Who are you marketing to, anyway?

If you don't know who your ideal customers are, what they're like, what they do and where they're likely to be found, you risk wasting a good portion of your marketing efforts. If you don't know who your ideal clients are, how will you be able to go about finding them, let alone persuading them to buy from you?

In the end, it's a simple fact that if you don't know who your potential customers are, you can't market to them. For your marketing to be successful, you need to be able to make an emotional connection with them. Understanding your ideal clients' concerns and desires is an essential key to the success of your business.

A key point here is that marketing to everybody is really marketing to nobody. A mistake many business owners often make is to think that everyone is a potential customer. I repeat, marketing to everybody is marketing to nobody!

The truth is that generalised, untargeted marketing is far less effective than a marketing message that appeals to a specific group of people. And that means wasting a lot of your marketing money, too. A powerful marketing message demonstrates an understanding of your ideal customer's needs and concerns. If you get it right, you can become the only logical buying choice for your target group of customers.

Another plus point is that members of a specific, tightly-knit group tend to communicate with one another, so your company name will tend to spread more quickly. Not only that, but having a specialised, targeted offering can often allow you to charge premium prices.

The end result is that your whole marketing becomes easier, cheaper and more effective when you really home in on your ideal customers. You'll bring in more business, and have fewer competitors in the marketplace. As the saying goes, better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond!

Research has shown that people actually prefer to buy from specialists who understand their specific problems and concerns. When your product or service is made-to-measure for a particular niche, it is much easier for potential customers to say 'yes, that company understands me, that's the product for me'.