“Let every dollar spent in advertising your product or service be directed to where the target market is. Some people just advertise everywhere because they have been told advertising is good. You are wasting a lot of money doing this. Fish only where the fishes are.”
– 12 Sales Secrets (Daniel Sarpong Jnr,MBA).
In selling, if you’re trying to talk to everybody, you’re not reaching anybody. In most cases, not everyone is fit to use your service, and not everyone may be interested in your product.
Instead of trying to reach an entire market, a brand may use target marketing to put their energy into connecting with a specific, defined group within that market.
When you target your audience, you save the time and money of advertising to groups that are not likely to be interested in your product.
Knowing who will buy your product or service is a key part of creating a thriving business and that is why businesses need to define with precision, their target audience early on in the business.
What is a target audience?
Let’s pretend you don’t know what a target audience is, or maybe you do. Let’s start from the basics. A target audience is a group of consumers who are likely to be interested in your product or service.
Brands may segment their consumers based on
- Demographic segmentation: gender, education, religion, etc.
- Psychographic segmentation: values, interests, personality, lifestyle
- Geographic areas: neighborhood, area code, region, etc.
Identifying your target audience is important because it can save you time, money, and resources of advertising to the wrong prospects.
How To Get The Attention of Your Audience
Leverage the emotional impact
Emotions affect people’s decisions, motivating them to make a decision based on the emotion your brand has invoked with them. For instance; people want to be happy, if coke sells happiness in a bottle, then they are motivated to buy coke. Giving everyone a dose of happiness. [See chapter 3 of 12 sales secrets].
Target Audience Oriented Content
Service is being offered by you, to people, and not to yourself. The content you create shouldn’t appeal to you but to your audience, it should strike every chord in your audience to want to make a decision to spend their time binge-watching your ads or going through your content, especially in a very distracting world of social media contents. The How? take surveys, ask questions, hosting webinars works well too.
Offer Value
Only the people who bring value to the table are the most remembered and appreciated. Do you understand what impact means to your audience, prospects, clients?
Do you understand that value means different things to different people? What value are you presenting to your audience with regards to the service or product you’re offering? [See Chapter 10, 12 sales Secret]
Don’t Stop Trying
Iterate and reiterate your sales and marketing plans and strategies to stay in the game and maximize return on investment. Everything in this world is dynamic.
There’s no one size fits all path to reach your customers. Invest in the right channels and reiterate as customer concerns change, making sure you’re offering value, as it should be.
In as much as it is very important to fish where the fishes are. You may never know how deep and far away other fishes may be. There may be people who need your services but may not have heard of your existence because you probably didn’t consider them your target or important to reaching out to.
There are no absolutes, in contrast to fishing only where the fishes are, it is okay to take a broad-spectrum approach sometimes. They can be as important as narrowing down to the “fish zone” sometimes. Just do not waste resources doing the wrong things.