After helping business owners with their marketing over the years, we have identified a fatal mistake that sometimes takes place.
Before we get into it, we want to preface it by saying this isn’t every business owner. It’s not even a majority of them. But, it’s something we have seen through consultations and casual conversations.
The fatal mistake we’re talking about is a business owner running their marketing and advertising with only themselves in mind.
Basically, tailoring their marketing to their experience in life and not their clients.
Let’s take the following business owner for example. Let’s say this business owner is successful and makes mid to high six figures a year.
However, the target market for their product / service lies within the $60,000 – $200,000 yearly household income bracket.
While they are successful, they aren’t the top dog in their market. The have some money to spend to augment their efforts and begin taking proposals for advertising and marketing.
The business owner will be presented a solution or campaign and say something like, “Well, me and my family don’t use or watch that, so I don’t think it will work. I don’t want to do it.”
This can rear its head the other way as well. “Well, me and my family do this / watch this / go to these websites so put my ads there. I think that will work and my friends will see my business.”
There are a lot of examples where something like this can rear its head and it’s not always based on household income.
Age is another. A young business owner where the client base averages 20 years his or her senior. Maybe even the inverse of that where the business owner is 20-30 years their target market’s senior.
You’re smart, so you can come up with even more examples.
Like we said, it’s not a problem that is wide spread, but we see it enough to type out this blog post about it.
Remember, while you might love them, you’re not always your client or customer. Taking your life experiences and daily routine and transposing that into your marketing and advertising isn’t always going to be a winning formula.
Get data and then arrive at conclusions about your marketing and advertising effort. A great way to get customer / client data is by performing surveys.
