publication. Three of those ads are here. And those ads reach out to three distinctively different audiences reading the magazine.
Now, more than ever, it’s important that you clearly define the target market for your product or service.
In web applications, behavioral targeting is a sophisticated technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns with well defined audiences. Behavioral targeting uses information collected on a person’s web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which information is most relevant to display to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements/content to the users who are most likely to be interested in their products or services.
It’s a highly sophisticated approach, but clearly designed to not only target an audience, but engage them on a much more focused level.
Behavioral marketing for web audiences can be used on its own or in conjunction with other forms of targeting based on factors like geography, demographics or the surrounding content.
Defining the audience for your business.
The following questions may help you begin to assess the best way to approach your audiences.
1. Who is your target market?
2. Where is your target audience located?
3. What do they think about your current brand?
4. What do you want them to think about your brand?
5. What’s really important for them regarding your products or services?
6. Who else is competing for their loyalty and business?
Define the brand for a great relationship with your audiences.
Conversations about brands and branding sometimes get bogged down in weird or esoteric terminology that no one understands. But when you break through the clutter, the confusion and the contradictions, it’s easy to understand what branding really is.
Branding is a way for a company to make more money. And once you get it down right, your audiences – your customers and potential customers – will buy from you than from someone else. Brands are the emotional and psychological relationship you have directly with your customers. Strong brands elicit good thoughts and positive emotions with their audiences.
By effectively branding your enterprise, you create an identity that resonates with selected audiences. You form emotional relationships with customers. That’s important because people don’t always buy products logically, they buy with their emotions.
With branding, you need to apply four basic principles to your marketing. And it doesn’t matter whether you are Federal Express, Apple or the local coffee shop.
Here are some of the branding principles:
• Forget about a long list of features and benefits
• Focus on creating a very simple, singular, clear, engaging message
• Adopt and dumb down one, absolutely killer selling idea
• Market the selling idea, not the product or service
Branding focuses on an idea. It could be an expensive idea like the prestige of driving a Lamborghini or an inexpensive idea like staying open later than competitors.
The bottom line.
There’s simply no substitute for knowing everything you possible can about the audiences you serve and the audiences you want to attract. Do all the market research you can. Not only externally by monitoring trends, competitive advantages, new developments, etc. But also internally, survey your existing customers to determine what they like, don’t like, want and need. Combine that research with a solid brand presentation, and you’ve just increased your odds of getting that cash register singing.
