Marketing targeting: how to pick an audience that won’t waste your money

There’s an old saying that goes something like this: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.” Meaning that, while it can be fun to get in the car and go on an adventure, directionless wandering doesn’t work well if you’re trying to meet a group of friends at a new restaurant for dinner reservations which are set for a specific date and time.

Instead, it’s a better idea to plug the address into Google Maps or Waze and evaluate a number of possible routes, taking into account traffic information, construction, toll roads, accidents, and a variety of other factors to make the most efficient choice to get you to dinner, on time, and with the least amount of hassle.

Most importantly, you’d do all those things BEFORE getting underway.

Since this is a marketing blog, it won’t surprise you when I say that requires the same type of route planning… and in this case, we mean audience development.

Sure, sometimes it’s tempting to launch a campaign across a wide variety of media channels and with no specific targeting, and just see what happens. But, unless you’re really sure that you’ve got an irresistible offer, such free-spirit marketing is a pretty dumb idea, especially for smaller marketing budgets.

What to do instead: marketing audience development for small businesses

The smarter choice is to stop and think about your customers. And no, that can’t be everyone; as I heard it put the other day, “if you don’t define who you’re talking to, you aren’t talking to anybody”. If you can’t target your ads and customize your messaging to appeal directly to your ideal customer, you won’t appeal enough to anyone to make a difference.

So let’s look at it this way: while we know you’ll accept a sale from nearly anyone, who is actually most likely to buy your product or service? What do they “look” like? Are they young/old/middle-aged, male/female, rich/poor, college-educated, or dropouts? And what sort of media do they consume?

All these sorts of questions will help you make good decisions about your target marketing audience, and the time you spend up-front answering them will reap rewards in terms of increased revenue and profitability.

Our favorite way to do this is to think about your best customers: what are your easiest sales like? Who buys with the least fuss? Who makes you the most profit? And what do all those people have in common? Those commonalities make up your target customer.

Let’s break down a few of the common things you’ll want to think about when building a target audience for your marketing.

Gender: Generally speaking, are your customers men, women, (or does it matter?) If you’re selling women’s shoes, the majority of your customers are likely to be women or to identify as women, and so targeting men will likely be ineffective. (Note: there are usually exceptions to every rule; you MAY actually want to target men in specific situations, such as a campaign aimed at male customers during the holiday season, extolling the virtues of your shoes as holiday gifts)
Age: What are the general age ranges of your customers? In some cases, this may be less important (everyone needs food, regardless of age, for instance), but in some cases, it’s absolutely critical to target age-appropriately. For example, if you’re selling million-dollar vacation homes, you probably don’t want to target anyone under the age of 18 (unless they also pop stars).
Geographic area: If you only offer services in a certain set of zip codes, or if you have a physical storefront, you’ll want to make sure you don’t waste money targeting customers outside your physical trade area. Running Google Ads campaigns in France isn’t going to help drive customer traffic into your store located in Renton, Washington. (Of course, if you’re selling online, that’s a different story. But in that example, are you willing and able to ship from Renton to Paris? And if so, have you accounted for the incremental cost. currency exchange, and time involved?)
Interests: This is particularly important for paid social media targeting. What interests do your customers have in common? Obviously, they should have some interest in your product, but is there something else they may all think about that could help you target them? If you’re a kids’ dentist, your target audience probably all has parenting and child-rearing interests in common, as well.
Keywords: This is primarily a paid search marketing concern, but it bears some thought. Are you targeting the right keywords that your ideal customers would use (and excluding the wrong ones) effectively? If you’re running an adoption agency for dogs, you’ll likely want to put some negative keywords in place to exclude people looking for cats, or turtles, or zebras… (true story – we’ve seen some truly odd things pop up in search results reports for our clients). Even if you’re not doing search marketing, paying attention to your keywords is an important part of keeping up on your SEO (for more on Search Marketing and SEO, read this blog).
Media: Is your message going out on a channel that your target customers are likely to consume? Pinterest, for example, is an amazing way to reach suburban moms. But it’s probably not the first place someone looking to buy a used Maserati is going to turn. That said, there are likely some great Facebook Maserati groups where Maserati aficionados hang out—and that might be a great place to post your ad for your used Ghibli S Q4.

