Building the correct target for my marketing campaign is the most important thing I can do in any marketing strategy.  As a Miami business coach, many of the business owners that I speak to, want me to advise them what marketing tool they should use. 

They say, can you help me with my marketing strategy, but what they are really asking  me about is marketing tool.  They want to know should they use Facebook, Twitter, e-Mail blasts, bus benches, you name it!

I have to stop them in their tracks and say, “Wait a minute! You’re starting at the wrong end!”  You can’t determine what the best tool is, until you know WHO you are trying to reach and WHERE you can find them in highest concentrations.  When you are determining who you are going to market to, you want to narrow your target as much as you possibly can.  This is different for different industries, and how you’ll deal with your overall strategy is different for different levels of maturity in the business.

I like to use a rule of thumb for most of the businesses that I help with their marketing strategy, that you should have a target size that’s small/large enough that you could focus on just that target for a month and get sufficient business from it.  Why, because if your business (or marketing) is not that mature, then you should focus on ONE marketing campaign at a time, and a month is about the minimum amount of time to run one campaign.  Again, this will be different for different markets, industries and even campaign types.

Narrowing your target allows you to more easily define where you are going to reach them in the highest concentration and to make your marketing message more directly relevant to them.

The most important part of any marketing strategy, or marketing campaign, is the Target. Not that your Offer or Copy isn’t important, it just isn’t nearly as important as your Target. You see, if you are selling to people that don’t want what you are offering, it doesn’t matter how great your offer is, how beautiful the marketing piece is, or even how convincing the words are – they don’t want it, so they probably won’t buy it.  If you’re talking to people that want what you’re offering, then even if the offer isn’t the best or the look isn’t perfect, people will buy because they want it.

Next blog, I’ll talk about how to make a compelling offer. Stay tuned...