Mistake #2: You’re not finding your audience

Obviously all businesses want to obtain the biggest bang for their buck. By not understanding your target audience and how to reach them, you might as well throw your money out the window and see what works. This may sound silly, but in reality, that is what many businesses are doing.

While there is no need to buy every form of marketing available in your market, when you understand your audience, you can create the right mix of marketing while maintaining or increasing your ROI (return on investment). Once you understand who you are trying to reach, there is no need to cast the widest net possible. While traditional media like TV and radio can deliver big audiences, they come with a big price tag and chances are you don’t even want to reach a large percentage of their audiences.

These media giants are struggling to reinvent themselves in a digital world, so they are losing their hold on the huge audience numbers they once owned to smaller and more targeted marketing options. Marketing is most effective when it is targeted and has your ideal audience profile in mind at ALL TIMES. That includes anything from what neighborhood they reside in to their pain points and interests. Best products for targeting these audiences can include digital ads, emails to a targeted audience list, Facebook ads and audience targeting/re-targeting, business or category-specific publications and local trade shows.

But don’t put all your marketing eggs in one basket.

Once you have established your audience, you’ll want to reach them again and again. Expecting any one of the above options to do it all will lead to disappointment and lost opportunities. The perfect scenario is to do a mix of these targeted options. When you are targeting the specific group most likely to buy your product or service, it is easy to build the correct marketing message for as little money as possible. By understanding who you are talking to, you will impact the buying decisions of potential customers, thereby increasing your ROI and creating a positive impact for your brand. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet that magically makes every marketing campaign successful. But, if you take the time to understand your audience and how to reach them then you will see results.

A major part of our process at Flat Water Marketing is creating your ideal audience profiles. We use these in every decision we make for your marketing and make sure you implement this internally as well.