Targeting Your Marketing Message and Planning Your Ad Strategy

Getting results from advertising doesn’t mean that your results will always be smooth.  Expect that when you’re advertising, you will always get what you ask for from your marketing message, even if it’s not what you actually thought you were asking for.  If your results from marketing aren’t what you want, you may be left wondering whether the fault lies on your choice of prospects or whether your marketing message is to blame. I would suggest looking at both areas to improve your marketing.

If you have marketing that’s bringing in phone calls and traffic to your business you may think that it’s working great, but think a little deeper on this. Is it really efffective? More specifically, is it bringing you the right type of prospect or are you just doing spray marketing, telling anyone and everyone and hoping someone is your target customer? Real marketing is tailoring your message to your target customer and then sending your message out to those people. It’s a mix of accurate messages and accurate targeting.

For you to ensure that you’re getting the right prospects from your marketing, you have to identify the type of clients you want to work with. For example, in a real estate business, you would want to ask yourself whether you want to work with:

• Buyers or sellers
• Home owners or condo owners.
• Investment buyers
• Sellers having trouble or looking to move up
• First time home buyers

You might want to add more to the list of people you would want to work with as time goes on, but do so slowly and carefully. The reason is that it costs more and more to offer multiple services to people in order to cater to their every need. This is often the kiss of death of businesses that try to be everything to everyone instead of offering a specialized service to a highly targeted type of client. Being specialized also makes it much easier for you to become well-known as an expert in your area of specialization.

Other things to consider is the logistics of that particular area of expertise in terms of location. Do you want to focus your business in one specific area of your city or do want to focus on a huge geographic area? If you do decide to go hyper-local, be prepared to have refers of other service providers in other areas in case prospects ask you to help them but they live/work in another geographic area. This is an excellent use of networking within your area of expertise and seek mutual referral agreements!

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