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Are you talking to me

Written by: David Levine

Article Overview: Are you talking to me? Many businesses advertise in the local media without thinking about who really are the readers (although I’ll reference print media, the same applies for broadcast and their viewers/listeners, or outdoor/billboards’ viewers). Many business owners stand up at networking meetings and say “Hi my name is John from ABC. We sell widgets. A good lead for me is anyone who needs widgets.” In other words, you’ll sell to “anyone,” but you don’t know who “anyone” is. This is not an effective way to target your marketing activities. Your “advertising wastage” will be very high.

Are you talking to me

Are you talking to me? Many businesses advertise in the local media without thinking about who really are the readers (although I’ll reference print media, the same applies for broadcast and their viewers/listeners, or outdoor/billboards’ viewers). Many business owners stand up at networking meetings and say “Hi my name is John from ABC. We sell widgets. A good lead for me is anyone who needs widgets.” In other words, you’ll sell to “anyone,” but you don’t know who “anyone” is. This is not an effective way to target your marketing activities. Your “advertising wastage” will be very high.

We’ll talk about “advertising wastage” in a moment, but first let’s talk about defining your target audience. Close your eyes and picture your ideal customer. What does s/he look like, how old, mostly male or female? What is s/he wearing, reading, or driving? You need to visualize your ideal customer and give them a personality that you can identify. Then write them down. Technically, these are called demographics and psychographics. [Example: 60% male/40% female, household income $60,000+, employed professional/managerial, live within 30 miles of our location, homeowners, two cars, at least one child under 18 living at home, dine out 2x or more per month, traveled internationally at least once over the past two years.]

The next step is to contact the media departments of the potential publications in your area, or those who say they reach your target audience. Ask for a “media kit” which should contain either a circulation audit statement or publisher’s circulation statement. This should tell you who is reading, or at least receiving, the publication or direct mail piece.

Now compare the publication’s target audience with your target audience. Do they match? Nothing’s going to match exactly (except perhaps a well sorted direct mail list). However, if the match is close enough, our “wastage” will be minimized.

Therefore, if the publication’s audience is 50/50 male/female and income of $50,000+, etc., that’s not too far off our example above. Don’t forget that certain publications, like newspapers, can have different readerships depending on the section (Sports versus Food sections, for example).

The difference between your target audience and the publication’s is “advertising wastage,” money you are spending that is not reaching your target. The goal is to minimize this wastage by clearly identifying your target audience and the media that reaches them.

Plan – Don’t Just Budget. Marketing is an investment not an expense. Therefore, it needs to be well-planned, not just accounted for.

Take a spreadsheet and put the months of the year across the top columns and your marketing activities along the left side. Then place the dollar amount spent for each marketing activity in the activity row under the appropriate month column. Calculate totals and percentages.

Analyze the data. Do the monthly percentages match your business’ seasonality? Are the different marketing activities properly aligned to maximize their impact or are they haphazardly placed throughout the year? Are you spending too much or too little, as a percentage of total advertising, on a particular activity?

Turn the budget into a plan. Plan your marketing activity to pre-sell your season, as well as during. Plan your marketing to increase activity during your slow seasons. Plan, so you can take advantage of frequency discounts, editorial issues that tie into your business, events, and more. Plan advertising activity (print ads and direct mail and radio) to overlap each other to maximize the amount of your target audience you reach over the advertising period, also known as “reach and frequency.”


Conclusion: Target audience plus planning = invest vs. expense
Investment vs. Expense. If you treat advertising and marketing as an expense, you will just grudgingly write the check, look at the line item on your books, and write it off as an expense at the end of the fiscal year.

However, if you look at advertising as an investment that creates a return, you must treat it as one. Therefore, it deserves planning, testing, and measuring. Planning includes what we’ve discussed here about clearly defining your target audience and mapping out an effective seasonal or year-long integrated campaign. Testing and measuring(a subject for another time) helps you fine-tune your return, which is measured in terms of customer acquisition costs and life-time values.

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