Why You Need to Stop Spending on Generic Marketing

With the possibility of hyper-personalization within digital marketing, where you are able to target your exact target audience by filtering a wide variety of factors such as gender, location, interests, tastes, relationship status and even personality types… any company that is still spending money on generic marketing where they are trying to appeal to a blanket demographic is wasting their money.

Today, we are all bombarded by distracting marketing messages and have become almost overloaded with “marketing noise” to the point most people zone out when they see marketing messages; so the challenge for most business owners, whether they have a niche business such as making aluminium canopy systems or a broader business such as one in the financial or professional services industry, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd and have people take notice of and absorb your message.

The most important predictor to how successful a marketing campaign will be is how relevant the message is to the market, and thanks to tools such as Facebook’s hyper-personalized targeting, this can be reverse engineered so you work out who your most relevant market are and then target these people with total precision.

Precision, however, comes at a cost, and many business owners simply can’t afford to connect with their exact target audience by presenting a message relevant to their specific interests; despite knowing how beneficial and effective this would be in terms of attracting new customers.

The most important thing if you want to stand out from the crowd and connect with your audience is to ensure you are relevant to them, in the sense that you want to position your product, service or company as something that can solve a particular problem your target audience face.

Within this theme of being relevant, it’s a good idea to focus your marketing (and business) efforts on a particular niche and become recognized as the go to expert within this narrow market rather than a generalist within a broader market.

In many ways it’s much more viable to be a small fish in a small pond than it is to compete with bigger fish in a bigger pond – unless you have tons of cash to invest in advertising campaigns.

Of course, at the core of your niche strategy you will need a unique selling proposition that differentiates you from the crowd and draws people in on the basis you have a solution to a problem that’s causing them some level of emotional pain.

Remember, people buy with their hearts not with their heads.  They use their rational mind to justify a purchase but it is their emotional heart that triggers them to take action and buy your product.  For this reason, you want to connect with the audience’s pain and struggle by showing how you can ease this particular strain of emotional pain.

In summary, the most important aspect when it comes to marketing is that you connect with your precise audience and deliver a message that is relevant to them; in the sense that it solves a specific challenge they face, scratches an itch they have, or relieves a pain they are contending with.

There are a number of marketing tactics that can quickly boost sales, but the trick is to stop focusing on the product or service you offer and focus more on scratching a particular itch (i.e. focus on the problem your product solves) and doing this in the most targeted way possible.