How To Narrow Your Marketing Focus

If you use a military metaphor to think about your marketing communications, it becomes obvious why you need to concentrate your resources to be effective. Imagine a long front line of enemy troops - those are the individual mental barriers to your sales message. Now imagine the message you want to put across as your own troops. If you spread your forces out sparsely all along the front, none of them will get through, but if you concentrate your troops against a small number of vulnerable points, you can break through easily.

There are basically three ways to narrow your market into a target concentrated enough for your message to be effective: geographically, demographically and psychographically. If you can, use two or, better still, all three techniques together for greater focus and effectiveness.

Geographic segmentation simply means targeting prospects in a particular area. If no media reaches your geographic market effectively - that is, if there's too much wasted coverage from using newspaper or radio, say, consider direct mail as a way to concentrate your message against a smaller audience.

Narrowing the market demographically means selecting prospects within the total audience with certain shared characteristics such as job title, interests, age or income. Some companies are lucky enough to have whole magazines or Web sites aimed at their particular demographic. Others have to carve prospects out of the larger, general audience by being very clear about who they are addressing in advertising.

Lastly, Stanford Research Institute's Values and Lifestyles (VALS) model is typical of psychographic research, which narrows a market by focusing on shared psychological characteristics such as a willingness to try something new or a tendency toward brand loyalty.

If you want to make sure your message is seen often enough to be effective, narrow the focus of your campaign. Bring your budget to bear on a target small enough to hit repeatedly with your marketing message.

This month's columnist is Phil Soreide. Mr. Soreide is a 30-year business-to-business advertising veteran and an associate of Wise Women Communications.