Remember, of course, that you may have different target customers for different ad campaigns. Say you’re a potter, and you want to promote a pottery class that you are teaching. That’s a different audience than you would normally use to sell your finished pieces, right? One would be people who may be interested in learning about how to make their own pottery; based on your experience that may be women between 30 and 45, who are interested in crafts, and like to get out of the house one night a week for a class with their friends (note: Pinterest could be a really good place to promote this!). But if you’re trying to sell your pottery directly, your audience may be, based on your sales history, both men and women, aged 45 to 65, who are interested in home decor, locally-made products, the arts, and farmer’s markets, and have a higher-than-average household income. Other channels may be a better way to reach them.

The elements above are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to selecting your target audience, but they form the beginnings of a good foundation. The more time (within reason, of course) you spend getting your target right upfront, the more success your campaigns will have—and the less money you’ll waste.

That said, we’d also counsel you to avoid analysis paralysis; when you reach a point where you feel like you’ve got the target about 80% “right”, launch your campaign! You can always monitor results and adjust going forward. Most small businesses can’t afford a formal market research study, so testing as you go is a great way to hone and perfect your ideal marketing audience.

And that sounds like a great topic for a future Guidepost, so we’ll stop here….

Happy small business marketing,

Theron and Katie

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small businesses and startups, including content marketing. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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Marketing doesn’t work! Or so we’ve heard.

One of the more common things we hear when talking to business owners is, “I’ve tried marketing before and it just doesn’t work.” Other variations are, “I’ve done Facebook marketing before and it didn’t work”, “I’ve tried search marketing and it didn’t work”, “I’ve tried email marketing and it didn’t work”… you get the idea.

And indeed, marketing ISN’T a magic cure-all that will instantly turn your business around, and so some of these comments definitely have a kernel of truth in them. Everything about running your own business takes work, and marketing is no exception.

How to tell if marketing really isn’t working for your business, and why.

But let’s break this down a little bit and tackle some of the most common reasons “marketing doesn’t work”.

How do you know it’s NOT working? You’d be surprised how many times people tell us that marketing isn’t doing anything for them, but can’t give us specific, quantifiable data to back up their claims. They just have a vague sense of unease that they’re spending money and not getting a return on their investment. An old boss used to really irritate me with the saying “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”… but it’s very true. Ask yourself: “do I have specific tools and reporting I’m using on a regular basis to keep track of my results?”
On that note, do you have specific goals you’re looking to achieve through marketing? You’d also be surprised how many times people launch marketing initiatives with no clue as to what they expect. They’re just hoping that their business “gets better”, whatever that means. Another boss saying applies here: “if you don’t know where you’re going, you probably won’t get there.”
Are you using the right tool for the job? All marketing vehicles are not created equal. If you’re expecting to drive a bunch of online sales through a newspaper ad, you’re probably not going to succeed. If you’re running a Google Ads campaign to build your brand, for instance, you MAY succeed, but it’ll take a long time to get where you’re trying to go. Make sure you’re using the right tactics to achieve your goals. And make sure your personal bias doesn’t get in the way of making good decisions with your tactics: if you love Facebook, that’s great… but it may not be the best vehicle to achieve every goal. If I were to wedge another boss saying in here, it would be “If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Everything is not, in fact, a nail. There are rivets, screws, bolts, and a whole host of other fastening options out there. And they all do something different. The same concept applies to your marketing tools. Also, remember that the problem may not lie in the tool, but in what the tool links to. No digital marketing campaign that links directly to your website is going to work if your website isn’t effective enough to capture and convert that traffic. We often see people saying some digital campaign “didn’t work” when no effort was made to create an effective landing page, or even update their website to reflect the messaging in the ad.
This brings us to the kicker: was your marketing done well? I hate to bring this up, but marketing is both an art and science, and it takes knowledge and experience to do well. We believe passionately that (almost) everyone can put together great marketing programs, but that doesn’t mean they can do it on the first try and without guidance. A poorly thought out, poorly executed, and poorly messaged ad usually won’t work. Especially if it sends people to a poorly thought-out, poorly executed, and poorly messaged website.

