Sort of a tribute to Friday the 13th, I’ll release a Mistake a day for 13 days.
Mistake #1: Marketing To The Wrong Audience
If you go wrong here, your entire campaign is doomed. It doesn’t matter how exceptional a product you have, how convincing your copy is, or what incredible price you’re offering.
If you try to sell this amazing widget to the wrong people, I guarantee you that you’ll flop.
On the other hand, if you offer an average product promoted by pedestrian copy and bearing a median price, but offered to precisely the right people, it will always pull in some orders. Not that this is your goal. I’m only mentioning this to show you the difference caused by properly defining your audience.
What can you do to make sure you’ve selected the right market? You have to start by defining precisely who your product appeals to. Your objective is to find the largest possible market who wants and can afford your product.
At the same time, you want to make sure that your focus is tight enough that you aren’t trying to appeal to too broad a range of interests at once. If you do, your marketing can easily become so watered down; it won’t really appeal to anyone. If you’re fortunate enough to have a product that appeals to multiple markets, you’ll need to develop distinct variations of your sales pieces for each specific market.
Here’s how this works. A client recently contacted me to help him determine what was “wrong” with his direct response advertising. His product was a small container of tear gas that could be carried in a purse or glove compartment.
The first question I asked was who he was trying to market to. His answer was female college students who were concerned about the rising crime rate on our nation’s campuses. His initial campaign pulled a dismal response.
What was wrong here? My client had made a fatal error. He had picked a market that had only a minor interest in his product and very little discretionary income.
Think about it. College students have very little money to spend, and what they do have goes toward clothes and entertainment. And despite the rise in crime, college students are at the age when they generally feel invincible. They don’t believe that they will personally be affected by anything negative. You can’t change this. And trying to market against these known facts is suicidal.
A little research would have revealed that my client’s actual market was senior citizens. These folks are truly concerned about their personal safety and would be willing to spend $20 or so to gain some peace of mind. He could then market to senior citizen groups, neighborhood watch program members, and other similar markets.
One more thing, if he did decide to pursue the colleges as a secondary market, a more accurate target audience would be the parents of college students. They are the ones who are truly concerned about the problems on campus. This campaign would make use of much of the same marketing information used to sell to seniors, but it would require focusing on those problems and benefits that distinctly appeal to this very different group.
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