Selling Ice To Eskimos

I saw an advert on TV yesterday promoting an event in Canterbury. All fine and well perhaps, and maybe I could have been interested in attending, but for the fact that I'm several hundred miles away from the venue. Placing this advert in the wrong region was clearly a waste of precious marketing budget.

It may well be that this incident was just a mistake but it does illustrate the fact that it makes sense to target your marketing messages at those who are most likely to buy your products or services. 

Even if you had no worries about your budget or your time, a misplaced marketing campaign can actively have a negative impact. For example, should you be in the frozen products market, and choose to run your "ice on tap" promotion to everyone - including the Eskimos - then they would quite reasonably think that your company was pretty stupid. When you subsequently run your "frozen lime slices for cocktails" promotion to the same territory, the Eskimos would simply brush your offer off as another silly idea from the ice people.

Knowing who you're speaking to means that you can tailor your conversation so it's interesting. Sure, Eskimos can just throw limes in to the snow, but how do they slice them up to fit in to the cocktail glass? Enter your product. But this message wouldn't work for the average desert dweller. You need to know about any groups of potential customers and how you can help each of them.

And taking that a step further, there may be specific triggers - like a time of year - which are likely to cause a potential demand for your products. If sailors were one of your groups of potential clients you may consider that the International Talk Like A Pirate Day (19th September in case you wondered) was a good trigger. You could then develop a campaign around this esteemed event.

So being clear about your "target market" is important. It helps you to save time and money; it helps you to be more specific with your messages; and it helps you to know when to run specific campaigns. It's called "segmentation" in marketing-speak, but don't let that worry you... just do it!