What to do of it: how to fix your marketing

OK, so now that we’ve identified a few of the issues we all face with marketing effectiveness, let’s take a look at some solutions/tips:

Marketing measurement: There are a ton of great, free tools out there. Google Analytics is absolutely free and will tell you more than you can possibly imagine about how your website is performing, what your best customers look like, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. Google Ads is chock full of data regarding your paid search campaigns. Facebook has an amazing dashboard that’s easy to use and extremely helpful when looking at your social media campaigns. I could go on and on, but the fact is that you really don’t need to spend a dime to get 85% of the data you could ever possibly need to run your business. Not running digital advertising? Stick a coupon in your newspaper ad and track them manually as they come in to your store. Old-school works here too!
Marketing Goals: This doesn’t have to be tough to figure out. What do you need to make your business successful? More visits to your website? OK, now that you’ve got Google Analytics installed, since it’s FREE and it makes no sense not to have it, take a look at what your average traffic has been over the past few months. Set yourself a goal based on that. It doesn’t have to be super-scientific, just pick a number and then track it over time to see how you’re doing. You’ll get better over time at setting goals and figuring out what makes sense and is achievable for your business. Don’t sweat it too much upfront, just get started.
Marketing Tools: This is one where you may want to get some outside help to figure out exactly how to achieve your shiny new goals. A few basic guidelines are as follows: Google Ads is a good way to drive traffic to your website from specific keywords/searches that are important to your business. Facebook pages (and other social media) are a good way to build awareness and engage with your customers with content, and Facebook ads are a good way to drive traffic to your website. Blogs are a good way to build awareness, position yourself as a subject matter expert, and help improve your website’s organic search rankings (SEO). This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible marketing tools and their best uses, but you get the idea.
Marketing Execution: This is another place where outside help can be really important. Find someone with a lot of marketing experience to run your work by. Don’t rely on friends and family unless you have a marketing director among that group. Friends ‘n family is often just a focus group of a few, and they rarely bring you much insight. If an adviser isn’t available to you, do your research online: read articles on how to build a great ad, now to message things correctly, on how to build good landing pages, etc. Then TEST. If you are strict about testing things, you’ll start to build your own experience on what does, and does not work.

Seriously, sometimes the best way to figure out if your marketing is actually doing anything for you is to have an impartial third party take a look at what you’ve done. We’re always happy to do a quick audit for you- just let us know if we can help!

Happy small business marketing,

Theron & Katie

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What new year’s resolutions and marketing shouldn’t have in common.

The weekend after Thanksgiving I went for my normal morning run in the woods near my house. From my perspective, just another run on just another morning. But, unlike most mornings, the woods were full of runners that didn’t run there much. Or, like, ever.

First, good for them. Running is an awesome sport! Second, we all know why they were there: it was the annual post-Thanksgiving feast guilt run. This is not unlike the post-new-year’s-resolution hit-the-gym-fest in January. You know; people make a resolution to take better care of themselves so the gyms are all super full… for about a month.

As I was running that day, it hit me how similar this behavior is to how a lot of small businesses think about their marketing; instead of buckling down to year-round steady marketing discipline, they do a few spectacular bursts of marketing and hope it works for them. And when it doesn’t, they assume that marketing doesn’t work for their business. Which, forgive my French, is bull-poop.

The reality is that, just as running a half-marathon in the early part of the year won’t actually get you in shape, running one big splash of an ad once won’t do all that much for your business. Marketing, like exercising your muscles, needs consistency.

Most of us realize that getting in really good shape takes work. Whether your goal is simply being in better shape or losing weight, you need to set a rhythm of working out and stick with it to see results. You know that if you skip too many workouts you simply won’t see the results you want. Right?

Marketing—especially when budgets are small, as they are for many small to medium businesses—is no different.

