A market segment defined target wards against ineffective marketing by saving you from wasting your time and money and by enhancing effectiveness of marketing messages.

If you haven’t defined a target market for your business, then that’s the best way to make your marketing more effective.

It seems that in every book or e-book about marketing, marketing experts speak about the importance of choosing and catering to a target market for your business.

A Market Segment Defined Target Wards Against Wasting Marketing Money

If you are marketing to everybody, you are essentially marketing to nobody. That’s why mass marketing is ineffective for all but companies with the deepest pockets.

As a small business owner, with limited marketing resources, you have to get a good return from your marketing resources. If you market without a target market, you’re wasting all marketing resources that don’t cater to people likely to buy your product or service.

For instance if you have a bookkeeping service for small businesses and advertise in your local newspaper, only a small percentage of the people who see the advertisement have businesses, and then only a percentage of business owners will need or want your product or service.

Yet you pay for the complete circulation of the newspaper. If 10,000 people subscribe to the newspaper, but only ten percent of subscribers are business owners, you’re paying to reach 10,000 people, but you’re only reaching 1,000 potential customers.

Furthermore, all business owners won’t need your bookkeeping service. Some will have full time bookkeepers who do their bookkeeping. Some just take receipts to their accountants and let the accountants work from the receipts. Some are small enough that they can do their own bookkeeping.

So it’s likely that only 25 percent of the small business owners subscribing to the newspaper are potential customers. If that’s the case, you’re paying to reach 10,000 people, but only reach 250 potential customers. What a waste of your resources.

A Market Segment Defined Target Wards Against Ineffective Marketing Messages

Once you’ve defined your target market, you can learn much about the people in that market that will make your marketing messages more effective.

You need to know:

• what their characteristics are,
• what they value,
• what they are concerned about,
• what they need and want,
• who influences them, and
• what media they prefer.

Armed with this information, you can create marketing messages that appeal to your target market. But if you create marketing messages without this information, your potential customers will likely just ignore your messages.

So you need this information on your target market, but getting it requires days or weeks of research.

A Market Segment Defined Target Wards Against Wasting Marketing Time

If you’re not a researcher and have no one on your staff who is, doing this research yourself will spend time that will serve you better spent differently. And there is no reason for you to do it yourself.

I’ve done the work for you in profiles. You can access them from the page linked below:

Target Market Profiles

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Against Ineffective Marketing

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 12:15 am and is filed under Market Segments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.