Target Audience

All Good Marketing…

Garth Beyer

is consistent marketing.

Maintaining brand voice, which is hard, is only one piece of marketing. So is keeping up with customer service in terms of response rate.

When you demonstrate you know who your product is for by stating “people like us…,” you lock in consistency. But when you open the door to the masses, your marketing loses consistency and you customer service response rate tumbles and your brand voice is lost.

People respond to consistency. It’s how you build a tribe. It’s why they keep showing up.

 

Stay Positive & There’s No One Path To Remarkability, There’s Only Staying On A Path

Problem With Many Marketers’ Mindsets

Garth Beyer

Marketers Mindset

As marketers, we often have a big ego when it comes to our industry. We see things. We notice trends. We can (or at lest we often always try to) answer why? Why X appeals to target Y. Why a restaurant would have revolving doors. Why a business is using a particular hashtag.

It should go without saying that we often know what’s best. After all, we’ve studied the industry for years, read thousands of articles, talked to hundreds of people to know why things are they way they are. Yet, this mindset gets marketers in trouble over and over again.

We think if a particular ad appeals to us, it will also appeal to our target audience. (We have high standards, you know? So if it works on us, won’t it work on anyone? Heh.) Our mindset can be simplified to we know what’s best for others based on our own reactions of an ad or PR strategy. All the while, we forget that we are not the target market.

The best way to break the mold is to see every opportunity as an opportunity to learn, not to prove or show we’re right. Michael E. Gerber wrote it perfectly,

“Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.”

As long as we retain the mindset of wanting to know more, needing to know, being humble enough to know that we don’t know it all, we can evade the mental trap so many marketers are caught by.

 

Stay Positive & Now You Know

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You Are Not Your Target

Garth Beyer

One of the largest setbacks I’ve seen marketers face is they believe they are their own target market. They treat their audience the way they would want to be treated. But…

The social media sites you use might not be the ones where people want to follow you on.

What makes you laugh and share and give, may not make others do the same.

Marketers have to remove themselves from their target audience. After all, if you’re part of the audience, who will the rest of the followers see as the face behind the product or business? Who will they go after for advice?

Rest assured, you don’t have to be part of the audience to form a bond. In fact, relationships are often stronger between marketer and consumer than consumer and consumer.

Your audience needs a storyteller, not a story-relayer.

 

Stay Positive & Be The Marketer, Not The Marketed-To

Best Time To Promote Your Remarkable Idea

Garth Beyer

Uber found SWSX and gave free rides to all attendees instead of spending the money on advertising in all the hometowns of everyone at the conference. They chose to reach a bounty of their target market instead of using a huge chunk of budget to advertise heavily in each city.

When everyone is under one roof, that’s your opportunity to make an impact.

When and where does your target audience get together?

 

Stay Positive & Why Aren’t You There?

You’re A Marketer Now, Get It Right

You’re A Marketer Now, Get It Right

Garth Beyer

New Age Marketing

Marketers used to rent eye-balls, they used to take out a loan for a potential audience, they would buy media space to shotgun market. That was marketing at its most traditional. That was marketing when the masses mattered, when there were only 3 television networks, when developers hadn’t come up with a way to block pop-up ads yet.

When I write you’re a marketer now, I’m not knighting you a marketer, I’m reminding you that you’re a marketer now, as in, you’re a marketer in the 21st century, as in the post-renting, post-loaning, post-shotgun marketing world of it.

Now as a marketer you own eye-balls, you own an audience and you own media space in a niche location. The success of your marketing is dependent in how you find those looking for you, treat those who already find you, and provide for those who frequently visit your home; be it your blog, your catalogue, your YouTube account or some other space your tribe gathers.

Marketing involves ownership, and ownership is scary. The stakes are much higher for marketers than they were 10 years ago. You can’t blame the mass for not clicking your ads, you can’t blame the lack of newspaper circulation for the decreasing sales numbers, you can’t blame Facebook for preventing your video from going viral. If some effort of yours is unsuccessful, it’s your fault. More ad space, bigger banners, extra magazine inserts won’t help.

Getting marketing right involves taking care of what you own.

For many that starts with understanding that you have ownership of an audience and a space.

 

Stay Positive & Remember My Favorite Aspect Of Marketing: You Get To Choose What You Own

And here is some bill the cat for you.

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Making Marketing Sense Of The Domino Effect

Making Marketing Sense Of The Domino Effect

Garth Beyer

Domino Effect

If you have three lines of dominoes and topple the first domino in each line, it doesn’t make sense to race toward the end of the lines and try to knock dominoes down along the way, right? They will be knocked down anyway.

The cheapo marketer will see those dominoes down the line as a safe target audience and will race to tip a domino further down the line instead of searching for a different line of dominoes. Why?

In the way things trend from friend to friend, it makes sense to go down the line and say “hey, all your friends are doing it! Why not be one of the first too?” Targeting these folk makes the marketer look like what she’s doing is successful. Profits are up, subscriptions are up, sure. But as said, they would have gone up without the effort.

Marketing sense is when you know a business is remarkable enough to have a domino effect. In these cases, the marketer needs to do the difficult task of finding new domino lines instead of targeting one’s already scheduled to tip.

Careful who you trust. All marketers are liars, right?

 

Stay Positive & Know When Your Story Is Remarkable Enough To Market Itself

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It’s Not The Answer You Want

It’s Not The Answer You Want

Garth Beyer

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How do you tell someone who feels like you’ve done them wrong, that you can’t do anything about it? How do you get people to talk about politics when they don’t want to? How do you get a hardcore punk-rocker to buy your classical music? How do you get a math major to write a fiction novel that’s not sci-fi?

The answer is you don’t. Not only do you spend their time and energy on something they don’t care about or are uncomfortable talking about or working on, you also waste your own hour and effort appealing to someone who doesn’t want to hear the message you have to offer.

As much as the world seems like it’s a discourse in manipulation and persuasion, it’s not. The game isn’t the game you think it is. It’s not who can please the most, who can convert the most, who can get the others out of their bubble into their own. The game is finding and connecting those with the same bubble as you; color, shape, goal and all.

Campaigns don’t move forward logically, that’s why so many people are frustrated with politics. Campaigns move forward emotionally, through connections of people who trust one another. The lesson here is not to preach to those who don’t trust you and you don’t earn trust with those who don’t agree with you.

Run social media for business’s who believe in it. Talk politics with those who enjoy talking about politics. Please those willing to be please. Don’t aim for the masses, the market that’s not listening or anyone who you haven’t fist earned the trust of.

 

Stay Positive & Your Message Is Only As Strong As The Peoples’ Trust In Hearing It

(not how convinced you are that you’re right)

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