Targeting is one of the most important parts of small business advertising. It’s important to make sure people can distinguish between you and your competition, especially when trying to appeal to a specific audience. You also need to prove that you’re more than capable to fill your target audiences needs. There is sometimes a temptation in small business advertising and marketing to try to be everything to everyone. Too often, the end result of this type of “one size fits all” marketing approach is that the audience you are trying to reach can’t recognize that your product or service is specifically geared towards them.
It is almost a given that your product will not appeal equally to everyone. It’s a waste of valuable advertising resources to advertise to people that aren’t interested in your product. Small businesses often make the mistake of thinking that their target audience is bigger than what it really is. Instead of narrowing their advertising efforts specifically towards their niche audiences, small businesses sometimes try a brand awareness approach, in an attempt to reach customers who might be in the market for their products in the future. Thanks to extremely high advertising budgets, big corporations can often have this approach work for them, but for small business it’s too high of a risk. Advertising resources are less effective by not raising brand awareness with your target audience.
It’s well known that customers only care about advertisements that show an immediate benefit to them. If they’re interested in a certain product or service now, then there’s a higher chance of attracting them as customers. And of course people that have no interest in a product will typically just ignore the advertisements. If you spend your advertising funds on trying to attract the second group, then you’re throwing away your money.
The first step towards maximizing your small business advertising efforts is identifying the perfect customer. Whoever most benefits from your product or service is the ideal customer. They’re the ones that you’d most enjoy doing business with, as well as bring in higher profit from. Although most targeted advertising is geared towards a niche, identifying and focusing upon this “ideal customer” can help small businesses put a face on their target audience, which will help determine the best advertising methods to use.
For example, instead of advertising in all the magazines that are available, your ads should go towards specific magazines and be fine-tuned towards your audience in an area that most appeals to them. Use demographics when targeting your audience if you’re using direct mail advertising. Internet marketing can also be fine-tuned to specific audiences by developing different landing pages for different types of audiences.
Targeted marketing can make your small business advertising much more effective. Sure you may once in a while grab someone outside of your target audience every once in a while. But you’ve gotten a bigger chance of grabbing your ideal customer.
Tags: small business advertising, small business internet marketing
