Marketing is Everywhere, but Narrow is Still Better

Taking a marketing class has one absolutely clear benefit for me: it helps me see the marketing in all aspects of business. One of the things that Netflix is known for is customer service (real live people on the phone!), and I think Staples is pulling out all the stops by preventing customer frustrations after the sale. Target offers umbrella bags, Beyond Wealth Management sponsored area Wild Kingdom events, and the Lime Gazelle underwrites WAMC and has a location at the Mid-Hudson Children's Museum.

Some of these activities are clearly promotional, others are philanthropic, and some are simply good business practices. What they have in common is the ability to make me think about these businesses in a positive way. They encourage me to tell people about my experiences. Marketing aims to leave an indelible impression on people, and different people can be reached in different ways. If you want my money, then you should consider supporting NPR or educational shows like Wild Kingdom - you'll never get my attention by advertising at a Yankees game.

Being more aware of what's influencing my buying decisions makes me appreciate all the more how valuable it is to clearly define one's target market. You have to know who wants your services if you want to get in front of people that are interested and ready to make a decision.

Today's confession? I haven't finished narrowing yet. I know that I make your business make sense to your customers, but I can do better than that.

Marketing Improves with a Tighter Focus

Probably the most challenging - and most important - step towards successfully marketing a business is figuring out the answer out how to respond to those four little words:

Who am I marketing to?

Yes, I know that this question has five words, not four . . . but if you think marketing is a small word, then either you're a native speaker of German (or another language with words as long as javelins), or you meant it metaphorically and have no clue just how big marketing is to your
business.

The four little words I mean are the ones that shore up marketing with the personal responsibility to take action and not just assume that you can do business with anyone that has money.

• Who indeed? It's a narrow, clearly-defined target market that ensures we don't piddle away our time and resources on people that just don't want or need what we're offering. I know that my who is business owners, small business owners even, but I need to fine-tune it more if I want to market meaningfully.
• am is the action word. This means you've got to remember that marketing is a verb and doesn't happen by itself. Of course, running a display ad with my logo and a phone number is about as verb-like as my rock garden is avalanche-like . . . it may be active, but just barely. (I think this is a perfectly legitimate reason to slip my new logo into this post.)
• I is the whole personal responsibility thing. Not only do I have to work on my marketing before it can do me any good, I've got to hold myself accountable for doing so. I don't know if that's tougher for a one-man show or a multinational oligopoly, but if you don't know who is doing what about the marketing, and when they expect to have it done, then it's just never going to happen.
• to brings it right back to the customer, like it should. My training in my rather unsuccessful journey to the world of multilevel marketing taught me that I should be talking to anyone that has a pulse, because the only people that don't use this service are just too stupid to breathe. My marketing coach Randy would definitely have told me that refining my aiming mechanism is worth the effort, because I would have spent less time in unproductive conversations (and no doubt would still be speaking to a few of my former friends and coworkers).

So I'm finding this bit of the marketing journey to be more than a bit challenging, and I'm looking to jump ahead into the fun parts. I won't get away with that, so instead I'm giving some further thought as to the demographics and psychographics of my market - what they look like, and what they want.

Narrowing a market is counterintuitive but logical. If I spend my time learning how to reach a small number of businesses that really need to hire a blogger, I'm going to get a better return because I'm talking to people that already value one of my services. And narrowing isn't irreversible - I can always relax my definition of the client just a bit if I tightened the statistical screws too much, or just add another target market entirely.

Want to know what your clients value? Ask them!

My client interviews have given me some interesting insights into the psychographics of my ideal market, and how closely they fit my business model.

Of course, if I keep writing like that I'm just going to make big problems out of little ones - but I'm getting ahead of myself. The questions that I asked each of my best clients were designed to help me know my ideal market, and the answers I got fell into three general categories:

1. Strengths that my clients value;
2. Value I didn't realize I provide; and
3. Shortcomings that aren't really as bad as I had feared.

For me, the most valuable information fell into the third category. There's no doubt in my mind that my clients were candid with me about where I fall short, and areas that give me the greatest anxiety didn't come up. It doesn't mean that I don't really fall short in those areas, but now I know that they are weaknesses that don't hurt my brand.

I also found out that, even though I'm good at finding the right voice to reach my client's target audience, that occasionally I assume that the target audience is a bit more knowledgeable about the subject than it really is. Using "psychographics" in the opening line of a post targeting novice marketers and small business owners may not draw in the readers I'm looking for.