Marketing results come when you set a cadence and keep putting your product or service out in front of your target market. Consistently, week after week, putting in the work. This means you shouldn’t try something once and immediately change it up (unless the results are spectacularly and very clearly bad) or put all your money into one marketing effort. Consistency is key.

Why? For a few reasons:

People rarely respond to an add the first time they see it. They need to see it again and again before it filters through the noise into their consciousness.
If you one-and-done your marketing effort, you’re giving yourself no chance to test different offers and messaging. Are you that confident that you can nail it the first (and only) time?
Unless your one big splash hits all your possible customers (unlikely), you’ll need to run different campaigns on different channels to reach a broader audience. No one channel has everybody.

But here’s the good news. Studies have shown that you don’t need to do hard exercise to get in shape. Actually, just walking every day has powerful health benefits, including lowering blood pressure, weight loss, and, oh yeah, reducing your risk of death.

The same holds true with marketing. You don’t have to go big or go home. Just doing a little bit consistently over time, whether it’s a small promoted blog post every week, or devoting a bit of budget to Facebook ads, will give you big marketing benefits. It just takes a little hard work… and discipline.

Now I’m going to stop writing and do some crunches or something…

Just let us know if you need someone to motivate you come, say, February.

Happy holidays from your personal marketing trainers,

Katie & Theron

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small to mid-sized businesses and startups. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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Yikes! My mind is blank, and my marketing deadline is looming… what now?

Let’s face it; no one is on top of the game all the time. Sometimes it’s a daunting task even just trying to figure out where to start at all, from figuring out what’s for dinner all the way up to pulling off a critical presentation. But no pressure, right?

Marketing is no exception. From time to time, even experienced marketers have situations where they’re facing a rapidly approaching deadline, and just have to get that next campaign (or blog post… ahem) out. No exceptions. No extensions. It’s just gotta be done. But our minds are… blank.

Beating mental gridlock to write great content

Especially for those of us producing content for a content marketing program, the question comes up again and again: how do we get out of what I like to call mental gridlock?

I’ve found several tricks over the years that never fail to get me started:

Just start writing something. It doesn’t have to be remotely close to on-topic, sometimes the act of simply beginning the creation process is enough to jump-start things. Even if you don’t end up using it, hold on to the stuff you write in a folder somewhere. In the future, the not-so-relevant stuff may be exactly what you’re looking for.
Find something you can re-use. I could probably create a whole post (or series of posts) on this topic, but sometimes the simplest thing to do is to resort to the “greatest hits” approach. Have an ad that’s produced results in the past? Change the date and run it again! Have a blog post you put up a year ago that covered a highly relevant topic? Lightly edit it and re-run it! Re-running marketing content is totally OK. (And no, that’s not what I did for this blog. But feel free to scroll through the Urban Sherpa Guideposts; there’s lots of great stuff in there…)
Google it. Searching for things like “I need a great marketing promotion” or “Blog Post Ideas” can sometimes surface articles and ideas that will get your creative juices flowing and that you can adapt and build from. Just be careful not to directly steal material or plagiarize.
Go for a run/drive/golf/shopping/anything not related to marketing. Sometimes when my mind is focused on something far removed from work, amazing things pop into my head. Pro tip: mowing the grass is great for this.
Meditate. Put on some relaxing music, get comfy, focus on the breath, and float away on a mini spiritual sabbatical. This is sometimes hard to do when you’re facing an imminent deadline, but shutting the world out for even 5 or 10 minutes and getting centered can help you start moving in the right direction.

Why do we get so stuck when it comes to marketing?

There are probably a bunch of reasons people end up gridlocked mentally when it comes to writing marketing content or creating ad copy. In the interest of keeping this blog to a reasonably sane length, I’m going to call out just two seriously misguided beliefs that can slow us down:

Your audience/customers are paying rapt attention to your every move and will KNOW if you are editing and reusing content or repeating things they’ve heard before. The sad truth for all of us is that no one is paying that much attention. In fact, there’s a lot to be said for the power of repeating particularly important concepts and value propositions, multiple times and in multiple different places. And if someone calls you out on it, great; you’ll know at least one person is an avid follower.
Everything we do as marketers needs to be well-thought out, planned to within an inch of its life, and edited to PERFECTION. The bottom line is that life moves fast; by the time you’ve put together the perfect campaign (or perfect blog post), the moment has passed and you’ve missed out on multiple opportunities to talk to your target audience. Getting SOMETHING out that’s 51% ideal beats shooting for that elusive 100% perfect post and delivering NOTHING. Every time. Get something out, and if it’s not awesome, do better next time.

