For some marketers, creating content or dreaming up brilliant campaigns isn't the problem with their strategy. No, for some, the problem is much more basic and at the very support system of any marketing venture – identifying and reaching the target audience. At first glance, targeting the right demographic may seem so simple that it doesn't even register as a potential hardship, but too often, a marketing campaign fails to achieve real success not because of the strategy or the lack of a quality product or service, but because the audience message was wrong.
Consider narrowing the target audience
According to an Entrepreneur article that recommends key strategies to identifying a target audience for a residential and commercial cleaning service, the important thing is to consider how to narrow a target audience. The first step might be to consider using geography as a means to do this.
"Let's begin with the idea of "narrowing" your target audience. Theoretically, since your cleaning service is currently both residential and commercial, your target currently includes everyone in your local area. So your first decision is how to limit yourself geographically. I suggest that you focus your energies on only one section of your city and then expand your selected zone as finances, organizational skills and available manpower permit. Choose a specific section of the city and focus your efforts there," wrote Roy Williams, according to the news source.
Williams went on to say that a business could also take into consideration the time and money involved with a campaign and looking to use these to help make a decision on what marketing venues to use to communicate to a target audience. Once the demographic is selected, the right medium is much easier to come by.
Remember to consider primary belief tenets
Once a target audience is selected, it's also important to consider the primary tenets of belief for this group. A marketer must understand the perspective of the potential customer to better create the messages that will speak to this group of people. Developing a marketing campaign becomes a much more straightforward process once this is done because a marketing professional begins to understand how best to communicate to this person. For example, a marketer who is fluent in talking to tech "geek" professionals can not use the same strategy to drive a conversation with 14 year old girls. Those customer demographics have relatively little in common with each other.
Create an image that speaks to the individual
Marketing a product or service is not necessarily just about how great it is, but how the customer can improve more than one area of his or her life with this purchase. The term lifestyle purchases has been used previously as a way to describe how consumers may decisions on what product or service to buy. It's not uncommon for customers to buy something that may not necessarily fit the life they have now, but the life they want to have. Marketers who can create a picture of how a service or product they are marketing can make significant changes to a customer's life will often succeed.
