One of the biggest mistakes marketing and sale professionals make is when they try to take their messaging too far – to try and make it do more than it can or ever will. It doesn’t mean that it’s weak, which it well could be, but it may be falling short for a different reason.
It might be trying to do too much with too little.
The way most businesses promote and attempt to acquire customers is by targeting their ideal market. This makes sense to a degree, until you realize it’s not enough.
We’ve all heard of segmentation, but few of us actually use it or apply the concept effectively. As a result, you end up generating a lot of effort for not a lot of results. It’s not very difficult to do marketing and sales that fill your pipeline with prospects that might buy “someday”.
Now many will say that even still, getting these super early prospects into the pipeline is better than not at all. So let’s ignore for a moment how that might actually be a useful approach if you followed up more consistently and turned more of those prospects into sales on a regular basis. We both know that doesn’t happen as often as it could or should.
Instead, let’s stay on topic and look at why trying to wrangle your market “as a whole” wastes a lot to get a little.
What you know, but don’t use to your advantage, is that there are different levels of awareness in your marketplace. Some people you approach know your company specifically. Some might not know your company, but know a lot about the types of products or services you offer.
Some people know a little, but they aren’t at an expert level. Maybe they’ve tried something like what you offer in the past and got their feet wet, or they’ve been researching a purchase.
Others may not even realize the solutions you offer are available. It depends on your industry. Maybe they are trudging along using outdated tech or approaches that are so deeply entrenched in their systems and processes, they can’t get their head above water long enough to see what might be a better approach.
NOTE: This is very much like what we deal with here at Integrated Search Marketing all the time. People don’t realize that marketing and sales lead gen has evolved from cold calls, lead magnets, landing pages and other less effective approaches than what we provide.
The list goes on, but in general you can categorize the main groups of awareness in your market. Here’s where you need to segment most effectively and craft your messaging to the awareness and intelligence level of those you are trying to connect with.
For some you’ll want to get them more info that moves them toward a higher level of awareness and understanding.
For others you’ll want to dig into the nitty gritty (yeah, when was the last time you got to throw down “nitty gritty” in a sentence?). But that’s how it works – it’s all about the communication that positions your solution more accurately, effectively and impactfully with the awareness level of any given prospect group.
As part of our services we help clients with a simple “segmentation injection” that is easy to start seeing results from quickly. This not only makes your marketing and sales more effective right away, it also improves the accuracy of your KPIs, analytics and projections. Oh, and did we mention how it improves the quality of your customers, too?
As always, our goal is to get you more of your best customers faster and more often – instead of or in addition to however you do it now.