Can you guess? We touched on it briefly in an earlier post. I’ll give you a hint. It isn’t using valuable website real estate to welcome visitors. Still nothing?
Okay, the suspense in not telling you is simply killing me (bad Halloween pun #1).
The #1 mistake new business owners make is not establishing who they’re marketing to before creating their marketing strategy.
That enthusiasm, the energy that drives them into creating a new business or launching a new product or service, can cause them to vault right over one of the most important factors influencing their marketing.
Simply put, you have to know who you’re marketing to. And as I’ve said before, you might have a secondary or tertiary market. However, your primary marketing efforts need to be targeted towards one buyer persona.
The Bare Bones
I’ll give an example…complete with more eye-rolling Halloween references, of course…
Imagine you opened up a business selling whitening powder. Not for teeth, mind you, but for skeletons to keep their bones sparkling. We’ll call this product Skel-Brite (if this is previously trademarked, I humbly beg the creator to have mercy on my insolence).
So, now you’ve created this product and hit the kneecap on the head by identifying your target market…skeletons.
Not so fast.
Cut the hearse engines because the general pool of skeletons is still too broad.
Identifying Your Target Market
What about those older skeletons who have rested peacefully in the ground for centuries and are attached to the weathered hue of their bones? They aren’t going to be in the market for Skel-Brite.
Okay, so we can eliminate skeletons above a certain age from our target market.
What if some skeletons don’t want to polish up until one of their loved ones comes for an eternal visit? So, now we’ve identified that the target buyer of Skel-Brite needs to have an immediate need for the product.
What about skeletons that are anti-Skel-Brite? They feel that the natural approach to bone aging is the right decision for their entire family. And they might just be talking to the inhabitants of neighboring burial plots, influencing potential buyers not to brighten up.
So, skeletons with certain bone biases are eliminated from the pool.
What about skeletons not of legal age to decide if bone whitening is for them? So, now we have to eliminate skeletons below a certain age too.
Are single skeletons more likely to want to show off bright bones? Probably. So, we can add unmarried skeletons to our target buyer profile.
We can expand from there…
Is one gender of skeleton more likely to buy Skel-Brite?
Are skeletons on the power track to become CBO (Chief Bone Officer) more likely to care about how bright their bones are?
Are metropolitan skeletons living in NYC more likely to purchase Skel-Brite versus skeletons living in the middle of Kansas?
The Final Resting Place
As we go down the grave hole (bad Halloween pun… #13? I’ve lost count.), we can see that the pool of skeletons has gotten shallower. This allows us to hone in on the motivations for our ideal skeleton to buy our product.
We can use those motivations to invoke an emotional response in our content, ads, and direct-responder emails to nudge them toward conversion.
And that’s just good bone sense…
