Marketing Strategies: Knowing Your Audience and Diversifying

Marketing Strategies: Knowing Your Audience and Diversifying

It seems like we live in the kind of world where we’re surrounded by marketing strategies on all sides.  When you’re at home, you see advertisements on TV or have direct mail delivered to your mailbox.  If you’re browsing the internet, you see advertisements on the websites you frequent.  You may also have marketing emails delivered to your inbox.  Plus, there’s also inbound marketing, the new internet trend, in which companies don’t actively reach out to you.  Instead, they make it a point to be prepared when you reach out to them by doing an internet search for a particular product or service.  If you run a company, you might be wondering which of these marketing strategies will work best for you.  Here are a few tips:

Know Your Audience

When you’re trying to market a product or a service, it’s really important to know your audience.  For example, let’s say that you’re selling a brand of shoes that appeals largely to hipsters who live in urban areas.  In that case, having an expensive billboard advertisement out in the suburbs may not do you much good because your target audience isn’t going to see it.

So you need to know who you’re trying to appeal to.  What age group do they fall into?  Where do they live?  What do they spend their time doing?  What forms of media are they most likely to be exposed to?  Once you know this, you can start to target your audience with the types of marketing strategies they will be most open to.

Nowadays, most people are online.  They have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and email addresses.  So the internet is likely to be a good medium for most audiences.

Diversify Marketing Techniques

Although it’s a good idea to target your audience based on the types of media they tend to frequent the most, it’s also a good idea to diversify your marketing techniques.  What this means is that you shouldn’t put all your eggs into one basket.  Many women interested in fashion read fashion magazines.  So it’s a good idea to place an ad in a fashion magazine, if you’re in this field.  However, the same women also tend to shop online.  So it would help you to have a website, blog and social media pages as well.  Similarly, people interested in buying real estate might browse the internet for property listings.  At the same time, they might also pick up the local newspaper and look under classifieds.

By diversifying marketing techniques, you’re also likely to reach out to different audiences who might be interested in your product or service.  In his book, The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell gives the example of Hush Puppies, a type of shoe that was initially worn by more conservative, older people but eventually started appealing to hipsters as well.  Sometimes, you may believe that there’s only one type of customer who will appreciate your product but diversifying your marketing techniques can help you to reach out to others who can use it in a different way.

Contact us for more information on marketing your product or service.

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