3 Tips to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy

By now, everyone has discovered the joys of niche, target marketing. Targeting a base of customers is always going to be high on any list of the right marketing strategies for your business.

As it turns out, that fact alone is not enough to constitute a marketing strategy. There is a lot to learn about target marketing beyond the basic fact that you need to be doing it. Plenty of businesses engage in rather involved and expensive niche marketing campaigns that don’t work.

You can spend lot of money on marketing fads that don’t yield the results you expected when you bought into them. These fads can cost you more than money, they can cost you time, wasted effort, and customer good will that you will never get back. If your target marketing campaign is not working the way you think it should, let’s take a moment to go back to the basics:

1. Engage Your Target Market
You’ve already identified your market. Now, it is time to engage with them. You can engage with them directly through social media, or indirectly through pay-per-click marketing.

There are a lot of misconceptions about pay-per-click. One of the most pervasive ones is that it is simple. But a good PPC campaign is quite involved and requires some bit of expertise if it is to be done right.

That’s why there is PPC management software. Here is just some of what is involved with PPC:

• Search ads
• Display ads
• Remarketing or retargeting Pay Per Click campaigns
• Remarketing lists for search ads
• Google shopping

According to the same experts:

Pay per Click advertising gives you the opportunity to purchase top positions in search engines and social media settings in order to get your message across to potential customers. You’re not only taking charge and being proactive about driving traffic to your site, but you’re also engaging in savvy, innovative tactics to target specific customers and bring your ideal clientele through your virtual or business doors.

Good target market requires active engagement. PPC management software and expertise is an essential part of any plan for which there is no substitute.
2. Re-target Your Market
One of the main reasons target marketing campaigns don’t work is because the market was improperly identified in the first place. The scary thing about marketing to a niche is that by its very nature, a niche is small and limiting. To combat that fear, the tendency is to define the niche too broadly.

Some experts say that finding the right niche market to tackle is all about filling the niche that is personally meaningful to you. However you find it, you have to make sure it is a true niche. Try going at least three levels deep. Here is what I mean:

Ask yourself who would most benefit from your product or service. Even if you think everyone will benefit, you have to focus on who will most benefit. That is the first level. If your answer is business people, take it to the next level by asking what kind of business people. Perhaps it is business people who fly for 25% of their work. A third level would be business people who fly to Eastern Europe for 25% of their work. That’s a niche you can work with.
3. Listen to Your Target Market
The worst thing you can do is misunderstand the needs of your niche, and fail to listen to them when they try to correct you. If your small niche of triathlon runners is telling you they want running shorts with pockets, it is not up to you to tell them that they’re wrong. You should be working on aerodynamic solutions for runners who want to carry things while they run.

If you are first to a market category, you may misjudge what your target market wants. Apple did this with the Friends button on the Apple Watch. It turns out that this was not the functionality the customers wanted. So they are repurposing it for something else. The initial failure is understandable. Had they doubled down on the button, it would have been unforgivable. Small niches do not reward willful stubbornness.

Hit the reset button on your marketing efforts by engaging your target market, re-identifying your niche, and reevaluating what they have to say.