I hate flying out of LAX. Not because I hate flying, I don't. But because it scares the bejesus out of the marketing guy in me.
How will you market to all those people? I recalled a plane trip up through California's Central Valley.
In a plane climbing to 35,000 feet, looking down on sprawling Los Angeles, you can't help but gasp at how big it is -- at how many people all live in one place.
As a small business, you look down at all those houses, at all those cars, on all those streets and you realize -- there's absolutely no way I'm going to be able to market to all of those people.
Fortunately, for most small businesses, you also don't have a desire to market to all those people.
So you take out your marketing funnel, pour in people of Los Angeles and as the funnel gets more narrow so does your target market -- maybe we remove people over the age of 40, focus on those with a plausible interest in technology, highlight one particular zip code, and implement an income floor at $40,000/year.
Suddenly, it's less about marketing to Los Angeles as a whole and more about breaking down a metropolis into a more manageable target market.
Because as a small business, you can't afford a regional print ad buy (it's a waste of money anyway) and you don't have the budget for a multi-code direct mail campaign (you'll get upset when you see your mail crumpled in the trash).
But what you can't afford, you can control. So you control your new target market.
You can't ignore targeted marketing. I preach it, I know, but it's for a reason.
Targeted marketing isn't just for small businesses. The world's largest corporations target their marketing with teams of highly-sophisticated customer models.
They do it because it puts their money to work -- they're not wasting it on households who don't care about their products otherwise.
Historically, small businesses aren't smart. They set-up shop and turn to traditional medias which aren't targeted:
- the local radio station (big, wasteful radio buy that listeners tune out),
- the local newspaper (hundreds of dollars for a column or two of space),
- the billboard on the main corridor (shoving a minute's worth of content and a bigger logo into a 3-second drive-by).
None of those strategies are targeted. Instead, it's the equivalent of casting a net into the ocean and hoping somebody bites.
If you have a bank account that won't quit, stop reading this and go about your ways stimulating the economy.
But if money's tight and you're already struggling to meet rent, before you spend a dime on an easy (expensive) alternative, do your homework, and find a way to target your spending.