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Narrowing Your Marketing Focus For Better Marketing ROI
First in a 4 part series on "Getting Creative with your Marketing to Drive Sales"

No Matter How Good Our Products and Services Are
Today We Live and Die By Our Marketing and Sales
 

Today the market for most any product or service is highly competitive. It is very rare to have something so unique that there are no competitors or alternatives for your prospect.  These alternatives place pricing and other pressures on your company.  Remember any alternative (including the customer doing nothing) is effectively a competitive pressure.  The result of this is that over the last few decades companies have needed to focus even more on their marketing and defining their customer segments (niches). By developing a specific customer profile you can greatly improve the efficiency of your marketing spending.  To do so you must not only define and be able to target that customer but also offer something special for that particular customer that others do not.  This narrowing of your market requires discipline and an understanding that this double edged sword can be used to your company's advantage.

Whenever you narrow your market there is a corresponding increase in the marketing and sales efforts per prospect that you can do by concentrating your spending against better customers.  If your budget is $20,000 and you spend this on 50,000 prospects this means a marketing budget of $0.40 per prospect.  However, spending that same budget on 10,000 prospects results in a $2.00 per prospect marketing budget. This can be much more effective for several reasons we will examine.  Firstly, it is normally thought far better to hit a single prospect with your message about five to nine times rather than hit one prospect nine times.   Let's compare two possible marketing campaigns where you can identify a good list of prospects and source both email and snail mail addresses on them.

                                       Two Ways to Spend the Same $20K Marketing Budget

$0.40 per Prospect to 50K	$2.00 per prospect Multi Step Campaign to 10K
Single brochure, Postcard or letter mailer	Higher quality mailer to better list ($0.50)  Repeat with different headline or message ($0.50)     Email 2-4 times  ($0.50)     $0.50 left over for a very targeted periodical ad or other vehicle

                                                           Likely Results                                                           
Small percentage of best prospects buy              Each successive vehicle after first mailer gets better results
Expect 0.1% to 2% max                                    You build brand equity by multiple exposures
                                                                         Total results per $1 of marketing budget much better
                                                                         More clients for references and referrals in a particular vertical

As you can see you not only have a better chance of closing more business per marketing dollar with the scenario above on the right but you are also likely to build your brand awareness and equity too. Look at the advantages of narrowing your target list and this multi-hit approach:

           1)  You narrow your list to higher quality prospects so each is more likely to buy
           2 ) You customize your message to that subset of prospects to be more effective and appear as a specialist
                   (this is often accomplished by picking a vertical market to specialize in so you learn and speak their jargon
           3)  You hit them 5-7 times over many weeks so they perceive you more as a market leader and
                 as a more stable player in this market
           4) Increased frequency means a greater chance that you hit them at least once
               when the need for your product is higher, or at a time when they were not too busy to
               even consider your offer (i.e. circular file just due to a very busy week).

The mix of marketing also makes your company appear bigger, like a market leader and therefore increases your chances of closing any direct sale opportunity because people feel better about working with a well established company. This also helps you to test more marketing vehicles to determine what works best.  It is important to experiment frugally with marketing, measure well and then scale what works.

Look to marketing vehicles that can be used again and again because you can own and develop your in-house prospect list. Renting lists is okay to test but buying them is far better given this need to repeat touches.  Look for ways to "touch" your prospects and existing customers again in a planned rotation or series (seasonal if appropriate).  Newsletters like this one are also great vehicles for this. I hardly ever send out a C-Level Advisor without generating some direct sales of products and/or some coaching-consulting services. Free information by email that shows off your expertise, with opt-in email lists is a core media vehicle for frequency and has little cost no matter how many people you are hitting. Today this should be a core marketing vehicle for most companies.

The moral of the story is that narrowing your prospect base can be very good as long as you are creating a subset with a higher likelihood of needing your product and hitting this small prospect list more with the same budget. 

You can adjust your product or offer to be better for this subset of the market and several ways:
     a) Minor product modifications
     b) Spelling out specific applications and benefits (not features) that do not make sense for all prospects to hear, 
     c) Market positioning to be more appealing to that customer (often just your messaging and jargon for that customer), 
     d) Pricing and bundling differently,
     e) Special offers that make sense for that market like leases, financing, better terms or volume discounts

These minor tweaks for you can be what makes the difference between a sale and no sale for certain customers. People have so many options today they want to buy from a "specialist" in their industry, not just anyone. By narrowing your focus you can counter-intuitively expand your business many fold if you select the right niche, get you messaging and offer right and ban away at that specialty for a good long time while your competitors are trying to "be all things to all people".

Understanding your product value, flexibility, market and being creative will help you decide where to focus for the best results. Step back and get outside advice too as sometimes you need to throw out the rules and lessons of the past which may not apply today due to time, market changes or just plain niche focus. The changes for the customer in that niche alone can create or destroy a market for you and the frequency of these kinds of changes is increasing.

The next in this C-Level Advisor mini-series will discuss:
"Your Brand and Creative Marketing Tactics"