Are you targeting a specific audience in your marketing campaigns?
An interesting postcard showed up in my mailbox this week from a gym in my area. The headline and photos on the postcard advertised the gym’s child care facility where members can drop off their kids while they workout. Sounds like a great amenity that many people would want to take advantage of! There is just one problem- I don’t have any children. This postcard has no relevance to me as the receiver, so my first instinct is to throw the postcard in the trash.
With the exception of the kid friendly focus, the gym actually had a really great marketing piece. The postcard had wonderful graphic design and was aesthetically pleasing, it had a unique offer to use a temporary pass to visit the gym with no membership obligation, and it had a call to action that I needed to call a toll-free number to obtain my complimentary visitors pass.
The problem with this mailer is that it did not reach its intended target audience of a gym seeker with children. After further examination, I also noticed that the postcard was addressed to “current resident” which tells me that this gym has no clue who I am and is probably mailing to every address in my area.
The underlying issue is that this gym did not do their research. Without good data, and a good list, your great offer/messaging/design will fall on deaf ears. Even a really bad marketing piece sent to the right target market can earn results, but a great marketing piece sent to the wrong target market will earn no results.
Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying your target market is easy. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who buys from you?
- What do they buy?
- When do they buy?
- Where are they located?
- What are their buying habits?
- What are your customer demographics? Consider age, gender, lifestyle, family, residency, income level, etc.
Cookie Cutter Marketing Doesn’t Work
Don’t try to generalize you marketing to fit all of these demographics or assume that one type of marketing strategy will work for everyone (like the gym postcard). You need to market to all of these audiences differently as every audience has different needs and preferences.
Bianca Te Rito, contributing author for She Takes on the World, said it best when she blogged that, “It is a big mistake in online personal branding (or any branding for that matter) to try to be all things to all people. If you try to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one”.
I agree with Te Rito that we cannot try to approach all audiences in the same. My experience confirms that many people try to create cookie cutter marketing strategies that can apply to everyone, but this just simply will not work.
Instead of sending everyone in the area a postcard advertising their child care services, this gym could have greatly benefited from three distinct mini campaigns.
One could have targeted parents of young children with the messaging and imagery that was in the original postcard.
Another could target young adults with photos of young, good looking, fit individuals and the gym’s state of the art equipment.
Another could have targeted active seniors by showing images of the diverse ages present at the gym and perhaps advertise senior friendly group fitness classes.
Cost
The first reaction I get when I suggest three mini campaigns to my clients is that it must be more expensive to do three mini campaigns than one campaign, but this is not necessarily true. It costs just as much to mail 3,000 of the child care post cards as it would to mail 1,000 child care, 1,000 young adult, and 1,000 senior target postcards. If you have customer data on file, and you probably do, than you might not need to buy multiple mailing lists. If the only design variations in your postcards are images and a headlines then the graphic design charges for three postcards will not be that much more than the one.
Target audience and good data are key a successful marketing campaign. Don’t just spray and pray for success. Having a clear marketing strategy target towards a specific audience will increase response rates exponentially.
Amanda Moore
