Do you know what distinguishes successful marketers from the vast majority of companies? The truth is, there are a lot of things that highly successful marketers do… that most companies don’t (and you thought I was going to tell you the ONLY marketing secret).
But behind all the many things that the most successful salespeople do is one important principle. The principle of “divide and rule”. This proven method of segmenting your market into smaller and smaller “sub-markets” is the key fundamental idea behind all successful marketing. Most companies over-market.
When asked who their target customer is, they’ll tell you “everyone who needs XYZ.” This is never true. In fact, the words “everyone,” “any,” or “everyone” are red flags when I ask someone who they want to sell to. They obviously haven’t done their homework.
So what do I mean by “divide and rule”? It’s really simple, but it requires a bit of thought… not much, but some. Take for example an engineering company that sells design services. They can design any type of commercial building: offices, retail stores, restaurants, fast food outlets, shopping malls, schools, and fire stations. All of these construction sites require essentially the same design services, performed by the same people in the company.
Not surprisingly, the firm creates a brochure, business cards, and a website that talk about the design work they do, the qualifications of their engineers, and the places they work. And, somewhere in every marketing piece (I often find it on the back cover of brochures) they list, in bullet point form, the various types of construction sites they can design.
first division
All the money the company spends on their pretty brochures, cards, and website will go to waste because by trying to talk to ALL the possible types of customers they want, they’re not talking to any of them. Prospects are people. People who have a floor full of problems in their own world. If you are not talking to them in their world, individually, you will be ignored.
So in the case of our engineering company, they need to divide their prospects into categories like:
* Office building owners/developers
* Retail store owners
* Restaurant owners (not fast food)
* Fast food franchises
* Strip Mall Developers
*School districts
* County and City Fire Departments
When you break it down this way and think about each type of customer and the issues they face every day, it’s pretty clear that you need to communicate with the people in the office differently than the people in the restaurant and even differently than the facilities planner in the restaurant. school District. then conquer
Now that we have divided the company’s universe of potential customers into logical groups, we can devise a plan to conquer each submarket. Instead of one brochure and website, I would create 7 one- or two-page brochures and 7 submarket-focused websites. It would even search for web addresses like retail-site-engineering.com or fast-food-engineering.com for each submarket. With each piece of marketing, we can now target the message to the specific people in each submarket. We can speak your language and talk about the challenges you face without alienating the perspectives of other groups.
So set aside an hour to also think about who you’re marketing to. Divide them into groups and conquer each one.