Marketing Strategy: How to narrow your target customer and grow faster
Peter Brissette • October 8, 2019
All right, welcome to the Review Me Marketing Monthly Training, Coaching and Q&A Call. We're on call number six today. And real quick I wanted to hit on a little bit of strategy just in terms of marketing in general and then we can answer anybody's questions about this or anything else.
So the one thing I wanted to talk about is how do you actually narrow your market and narrow your target customer. So a lot of times, especially newer businesses, I see this in, they don't have a really good defined target customer or market that they really want to go after. And it really makes it difficult to get all their marketing put together to have their content organized and really to have, what is the problem I solved?
So all that gets into the basics of marketing. Who's my market, what's the problem they have and how do I solve it? And then what is all the information just around that space that does that? We often go way too broad in our marketing. For example, real estate agents. Real estate agent, they want to sell a house or help somebody buy a house. Well lots and lots of people buy and sell houses, right? So they just go after anybody with a pulse. That's just natural starting now because it's a hard market and you've got to try to find a deal. So you're like, I need anybody who even thinks they want to buy a house. That's who I want to talk to. But you can actually narrow that market even and be much more strategic and be able to build referral partners and relationships and connect all your marketing to that.
So one example of that is a local gentleman, and I don't actually know his name, I wish I did, but what he promotes himself as, he's a real estate agent, is he sells garages with attached houses. So what he's done is taken his hobby, which is the love of cars and connected that to be a piece of his marketing strategy and narrow his market. So he goes to car shows. If you go to this website, it has information, you'll see a picture that is a garage with lots of nice cars, Maserati or Ferrari sitting in the garage. Then you can explore the rest of the website to see the rest of the house, that kind of thing. So his business card, it's him sitting in a car, nice car. So that's a way to narrow your market.
So I want to give you seven quick ways to become the best in your world, in your marketplace. And few ways to do that. One I gave you was a hobby, so you can connect your hobby to it. One's location, so you could make it specific to a city, county, a state, whatever it is. A demographic, so this could be an age, this could be an income, it could be several different things that you pick out of a demographic for your market.
Having a much more narrow product. Like you could offer a lot of different services depending on your business, but can you just narrow it down? So you know, maybe you are a financial planner that can do all this financial planning, but you want to focus on just one area. Maybe you want to focus on life insurance. Even though you can do everything else, that becomes your focus and you can always add those other things on.
Another way to do that as a personality. Personality is the dealing Doug's right? The Jake Jabs, that kind of stuff. So if you want to make that, that's a way to become best in your world. Size of client, size of project. Have a handyman friend right now that's wants to really keep things focused in the handyman space and not have big projects come up that take up a lot of time. So it's two hours to two days, that's his max. So that's the size of project that he'll do, won't do something bigger than that.
And then another way is expertise. So expertise can be, you go and you speak on that topic, so you do training on it, you write blog posts, maybe even write a book about that particular thing. And so you become known as the expert in that particular niche, in that particular space.
So those are seven common ways to do it. Another way that you can differentiate yourself in narrowing your target customer is to offer a guarantee. So if what you do is just almost the same as what everybody else does, but if you're able to offer some type of guarantee where your competition doesn't do that, that can help you as well. But the idea is with these different things is to create a much narrower market, a smaller market where you can be the number one in that market and that's what you're trying to do.
So you just cutting out niches within niches and making smaller niches until you can be in that number one spot. Of course, the other things matter, right? Do they have a big enough problem that they're willing to pay money to solve this problem? And is that market big enough to sustain a business and to grow a business that's important to the equation of this, when you're talking about narrowing your market. Because if your market's so narrow and there's only 10 people in the world that would want what I have, that might be too narrow. So somewhere in the middle there is the balance.
So that's our strategy review for this month. Hopefully that was helpful and we look forward to being on the call next month.
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.
The next question is, we have a couple more here. What is your choice for a website hosting platform? So if you're going to host WordPress, my number one choice would be sitegroundsiteground.com That would be my top choice for WordPress hosting that, great support and all that. And again, you can have your. Domain on GoDaddy and it can point to wherever. It can point to Squarespace. It can point to site ground wherever it needs to go. But yeah, for WordPress site ground would be my top choice.
The next question is, can other businesses similar to mine attach to my website and then their ads show up on their Facebook page? No, I don't see how that can happen. Thank you.
The next question that we have is I used to utilize local provider gizmo to be able to personally update my website due to its ease of use. If you knew word you could do gizmo. Do you know of a website editing platform that would be as simple. I don't need an online store so our website just needs to be simple clean design that I can update content. So any of those platforms we talked about we believe with Squarespace can do that. Our platform that I mentioned can do that as well. So that's something that I know someone that was asking about that, I'll just give you my contact info. You guys you know can provide my contact info. If you're interested in looking at that, we can we can talk about that one-on-one Thanks, Peter.
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