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.