When you’re forming a new business or beefing sales on a preexisting one, marketing plays an integral role in getting the product out to the public. Brand and name recognition is the cornerstone of all advertising and marketing. Unless you’re in a position to sell at a loss, why would you not want people to know your brand? This is why advertising takes up a massive shareholder on the world’s business expense, competing with distribution and often amassing a larger total sum than production. How you market your product will determine how much you make.
But the question arises: who should we market to? Should one just put it out there and hope it catches steam? Will the power of the internet be enough to get a generic all-purpose product to market? The answer is increasingly no. The way that people buy things is ramping up massively, albeit shifting. And if you’re thinking about jumping into a marketing strategy, this is why you should be specific to your audience along with specific means to do so.
Content List
Online Presence
The biggest thing in advertising these days is the internet. That’s the first thing people think of when they decide to get into business—any business, in fact. They think: “it’s 2019, we have to have a cool internet presence.” But, truth be told, having an online presence is only part of the story. One has to tailor their audience using tools such as social media and SEO. If someone is dying to sell a video game to a crowd of 1000 people, only a handful of people might actually play video games.
It would be a completely wasted effort to try and sell to all of them. Instead, if you have a banner or a booth that says, “video games!” You’ll attract those who most probably plays video games. That’s the essence of targeted marketing. Search Engine Optimization is like that banner, except instead of the size of said banner, one focuses on the specificity and repetition. You do this by hiring an expert to make sure that your website comes up first when someone enters a certain search in a search engine. These services are highly sought after, and the competition is as fierce as any in the ad world. The upper hand in all of this is the performance of one’s SEO plan.
Brand Alignment
When building your brand, you have to take into consideration how you’re aligning yourself. From the external factors to the finished product, having a mission and vision that falls in line with the target market is key. If you’re a juice company, your mission and vision cannot just be “sell juice.” In order to attract the people that are lying to shell out money for juice, you need to appeal to their sensibilities, health concerns, and even politics.
You quickly become: “An easily digestible plant-based nutritional solution, providing sustainable options for a better future.” That’s how you get the target market to buy yours instead of Joe Juice’s stuff. It may seem a bit excessive, but that’s how modern marketing works. Aligning yourself solidifies a “tam” mentality that makes people want to gravitate towards you. It can only help your brand. And unless you’re selling a very generic product, or an alternative to common commodities, you’re going to have to be that specific.
Niche Buying Habits
Why does this all matter? It all has to do with the nature of purchasing in this day and age. People aren’t so much trying to buy a product as they are building an identity, aesthetically and politically, through products. If you’re going to buy a shirt, there’s no functional difference tweet a plain white T-shirt that costs 5 pounds and a Supreme white T-shirt that costs 300 pounds. The cotton is the same. The stitching is in the same Chinese factory.
The only difference is the team one is associated with once that shirt is on. And in certain markets, like the “hype beast” youth, who spend exorbitant amounts of their minimum wage salary on unnecessary things, a 300 pound price take for a bad shirt is the price you pay for social status within your team. Same goes for smartphones. There’s no difference between a green bubble and a blue bubble functionally. But a blue bubble is the marker of a team. And if that’s how people are buying, that’s exactly how you have to sell.
Pop-up Shops And Customer Analytics
A more grassroots approach is often needed when selling to those who like to consider themselves “old fashioned.” They’re the demographic that is somewhat in between the internet-only market, and the mall-going older crowd. That’s the pop-up shop. The pop-up still has its roots in social media, you have to be following certain companies to know where they’ll be next, but the effort to go to the stall is still indicative of an old-school mentality. Marketing to people via a pop-up shop is one of the best ways to gather information on your crowd.
Anybody can follow you on twitter. People often don’t even know how many companies they follow until they like a picture and an algorithm recycles related products. But the effort one puts out to actually go someplace gives you a good idea of who, how, and why someone is buying your product. After all, you’re controlling the “when” by scheduling a pop-up.
Reducing Overhead
On a practical production end, once you establish who your market is, you can start to cut back and cull products that you know won’t sell in that market. This, in turn, allows you to save money by increasing specificity. The resources saved on that end, allows one to refine the product out in the market to even further anchor what you’re selling as a staple in that demographic. A perfect example of this are Jordan sneakers. Every season has a few models, one or two of which are stylistically different from the rest. They analyze the sales and move their line in the direction people are buying. That can only be done by targeting your brand and analyzing the outcome.
The way that people purchase and view items may have changed over the past few years, but what hasn’t changed is the volume of people purchasing products. If anything, it’s increased. Consumerism is at an all-time high right now, thanks to people doubling down in their niche demos. And to not model yourself in that manner runs the risk of losing customers to one that does.