Marketing Audience Fit
This model shows you the 4 key elements of marketing and from these elements how a marketing offer can go, first off all every unique variation/offer you do is separate in the eyes of the Marketing audience fit. This means even for the same offer you can have copy variations carrying a different message.
An example could be for a fitness product one copy aims at the average want to be fit person, which will most likely go on about ease of use and the results of average people. That's very broad so try more specific groups, A more specific variation of this ad would be targeting moms who want to fit it into their lifestyle, another variation? Busy professionals who need a workout program they can do anywhere and does not need fancy equipment or a lot of dedicated time.
Audience= who is your message targeted at?
Message= what is it that your marketing towards the audience?
Channel= where is the marketing going to take place?
Scale= can the traffic source go from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands a month?
Now achieving a perfect marketing fit is very difficult and very few businesses can do so consistently. The vast majority of businesses use to big a scale which reduces the message fit to the audience. It's always best to have many perfect marketing fits with very small scale than to try and have loads of big scalable channels.
When we go back to the fitness product above to many businesses does a one size fits all approach to their sales copy instead of creating different message variations, targeting different key customer groups.(audiences) It is harder to create multiple variations however the messages will fit better and is more likely to create better conversions.
Lets look closer at each element
Audience
Audience= who is your target audience for this particular ad? You must have multiple audiences made based on customer profiles.
When you have done your profiles you will most likely have found 2 or more key customer groups and their needs.
Your key customer profiles should be based off of various things such as those with the best lifetime value and quality. Then there's the majority. Then there's other metrics that can be important to you such as contributors etc.
In the beginning it's best to focus on the majority of buyers and those with the best quality in terms of lifetime value.
If we take accounting software some customer groups we can assume are:
Self employed entrepreneurs (can group it further through size, industries and interests for example small entrepreneurs that focus on online marketing)
Finance managers (can group it further the same way as above)
Accountants ( some other ways to group it further is through education and specialism)
- Coaches / consultants/ freelancers (these can each be their own group and can be broken down further)
The list can go on and on by going even deeper such as size,role, industry and habits to name a few, from your analysis we should focus on the key 2-3 customer groups, the one that brings you the most money and is high quality, the one that makes up the majority of your audience and then there's the one that's a mixture of the two.
MESSAGE
Message= what is it that your audience truly needs/wants? This means figuring out what motivates them. Then communicating to those motivations clearly and strongly.
What emotions are key to them?
Usually it's self serving emotions such as wanting to be better. To show off and fulfill their ego etc. you can find this out from these groups by using surveys and questionnaires to uncover their motivations to help you figure out the messages you should construct.
You must make sure each customer profile has dedicated copy and that you find the right channel to market to them.
If there's 3 key customer profiles then for each offer you should have 3 message variations where each one targets only 1 customer profile.
If we use accounting software two potential key customer profiles are the self employed entrepreneurs and accountants.
Entrepreneur - we can assume they want something easy and ideally automated, this would be targeting their need for comfort through reducing the workload.
So going on about features that show how easy it is such as cloud based so they can give accountants access, direct connections to payment processors, tax calculations etc. All this so they can focus on their business instead of worrying about their accounts.
Accountant- here we can assume accountants want to feel superior in making a risky decision, and that they want to start making more money and living a more comfortable lifestyle.
Here you can go on about cloud access so they can work on accounts from anywhere, direct connections to payment processors so they don't have to manually check it all and save them time, tax calculations so they don't have to do it all the time where they can just set repeating items as a specific category and have the tax calculation do it for them, here they mainly care about improving their income and the quality of their comfort.
Notice how the features are the same in the example it's just the benefits that are described that are different.
CHANNEL
Channel= where does your audience hang out? Are there certain interests they have or even a similar occupation.
A channel can be a website a certain publication or some place. In most cases it's best to target those with strong tracking which is online channels whenever it's a website or online publication.
To many marketers market through channels that have a diluted audience instead of a concentrated audience such as small dedicated websites.