The creative insights inspired by these interviews have been surprising and exciting. Armed with the knowledge that my descriptive language is powerful and evocative, I've been coming up with ways to tie visuals into how I describe my writing. If a picture is worth a thousand words, doesn't that mean that words are currency? How much is your business worth? Is The Professional Wordsmith worth a thousand pictures? I'm not sure where this will take me, but I'm due to brainstorm about it with a bunch of creative business owners and my Duct Tape Marketing Coach in a couple of days, and I'm really looking forward to it!

Who do my clients think I am, anyway?

My business may be the smallest one that Aim One Marketing has ever worked with, but as Coach Randy told me, I can set some pretty ambitious goals that are still realistic.  For me, I thought quintupling my monthly revenues by the end of the year would be a good start, and Randy agreed that this is entirely achievable for me.

Digging into demographics

I continually spell that word as "demongraphics" as I write, and I note that my browser's spellcheck doesn't have a problem with that version.  This is probably because the devil's in the details.

Once I carefully sifted through my client list and defined it closely, I knew I was going to fall short of my assigned task (compiling data on my ten best clients), because I don't bloody well have ten clients yet!  It looked like that at first, but once I started digging deeper, I realized that not everyone I have done business with quite counts:

• Content sites like Suite101.com and Examiner.com have been a reliable source of revenue for me, but since my writing is self-directed I don't know if I can consider them "clients" in the traditional sense.
• I've also been managing some social networking for AltGlobe.com, but it's an arrangement that doesn't focus on my writing.
• Two clients for whom I have not yet delivered the final product can't really be considered yet.
• Three more of my clients aren't really mine - I did work for them through their marketing firm Kathode Ray Media.

I dutifully pulled together the information I had on what turned out to be my three best clients.  Was this going to be enough?

The interviews

I guess I'll know soon enough if my three clients will give me enough information, because I'm going to have to interview them!  I'll be scheduling time to sit down with each of them, find out why they decided to work with me, what they like, where I fell short, and what they think about writers in general.

It could be fun, it could be scary, but it's sure to wind up making my head explode with the information.  The idea is to discover what my clients value about my services.  The answers may surprise me.  I hope to discover what businesses look for in a writer, and to pick up some interesting psychographics (emotional traits) about my existing clients that may offer me clues as to the sort of person that likes working with me.

Searching for the Ideal Market

The first Duct Tape Marketing class that I took was a little bit of a scramble - the course materials hadn't arrived yet, so we were relying on Randy to guide us entirely from his knowledge and experience.  Coach Aimone did not fail in that regard; he was more than prepared to start our journey without pesky books!

What is marketing?

We talked a bit about the nature of marketing itself.  There are plenty of definitions for the word, and as an adjunct professor at Marist College, Randy teaches his economics students all of that gobbledegook.  However, the economist and the business owner have different priorities, and a definition that is entirely intellectual or academic isn't all that helpful for someone trying to make a business profitable.

So what is marketing?  It's how you get people to know, like, trust, and even love you, says Randy.  It's getting your business in the minds of the right people, so that they turn to you first when they need the type of problem solved that you're good at.

Lacking focus

Businesses with ineffective marketing lack focus in two ways:  they don't know what their ideal client looks like, and they don't know what kinds of messages will make that ideal client stand up and take notice.  Randy sent us home with some marching orders:  sift through our client list, pick out our top ten customers, and pull together demographic information about those people or companies.  In addition, we were going to have to set 1-3 business goals according to the SMART principles.

Of course, I knew what my first goal had to be - I needed to get ten clients so I could do my assignment!

My Story: Big Ideas, Little Plans

I've read plenty of business books over the years, I've helped clients write business plans, and I've done enough blogging for businesses that I have picked up some essential marketing tidbits.  However, when I found myself forging ahead with my writing career and leaving the security of employment behind, I knew that I was going to have to get serious about marketing in order to make The Professional Wordsmith a successful venture.

This blog is about my journey from a simple business writer to a business owner with a comprehensive marketing plan - at least, that's what I hope.  Just over two weeks ago I started taking a marketing class with Randy Aimone of Aim One Marketing.  I agreed to honestly document what I learn and how I apply it to my business.

State of the Business

To establish some kind of a baseline, let me document the types of marketing efforts I had been using up until I started working with Randy:

• Professional blog
• Facebook page
• Other social networking, including Twitter, StumbleUpon, Squidoo, and LinkedIn
• Referral marketing

I pretty much started my writing business on a shoestring, which is why I haven't invested tons of money in advertising.