Before you unfold any
product marketing strategies or campaigns to develop your small or medium business, the first step is to define your target audience. Now, who are your target audience? Ask yourself “Who can I possibly sell my product to?”, and you get your answer. Your target audience constitutes all the people that have the most trivial to the most powerful reason for buying your product. It also includes people that have no reason to buy your product at all – yet those in whom you have created a desire to buy your product! This constitutes your ‘target audience’.
To better understand this concept, let us take an example. Suppose you are running a small cosmetic company with some exclusive and expensive skin creams and lotions you wish to market. All people of the town/city/state constitute your ‘audience’. But your ‘target audience’ constitutes only those people who need your creams and lotions, those that can afford to buy them, and those that desire to buy them!
How do you find them? First, let us analyze the ways in which you can sell your creams and lotions. You could make individuals directly buy them off fancy shop or medical counters; or you could get dermatologists to prescribe your creams and lotions to their exclusive patients; or, lastly, you could get beauticians to recommend your products to their elite clientele (both women and men). So the people that you can target your products are:
· Informed individuals that need your products and can afford them, and those that desire to buy your products
· Exclusive dermatologists
· Beauticians
Now, this narrowed-down audience is your ‘target audience’.
The next problem is how to reach them effectively. You could reach them through local cable TV network or channel, Door-to-Door campaigning, leaflets, local newspapers, or tele-sales campaigning. Suppose you decide on employing a Door-to-Door Marketing Method. You engage the
best sales agents to make market surveys of the creams and lotions being sold in the town. You get hold of lists of affluent and informed people, their addresses and telephone numbers through your sales team, who in turn get them from their retail and druggist friends. You arrange for small, exclusive yet modestly priced compliments/gifts such as monogrammed key-chains, ball-pens, elegant pen-trays, paper-cutters, handbags, or even samples of your creams and lotions to be given while making Door-to-Door visits in order to create desire in those elite and informed set of prospective customers. You announce a great incentive to the
best product sales agent in the campaign. This would boost the adrenaline in every
sales agent. And then you unfold your marketing campaign
.Similarly, you arrange for your sales team to visit the exclusive dermatology clinics and beauty parlors in town in order to indirectly market your creams and lotions through those doctors and beauty parlors.
You have now successfully found the effective way to reach your ‘targeted audience’!
However, all this is merely an example. With the population explosion in recent years, internet, the advent of website development, mobile revolution, increased TV channels and fast-paced hectic living, the marketing scenario has largely shifted to TV and internet marketing rather than conventional Door-to-Door selling.
Cable TV advertising is an affordable and effective way to reach your ‘targeted audiences’ for improving your small/medium sized business. Multiple network channel choices today allow you to easily target a specific audience. Define your ‘targeted audience’. Let’s say they are housewives, who are usually free from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and again from 6.30 p.m. to 9 p.m. identify the ‘niche’ TV program of housewives. It could be a popular regional TV serial. Identify the cable TV network or channel it is aired on. Contact the local cable provider to estimate airtime and TV commercial production costs. Find out the area of coverage of the cable TV network or channel so that you know the range of coverage of your cable advertising on your target market. Buy the appropriate slots of airtime. Select exact days of the week, airtimes, and on what TV channels and programs your commercials run. Now that you know approximately how many thousands of housewives are exposed to your commercial over a week or month, you can easily estimate the returns on your
marketing investment. Budget your TV advertising dollars wisely to reach your targeted audience.
Coming to internet marketing, it is the dominating force in marketing today. Website development is going into microscopic levels to add as many features as possible not only in design and development of websites, but also equal if not greater pains in making websites accessible by search engines that are used by ‘targeted audiences’.
Let’s suppose you are a real estate agent running a small business from South Carolina and want your ‘targeted audience’, who are naturally “buyers”, to visit your website and view the excellent houses, apartments or land you are selling. The onus is on you to help them locate your website. How do you do that? By adding appropriate keywords that your targeted audience will be likely to use in internet searches. If you place the following Keywords to make your website accessible: “real estate agent in South Carolina”, it will be accessed by only 70-100 prospective “buyers” in a month. But when you change the Keywords to: “South Carolina real estate agent”, over 600 prospective “buyers” will visit your website that month!