Who Is Your Target?

By Neil Myers / Oct 04, 2013

Blog-image-Who-is-your-target-Rev-A-2013-06-30Yogi Berra famously said “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” You never knew what Yogi was really talking about, but in this case he may have been talking about choosing your marketing targets carefully. Here are three things I’ve learned over the years about choosing your marketing targets:

  1. Age matters. Currently there are three broad cohorts in our market: Boomers (50 and older), Gen-X (30-49) and Millennials (18 to 29). These three groups are very different in terms of what they read (or don’t read), social media uptake, how they process information and so on. Tactics that work perfectly for a 40 year old will likely fair for a 25 year old.

    Make sure you know to which group your buyer belongs!

  2. Clients often market to themselves. I see this one a lot. Let’s say your marketing team is in their twenties and your buyer is 40-something. You know social networking is important, but should you favor Facebook or IT tech forums?

    Your buyer spends most of his (he is probably male) time on IT forums. Your marketing team has never seen a forum, and spends 3 hours a day on Facebook. You can see the opportunity for disaster!

    Make sure your team gets to know precisely who your buyer is and bases their campaign decisions on his habits, not their own.

  3. Fear and Opportunity are very different things. Large enterprises are mostly driven by fear. They view new things as dangerous. SMBs are mostly driven by opportunity. They view new things as potential pots of gold.

    How you market to each should reflect those different points of view. Message around safety and risk for Enterprise, and performance and innovation for SMB. That is a simplification, of course, but you get the idea.

    Delivering an opportunity-based message (say, innovation) to a risk-based buyer is guaranteed disaster. Ditto for the reverse!

I could go on, but it really just comes down to developing clear, precise personas for your buyer. Once you have those, develop your messaging and choose your campaign tactics accordingly.

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