Shotgun vs. Niche Marketing
Legacy Adbongo Blog 2011.
Let’s pretend you are planning for your upcoming wedding. If you wanted to send an invitation to your Auntie Anne for your wedding you would have two options for delivery:
- Look up her address after verifying that she is interested in attending your wedding, then send her a self-addressed stamped envelope with an invitation to her.
OR
THE SHOTGUN APPROACH:
- Bust open your bank account for $10,000 and print out 10,000 copies of the same invitation, hire a pilot to fly over the city your aunt lives in and drop invitations all over the city in hopes that she will get at least one of the invitation.
Which option would you choose?
NICHE MARKETING asks that a company tightly define the customers they are trying to reach so that marketing and advertising efforts can be designed and placed with a strategy that reaches those specific customers. For example, if you produce a Star Wars board game, you will have a much higher rate of response by placing an ad in a Star Wars magazine rather than in a general board game magazine. Because you have success with this product, you decide to produce variations of this game on the same Star Wars theme. Your website will be optimized for Star Wars fans instead of just board game fans. You do not become lost in the giant sea of board game producers; instead, Star Wars fans seek you out. Fans of Star Wars board games can be described as your niche or your target market.
Here is a brief article from Entrepreneur.com defining “target market:”
TARGET MARKET
Definition: A specific group of consumers at which a company aims its products and services
Your target customers are those who are most likely to buy from you. Resist the temptation to be too general in the hopes of getting a larger slice of the market. That’s like firing 10 bullets in random directions instead of aiming just one dead center of the mark—expensive and dangerous.
Try to describe them with as much detail as you can, based on your knowledge of your product or service. Rope family and friends into visualization exercises (“Describe the typical person who’ll hire me to paint the kitchen floor to look like marble…”) to get different perspectives-the more, the better.
Here are some questions to get you started:
• Are your target customers male or female?
•How old are they?
•Where do they live? Is geography a limiting factor for any reason?
• What do they do for a living?
• How much money do they make? This is most significant if you’re selling relatively expensive or luxury items. Most people can afford a carob bar. You can’t say the same of custom murals.
• What other aspects of their lives matter? If you’re launching a roof-tiling service, your target customers probably own their homes.
! Once upon a time, business owners thought it was enough to market their products or services to “18- to 49-year olds.”
Those days are a thing of the past. Because the consumer marketplace has become so differentiated, it’s a misconception to talk about the marketplace in any kind of general way anymore. Now, you have to decide whether to market to socioeconomic status or to gender or to region or to lifestyle or to technological sophistication. There’s no end to the number of different ways you can slice the pie.
Further complicating matters, age no longer means what it used to. Fifty-year-old baby boomers prefer rock ‘n’ roll to Geritol; 30-year-olds may still be living with their parents. People now repeat stages and recycle their lives. You can have two men who are 64 years old, and one is retired and driving around in a Winnebago, and the other is just remarried with a toddler in his house.
Generational marketing, which defines consumers not just by age, but also by social, economic, demographic and psychological factors, has been used since the early 80s to give a more accurate picture of the target consumer.
A newer twist is cohort marketing, which studies groups of people who underwent the same experiences during their formative years. This leads them to form a bond and behave differently from people in different cohorts, even when they’re similar in age. For instance, people who were young adults in the 50s behave differently from people who came of age during the tumultuous 60s, even though they’re close in age.
To get an even narrower reading, some entrepreneurs combine cohort or generational marketing with life stages, or what people are doing at a certain time in life (getting married, having children, retiring) and physiographics, or physical conditions related to age (nearsightedness, arthritis, menopause).
Today’s consumers are more marketing-savvy than ever before and don’t like to be “lumped” with others—so be sure you understand your target market. While pinpointing your market so narrowly takes a little extra effort, entrepreneurs who aim at a small target are far more likely to make a direct hit.
source:
(http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/term/82498.html)
PERMISSION VS. INTERRUPTION MARKETING from “The Dominant Approach Internet Marketing” site:
Many times when I sit with clients, different forms of old interruption marketing come up as possibilities for how they should spent their marketing dollars. They don’t call it “interruption marketing” they call it television, or radio, or something similar to that. When I bring up the concept of interruption marketing or permission marketing most times it need further explanation, so I’d like to do so right here for ya.
Interruption marketing is based off of interrupting potential customers into listening to a companies marketing messages. If you are sitting and watching television, you don’t sit there to see the commercials. These commercials are interrupting your television experience, and trying to get you to pay attention, but you aren’t interested in shopping for a car right now, or looking for a personal injury lawyer. They hope that SOMEONE is listening and might need what they are offering, but the conversion rates for this are despicable, usually way less than 1% conversion rates. This is the old way of marketing, and is a shot gun blast of your dollars just being sprayed among an audience of hundreds of thousands.
There is a place for interruption marketing however, and sometimes it is just necessary.
With this type of marketing you don’t do it just for the sake of a high conversion rate, a lot of times if the campaigns are continually ran over a period of time it will help your company brand itself. The more times that people see your marketing messages on television, the more you will be recognized, and the higher the chance is that later on when they actually do need those services, they will think of you.
People see over 10,000 marketing messages per day. Our subconscious mind has learned to block them out. We don’t even see most of them anymore, its just like breathing. We have been exposed to continuous marketing that we never asked for, and don’t want to see, and out human anatomy is helping us to stop seeing them. Is this the type of marketing that you want to do? And then there was permission marketing…
Permission marketing is marketing that is being actively asked for at the exact moment, and delivered to the customer at that exact moment. As opposed to shotgun blast TV or Radio commercials, permission marketing is only delivered to those people that are actively asking for it RIGHT THAT SECOND. Do you think the conversion rates are higher than the others? Exponentially higher!
It works like this. You go to google, and you type in “House Painter Alexandria VA”. You are now giving any house painter in alexandria va the PERMISSION to market to you. You WANT to see different painters in alexandria va. You are going to purchase, and you want it now. This is a whole new ball game, giving small businesses the ability to market their business ONLY to those that are actively looking for them. No waste. Permission marketing is much more accepted by the customer, and they are actually HAPPY to see your advertisements and marketing. They want to know about you, and what you can do for them, and they have their credit card in their hand ready to go!
If you’d like to know more about Permission marketing and how you can use it for your business, product, or service, just leave a comment below. We love to educate, and we love the opportunity to share out knowledge with small businesses and marketing managers to help them to grow.
source:
http://www.thedominantapproach.com/tag/shot-gun-blast/