Target Marketing: Who Are You Trying to Sell To?

When it comes to managed IT services, the only way to succeed is to successfully relay the value of your services and solutions to your target audience. You’re more than just ‘the computer guy/gal’. You’re an experienced consultant who can help them save money, increase network security, streamline processes, and plan for growth. Your marketing and sales team must be able to demonstrate how your services will benefit your prospects/client, but before you can market to them, you have to understand their needs.

Use marketing and sales to show off the value of your service offerings.

When creating your MSP’s marketing strategy, it’s important to consider what questions you should be answering with your marketing - but to do that you’ll need to think about WHO is asking those questions.

• Have you considered what audience your current marketing is geared toward?
• What, and who, make it work (or fail)?
• How does feedback and lead capture information affect the way you build your strategy? Or doesn’t it?
• How do you know where to direct your marketing efforts?
• What strategies should you use to get the best return out of your marketing budget?

These questions, among others, should be considered before you start building out a marketing plan. Consider the implementation of a target marketing strategy to improve your chances of successfully marketing your product or service.

What is Target Marketing?

Target Marketing is the marketing of products and/or services to specific audiences that are more likely to be interested in purchasing, or making buzz about those services. Taking those statistics into consideration, you can then develop marketing campaigns aimed directly at these target markets to maximize potential sales and lead generation.

Targeting your marketing efforts generally results in better opportunities. A-list clients stay with your company longer, spend more money, give your company referrals, and, ultimately, provide you with more value than a steady stream of revenue. Every small business could use more of that. Let’s take a look at how to get started.

Defining Your Target

Before your business launches a campaign or any kind of marketing initiative, it’s important to have a target market in mind. You’ll want to pinpoint demographic specifications for businesses that are most likely to purchase your product. The answer to these questions will help you clearly define who your ideal customer is.

Here are a few queries to consider as criteria for determining your target:

• What are the needs that I’m fulfilling with my products and services?
• Who needs what I have?
• Where are they located?
• What are their revenue levels?
• What business verticals can I target?

Using an analytics tool will further help you identify a strong target market. If you are set up with a Google Analytics system, you’ll be able to identify who your Internet prospects are, how they found your site, what services they are interested in, and more.

If you have already launched a marketing campaign and haven’t pre-defined a target market, it’s not too late! Analyzing your current customer base will help your targeting efforts. By considering the commonalities of your current clients you’ll be able to identify the “ideal client”. This will allow you to target with your marketing efforts toward businesses and customers with similar profiles.

For example, if your company sells a Backup and Disaster Recovery solution, consider marketing this service to businesses that share common traits with your current clients. You may determine that your most popular BDR demographic is small medical businesses within a 30-mile radius with revenue levels at or around $500,000/yr. The more details you are privy to about who purchases your business the more thorough you can be identifying potential customers. If you need help in this process, a simple customer satisfaction survey would go a long way in helping to identify your key demographics, and help you serve your current client base better.

Fire Away

Once you’ve identified your target market, it’s time to buckle down and do some marketing. After defining your target, you can rest assured that your marketing efforts are, at the very least, being noticed by prospects. This consideration is all you need. Handing off a legitimately interested oppurtunity to your sales team makes their job a lot easier.

In the previous example we defined our ideal BDR client as small local medical businesses. If these companies are most likely to buy your product, find more! If you run out of leads that meet this description, try expanding the distance radius, revenue level, business size, or any other parameters to give you more targets.

It’s important to keep in mind that marketing is about a series of touches. To be successful, you’ll need to plan out a marketing strategy which continues to offer your prospects valuable information and drives brand awareness. For each campaign you’ll want to develop a strategy to improve success rate each time you run it. Here’s a simple way to do that:

1. Run the Campaign
2. Follow-Up with Target
3. Review Success/Failures
4. Run the Campaign Again

If you want quality marketing output that leads to sales for your company, be sure to feed it quality marketing input by targeting your marketing efforts. JoomConnect can help you build marketing campaigns complete with Internet and print resources to launch toward your target. For more information on how to target a specific market, or how to receive custom campaigns for your marketing efforts, give us a call today toll-free at 888.546.4384.