Segmentation of your target audience and getting the message right for that sector

I meet a lot of SME’s and small business owners in my roll as partner of a creative agency and it still surprises me to this day how many of them still use the scatter-gun marketing approach. A strategy of firing out marketing materials until something sticks in today’s market can be very expensive and very unreliable.

This is the wrong way to attract clients and customers, although there maybe the odd one that works but at what expense? Spending time segmenting your target audience and educating yourself in what the trigger point of that segment maybe is vital in the success of your marketing campaign, it will also be so much easier to track and calculate ROI. The question you should be asking yourself is what makes them tick?

Example – if you want to sell a construction product such as bricks to the market place and the target audience is made up of architects, main contractors and small building firms, the messages and tone of voice and even the images used will all be very different and how you get the message across to them will differ too – architects will be interested in specification, sustainability and aesthetics, main contractors will be interested in products that are simple to use and if their staff are trained to use it and small building firms will be cost sensitive whether the product is available locally.

Of course all businesses have different messages and even if you’re in a market place where it’s purely down to price, your USP (unique selling point) can be your differentiator to stand out.