What About Me?

October 29th, 2007 | Posted by Paul Miser in Marketing,Paul Miser

The first thing, we as small business owners have to do to grow is to really understand our target market.  I mean REALLY understand our market, not just demographically, geographically, or psychographically, but know who they are, their lifestyle, their likes, dislikes, etc.

Look at your current target customer. What does he/she look like. I am guessing you answered something like

Male
Caucasian
34-45
$45,000-$65,000 Annual Income
Owns a Home
Living in San Diego

If this is similar to your answer, you might be missing on a huge part of your potential client base. The key to effective marketing is to narrow your target as much as you can. The description above is a pretty narrow target, but what if we go narrower.

What if we start to market to individuals? What if we get in touch with our customers and ask them what they like about our service/product? What if instead of marketing to:

Male
Caucasian
34-45
$45,000-$65,000 Annual Income
Owns a Home
Living in San Diego

we market to Bob Reynolds, or Suzie Powers, or Billy Frank. Imagine the power of our brand. Imagine the loyalty and customer service we could provide. Imagine the viral marketing that it would produce.

By simply narrowing down our target to the individual, we can focus on complete customer satisfaction and building a program that would integrate our company into the lifestyle of the customer. If we can understand what our clients are doing at every time during the day, we can better serve them and become their go-to company for our product/service. Instead of providing a choice, we produce a habit. And as we all know, it takes a lot to change a habit.

This is even more important to us as small business owners.  If we lose even one client, we might have to close our doors.  Getting up-close and personal with our customers like this builds brand loyalty and trust like no other form of marketing.  With and handful of loyal customers comes a bigger handful of referrals, and so on.

Bottom line:  Get to know your customers as intimately as possible and your business will grow. 

Paul Miser is the President of Miser Advertising and Marketing, a small business marketing company in Carlsbad, CA.  He can be contacted by emailing pmiser@miserad.com