If we took the accounting software example again some targeted potential channels pop up:
- Wordpress plugins/themes- here you target bloggers and a lot of which are self employed entrepreneurs.
- Internet marketing blogs- you will find more entrepreneurs here.
- Ezines about business- online magazines about internet marketing or other business subjects will have entrepreneurs there to.
- Digital nomad lifestyle blogs/ezines etc- this is a lifestyle where you can work from anywhere most of these people would be self employed and will love location independent tools.
- Accounting websites- here you're targeting actual accountants.
- Education (colleges,universities, adult learning etc)- here you can convince the decision maker of the courses to show your offer to groups of potential accountants and entrepreneurs.
SCALE
Scale= how much exposure is there? Is there only a few or millions of targets? Is it a fixed scale or can you vary it through targeting etc.
To many marketers go broad instead of starting with very small highly targeted channels. It's these channels you should start with.
Many online businesses offer variable scale such as search engine and social media advertising.
You can get very specific such as using a small website where you advertise to their audience which may only be a few hundred followers.
The 3 different types of scale
Small scale- what are niche and very high quality in terms of their audience? For internet marketing it can be a site dedicated to the subject you're promoting on a website that's about joint ventures it is very small and niche, this scale can vary to slightly bigger such as affiliate marketing .
With small scale the owner of the channel generally is under using it and may not even know how much their audience is worth, you may be able to get very good returns if you negotiate a deal with website owners.
Variable scale- these are channels that can vary in their scale social media and paid traffic is an example you can target specifically and overtime make the targeting more broad. With facebook you could target readers of small high quality blogs similar to your own and eventually expand to bigger blogs, interests etc.
Big scale- these are channels that are big and can not start small, advertisements in offline material such as journals is a key example. There are also online businesses that will only do big scale advertising and not small, here the main barrier is cost and the channel may not be targeted as you want it (tv adverts are usually examples of bad targeting) ads in hobby magazines are more targeted and can be considered big.
Note: you don't have to use only paid scale is purely about size, and this size and cost can be adjusted in many places such as through using a social presence on forums, communities and blog comments.
A strategy to start marketing more effectively
First of all collect data about your key customer profiles. This may mean starting from scratch or guessing if you're starting up.
When you can customer profiles are essential for very targeted marketing. As they allow you to create targeted messages find the best channels and figure out the key audiences your offers appeal to, don't you dare say your audience is everyone that's what most business owners say instead actually collect data and find out.
Start with small scale this is especially important if your small or just starting up. This is due to how cost effective and targeted they will be and the fact you may not have to pay and instead can use some sort of strategic partnership.
Look for websites that are relevant to your target audiences. Make sure they are small. Check to see if they allow adverts on their site and check their numbers to see if you want to put your ad on their site.
For banner ads it's best to offer something free such as an E-book that is highly targeted for what that website's audience is. A site about small online businesses is likely to have best results with online start ups and key online marketing strategies.
You could do that and/or look into how you can improve their business and work on building a joint venture with them.
There is also banner brokers such as BuySellAds that you can use to find sites.
Work on adding one marketing channel at a time and see if it's profitable to you, it makes more sense to focus on one or two channels until they are doing well and slowly grow the diversity of your marketing channels and methods.
Joint ventures?
If you can joint ventures are the best form of marketing available. The joint venture model has an in depth look at why and how of joint ventures.
For now create a list of small channels that target your key customer profiles. Then figure out which potential partners are around your size and will need help growing themselves.
Start off by helping them with no attachments to build trust. This means commenting in blogs/forums. Offering suggestions to improve products/systems and anything else to help.
When you pitch a joint venture make it about them and make it turn-key so they do no work and can only gain. Make sure through the turn key solution you also benefit in some way such as access to their audience.
You must work hard on building a relationship that shows that you're capable and can be trusted, more is covered in the JV model.
P.S. My book goes into more detail about joint ventures, creating a customer profile and creating sales funnels
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