Now, in the interest of best practices, it’s about time to wrap this up. Plus, deadlines, you know!

Happy Small Business Marketing,

Theron and Katie

P.S. Bonus 6th method to get things moving: drink lots and lots of black coffee.

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small businesses and startups, including content marketing. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline.

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What is the difference between SEO and SEM: the small business owner’s guide

Just about everyone has heard about SEO and SEM. SEO, particularly, gets talked about a lot; even small business owners with very little marketing experience trot it out when we meet with them. And, indeed, both SEO and SEM are important tools for any business owner.

The problem is that there is a lot of confusion between the two terms, despite the fact that they are entirely different things. And even worse, people rarely ask for clarification—either because they don’t want to admit that they don’t know, or because they don’t realize that there actually IS much difference.

So, in the interests of making everything clear, here’s the quick and dirty on what the heck SEO and SEM are, and how they are different.

What is SEM?

First, let’s start with SEM. It stands for Search Engine Marketing and refers to paid advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. These are the ads that you see at the top of the results when you search for something. You can tell they are ads because they say so, in a little box in the corner of the ad.

From a small business perspective, SEM is a really excellent way to get your product or service in front of people at the very moment that they are looking for it. This makes it extremely effective for most businesses. You bid on certain search terms that are related to your product/service, and if your bid is enough (and you meet some other criteria) your ad appears when someone searches for that term. I won’t go into a lot of detail, here, but if you want to read more about SEM, check out this article from a little while back.

The great thing about SEM is that you can fire it up and start showing ads (and attracting customers) immediately. That said, if you shut off the money, you shut off your ads.

What is SEO?

Now, let’s talk about SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the (wide) variety of optimization activities that you do to try to get your website to show up high in the natural rankings when someone searches for a term associated with your product or service. The natural rankings are all the results that show up below the ads. You do not pay for these placements, so it’s technically “free”, though many SEO activities can cost you money. Despite sounding really similar to Search Engine Marketing, it actually only has that one thing in common: they both focus on the keywords that people may search for.

You can improve your SEO by doing things like making sure your important keywords are used frequently in your website, making sure you have keyword-rich page descriptions, making sure your site is optimized and user-friendly, adding key-word rich alternative descriptions for images, and adding blogs regularly… among a lot of other stuff (if you want to learn more about SEO, check out our article on the subject here).

The important thing to remember about SEO is that, unlike SEM which can kick in immediately and have an instant effect on your business, SEO is a long-term play. You actually have very little control over how your site is going to show up. It can take months and even years to pay off, depending on how crowded your field is, and how much competition there is for the terms that are important to your business. If you have a few competitors that have had really SEO-optimized sites up for a long time, you might never achieve the ranking you want through SEO alone.

Which is better for small business marketing: SEO or SEM?

Now that you understand what SEO and SEM are, you may be asking which you should focus on. Frankly, that’s the wrong way to look at it, because SEO and SEM serve different marketing purposes. A smart business will work on both. While the natural rankings you achieve through SEO aren’t dependent on your budget and are more compelling to searchers (organic traffic usually stays on your site longer, reads more pages, and converts better), there’s no guarantee that all your SEO efforts will get you to the top of the first page… ever. And, my friends, if you’re not on that first page, people simply won’t find you. SEM ads, on the other hand, guarantee that you’re front and center when people are searching for your product or service… as long as you keep the money going.

Our advice? Focus on SEM to make sure you’re getting customers immediately, but also build good SEO into your website and use a blog to keep things active. In other words, think of SEM as a specific marketing campaign, and SEO as a baseline practice that you keep running in the background.

Together, they pretty much make the perfect team.

Happy small business marketing,

Katie & Theron

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