A case study on why you should tailor your marketing to your market.
Transcript:
Hi, folks. It’s Karl here from Buzz Website Design in Leicester and in today’s video I want to share something with you which is actually very, very important for almost every single business out there — big, small, tiny, medium-sized, you name it — everybody needs to have a think about this.
To begin with, I’d like to set the stage a little for you in that last Friday I had a chat with a lovely couple who used to work together in an organization. They both got made redundant and now they want to offer what they were doing for this organization out to the business world.
There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a dozen or so things that they can offer — all good stuff. But, they came to me with a view to building a website to promote all of these services and helping them with some marketing ideas as well.
During the discussion, I realized that they’ve actually got quite a broad offering here to quite a broad market. They can sell their services to businesses with just 10 people or business with 10,000 people.
Now, ordinarily, that’s not a problem. You think, “Well, that’s fantastic, their market is huge.” But, the challenge with that is, whilst their market might be huge, their marketing needs to be tailored to their customer type and they hadn’t actually considered the fact that the decision-making process and the wants, desires, and needs of a tiny business of say a dozen people is going to be vastly different to a business with 500 people.
As a result, the marketing messaging, and what you’re putting into the marketing, and how you’re going about doing it needs to be quite different. In other words, just building a cover-all website with a very blanket message is going to be oblique for just about all of the market.
So, I suggested to them that they actually go back to the drawing board, have a think about what they’re offering and to whom, and what the benefits are of what they’re offering to that particular sector of market because, when you’re running a smaller business with a dozen or so people, your challenges are different. They’re often more immediate.
The great thing about running a small business is that your decision-making process is very much shorter. So, if you see something you need and you’re convinced that it’s right for you, you can decide to have it that moment.
The challenges that small businesses face are going to be vastly different to a bigger organization which is more like a tanker. The buying process is much, much longer. The decision-making process is often quite protracted. Making change in the organization takes awhile. It’s a bit like steering a tanker. You turn the wheel and a little while later the whole thing starts to turn.
But, with a small business, it’s a bit like a speedboat. You turn it and roughly it goes pretty much instantly. So, this process is very different. The decision making is very different. The challenges are very different or how to get things done is very different. In a large organization, there will be layers of management. They’ll often have a professional buying group, a procurement office or a buying office. With a small business, you’re often dealing usually with the guys who own the business and, so, you can get things done really quickly. If something needs to change, they can make it happen just like that, a little bit of training of the staff, etc.
So, the point of the whole exercise was this. I had to say to them both, “Look, I don’t really want to build a website for you that I can’t help you with your marketing until you fully understand who you’re selling to, what their challenges are, how you can meet those challenges, and then how we can communicate this to each particular sector of the market.”
If you want to deal with small businesses, it’s great because there’s lots and lots of them and, once you understand what their issues are and how you can address those issues, then marketing actually becomes a lot more straightforward.
The same thing with bigger organizations, once you understand their process, their problems, and trying to find the person you need to speak with to make these decisions, the marketing to them becomes that much more straightforward.
Why You Should Tailor Your Marketing to Your Market.
But, trying to put a blanket, cover-all marketing approach on a blanket, cover-all website approach into effect to tick all of those boxes for all of those organizations is near impossible. I don’t care what anybody says. If you’re trying to sell to small businesses, you need to address small business issues and likewise for big businesses and the big business issues.
So, the point I’m trying to make here is, as I suggested to this couple, take a step back and have a look at what you’re doing. Have a think about who you’re selling to, what their issues are, how you can address those issues, and then how you’re going to get those two communicated between you and them. Every business needs to do this.
If you don’t understand your market, your marketing efforts are going to be less than optimal. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in.
So, I would say, “If you’re unsure about who you’re selling to, if you don’t have a particularly well-defined target market or markets — you can have more than one – then I would say, ‘Go, take a step back, take some time out. Have a think, because you’re not going to be able to sell everything to everybody in the same way.’ It simply doesn’t work that way.”
So, hopefully, that’s been useful. Go out and do it, and bye for now.