target group Archives

Sometimes You Should Fire Your Customers!

It is important to find your ideal target group, the people you should be selling to. A way to do this is to find your dream customer, those you absolutely love to work with and for. But have you ever thought about this?: It is equally important to know who you don’t want to work with. As much as you should work on your marketing to attract the customers you want, you may also need to fire some of your existing customers!

Bear with me. Some people may think I’m crazy, but the thing is, a customer is not the same as a customer. Not all business is good business.

As a rule of thumb, you should fire about 20% of your customer base. Hear me out on this one. [Read more…]

Who Are They? Define Your Target Groups On More Than Just Dry Statistics!

In previous posts I’ve discussed why you can’t sell to absolutely everyone and how you need to find your dream customer, the best target group or groups to focus on. But how do we define those target groups?

The classic way is to define them by demographical and geographical things like age, gender, income brackets, education level etc. In some cases, this is very relevant. In others, it doesn’t matter whatsoever! Whether demographics or location is relevant in your case or not, you are always going to have to drill down and find out more. You have to get to know these people like your best friends. Understand them, what matters to them, what makes them tick, [Read more…]

Your Dream Customer – How To Find Your Ideal Target Group

We may know that it’s not the most effective way to market to just try to reach everyone. The problem is, we just don’t know who are the right people for us to market to. How on earth do you figure out the best target group or groups for your business? Well, worry no more, because I am coming to your rescue ;)

The biggest clue to your ideal target group are your existing customers. [Read more…]

Owning or Renting Your Marketing

Those that have been following me for a while might accuse me of being anti-advertising. So I want to address that today.

I am not against advertising, per se. However, I want to make sure that businesses are always using the marketing activities most suited to themselves, their market and their brand, and activities that give them the best return on investment (hmmmm very much a business phrase! :) – and activities that can be measured to show that they are really delivering results and that all important ROI.

Unfortunately, many of us just throw adverts out there and don’t think enough about what we want them to do, or make sure that they are doing what we want them to do. The fact is that people need to see you (your business, product, service) quite a lot of times before they are ready to buy, and for most small businesses, getting that exposure entirely through advertising is simply too expensive. I have spoken extensively about how often people need to see you in videos. If you plan to drive your marketing mainly through advertising, you have to advertise a lot and that can get very expensive.

Another thing that non-specialists in marketing have a tendency to do with their advertising is to try to say a million things at once. The fact is that it is hard enough to get people to take note of one message in your advert and as soon as you try to get more across everything becomes muddled and the ad loses its effectiveness.

Advertising can however be a great marketing tool if used correctly. What do you need to do for that? Here are five things you need to remember when you use advertising in your marketing: [Read more…]

Should you still be marketing on Facebook?

Are you marketing on Facebook?

If you are, you have probably noticed that your Facebook posts are not reaching as many people as they used to – or what? Many people have been noticing this for a while now, and it isn’t just that people have been using Facebook less over the holidays or something like that and therefore not seeing what you are posting.

Facebook have simply come out and said that businesses can no longer rely on getting free exposure through their Facebook pages, and they recommend that businesses buy advertising. This shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone. A: They are a business and their revenues come from advertising. B: There is a gargantuan amount of posts swirling around on Facebook everyday and they must somehow filter what people see so that people are seeing what they are interested in. If people started seeing everything, they would quickly leave (and that would in turn render Facebook useless as a marketing tool). People don’t see everything that those they are connected to on Facebook post – they filter it and choose the best stuff for you.

You can see a few more articles about these Facebook changes and their effects below, if you want to delve deeper. [Read more…]