As a new solo business owner, when creating effective marketing strategies it is vital you ensure your marketing has relevance. This may seem obvious, but trying to be all things to all people is an extremely common mistake.
If your target market is a mother with children between 0 and 2, then talk to mothers of toddlers, find out their challenge and solve it. Then market and advertise in places where mothers with toddlers hang out.
Your product may indeed have relevance across the board but when creating effective marketing strategies you will need to segment your market so that you can tailor your message to that particular market segment.
Take for example a cleaning business, called Clean Co. It would be a valid assumption of Clean Co. marketing department to think that everyone with a pulse is a potential customer for cleaning services. And that is probably true but consider this…
According to Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in his famous book Flow, our senses are constantly being bombarded by information – approximately 2,000,000 bits per second. If you were to be instantaneously aware of this external input all at once you would go insane.
Your nervous system is designed to cut this massive amount of information down into manageable “chunks” of data. Out of the possible 2,000,000 bits of information, you actually process seven “chunks”. That means that we actually receive 0.000067% of all the possible information coming in.
Your job in creating successful marketing strategies is to make sure that you are in that 0.000067%. The only way you will do that is to speak directly to an individual, relay to them, in the first few crucial seconds that you understand and recognise their challenges and you have a solution.
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The way you can talk to individuals is to segment your market. So for Clean Co. for example they might do corporate cleaning and private home cleaning. Within private cleaning there might be further segments such as busy working mums, retired people, single women, single men. If you divide up your market you can start to talk to them specifically:
Busy Working Mum –
“You’ve got to do the grocery shopping, pick up the kids and your mother-in-law is coming for a few days… let us do the housework and lighten your load.”
Single Men –
“If you’re happy being single, don’t call us, but if not, let us clean up your bachelor pad so she doesn’t disappear after the first dinner date!”
Same product, same service – different message! It must be relevant to the reader if it is to get under the radar and register amongst that 0.000067%.
As more and more marketing messages flood our senses we need to focus our marketing strategies on the niche pockets within the broader market in order to even be seen by potential new clients. The closer a potential new client feels your product or service matches their particular unique needs the more likely they are to purchase.
