Here’s a newsflash for businesses trying to gain new customers. From a marketing standpoint, more is not always better. If you’re casting a wide net by marketing to the masses, not only are you wasting your resources.
You’re also diluting the potency of your message for the folks whom you really want to attract. Unless you’re selling a service that’s generic by nature and that every single person needs (like electricity), micro marketing, rather than mass marketing, is the smartest and most effective approach.
Identify Your Niche
Whatever they’re shopping for, consumers have options galore. If you try to be all things to all people, you don’t stand out. If you identify a niche and focus all your efforts on excelling in that arena, you position your business as a go-to source in that specialty.
You also significantly pare down the pool of people you need to market to and greatly enhance your credibility. When you’ve defined your niche market, you can truly understand your target customers and appeal to them. You can pinpoint their preferences, hobbies, habits and even their lingo. In doing so, you can tailor your messages very specifically so they really stand out from other businesses in your category.
Micro Marketing Can Help Improve Your SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of ensuring that people who surf the web for your product or service find your website. Search engines use a complex series of algorithms to determine, for example, which dentist’s websites pop up first when someone searches for “Houston dentist.”
Websites that are hyper-specialized rank higher: a pediatric-only dentist’s website will appear to a search engine more valuable than a general dentist’s website.
There are quite a few free things you can do to improve your SEO and you can read about them here. Basically, focus on creating more high-value content and optimizing it well.
Take Advantage of Technology
A surefire way to be certain your message reaches people most apt to be interested in your goods or services is to identify your target audience and market to them through mobile advertising. Most Americans own a smartphone these days.
Mobile marketing allows you to geo-target your marketing efforts toward these consumers by pinging consumers, so your hyper-relevant message is being seen by people closest to your business. You can further pare down whom you target by combining geo-targeting and behavioral patterns to reach people most inclined to need your product or service.
Facebook ads are a great tool to help you leverage technology to market to more of your target audience.
Summary
As hard as you try, your business will never succeed in being all things to all people – so stop trying to market to everyone under the sun. Start specializing and narrowing down your niche so you can let micro marketing work its magic. With micro marketing, you’ll save time and money while identifying your core customers.
From there, you can always scale up and explore other marketing strategies and channels.
