Okay, I’ll be blunt today. Most marketing sucks. One of the biggest reasons why they don’t work is that they don’t focus on anyone and tries to attract everyone. This tie in with what I wrote yesterday about escaping the Google Trap,
To please a gazillion eyeballs, you are, in effect, trying to please everyone. You know what happen if you try to please everyone? You end up pleasing no one.
If you want your business to have the competitive cutting edge, you must never ever try to please everyone and be everything to everybody. I know this goes against the grain with what everyone else is doing for their Internet marketing. After all, if the world is your oyster on the Internet, it makes sense to try and attract as many people as possible. But unfortunately, this will serve to dilute the marketing message of your business. All sorts of people will come and try out your wares on the market—even those who should not be your customers in the first place. Because you can’t please everyone, there will be all kinds of responses, from rabid loyalty to absolute hatred (and whatever in between). These mixed responses will spread through word of mouth and drag down the perceived quality of your products/services.
What you want for your marketing is to focus on those whom you really want to be your customers—ideally, the ones who will turn out to be your True Fans. This will naturally deflect away those whom you prefer not to be your customers. The ones who are left will tend to sing praises of your brand. This in turn will raise its perceived quality.
So, how do you go about doing that?
The first thing you must do is to come up with a profile of your ideal customer. Be as detailed as possible, even going to the extent of going into his/her physical description. A typical profile may look something like this:
David is 28 years old, has blond hair, green eyes, weighs 70 kg and is 1.8 metres tall. He lives inMelbourne,Victoriawith his wife and works in an office all day.
He loves to watch the game with his buddies on weekends and found our website via a referral from a friend at work.
He brought from us because of our large selection of products, has recommended us to at least one friend and was happy with his purchase and would buy from us again.
He also loves video games, playing poker and has a university education.
With that profile in your mind, you will then be able to craft your marketing messages for such an imaginary person. This will give your marketing messages the razor focus. People who fit closer to your ideal profile will be much more likely to be attracted to your brand because they will feel your ‘attention’. Those who are further from your ideal profile will tend to feel ignored and select themselves out of your potential customer base.
What’s left will be the cream of the crop for your business to work on.
