Lesson 3:

The Secret For Getting A Bigger Bang For Your Marketing Buck

For good or bad, and it's a debate that has nothing to do with us marketers, privacy in America is dead. It's gone, buried, forget it. The database world, the world of lists, the world of demographics, psychographics, the world of target marketing knows more about you than your mother.

So if you say to me, "Here's what target marketing is all about, target marketing is all about leveraging resources, great marketing message, now we want to leverage our resources, it's matching the message with only high-probability prospects, and here's why and how it can be done," if you say to me, "my perfect prospect is a one-legged midget with an industrial engineer degree, between the ages of 35 and 52, he's got three kids, two dogs, one television set, he bowls in a league on Wednesday night and he drives a Chevy Impala that's between four and six years old and has primer paint on the left front fender," we can get a list of them in your zip code. Not going to be a very big list, but we can get a list.

And it begs the issue of high-probability prospecting, target marketing, using your resources only to reach the people who are perfectly matched with what it is that you have to offer
.
So we're going to start to talk about target marketing. We're going to spend a minutes on this. And if you know nothing else about target marketing, you'll instantly understand the first thing on the list.

There's about 15 ways to do target marketing. If you're a business-to-business marketer, you do it technically different than if you were a consumer marketer, but conceptually it's the same. Here are the top five ways to target market if you're a consumer marketer, and you'll understand the first one if you understand nothing else about target marketing.

The first one on the list is basic geographic target marketing. And just about everybody gets it and pretty much just about everybody does it. That's where you get a map, take a kid's crayon, Styrofoam cup, put the cup over your house, your store, your factory, your place of business. Take the crayon, draw a circle around the cup, take the cup away. That's my target market. That's valid, but it is dangerous and wasteful in its simplicity.

So what I want to do with next few minutes is I want to at least get you intrigued enough with target marketing that you'll go do the research necessary, which 90 percent of it can be done for free and 90 percent of it's a do-it-yourself project, take you less than a day. In order to become a more sophisticated, precise target marketer in your particular business.

Why You Want To Be More Sophisticated Than
Geographic Target Marketing

I'm in my office one day and I get a phone call. You should know, I'm never in my office. And when I'm there, I never take incoming calls, for reasons that will become obvious in a second. But somehow, this day, this guy gets through to me on the phone. He says, "Look, I've been to three of your seminars, I've got your complete marketing system. Most recently, we've been doing a marketing campaign for our company. We've followed the examples in your system. We've been doing direct mail. We followed your examples perfectly and we are getting zero response."

This is not a good call. This is why I don't take incoming calls. But somehow, I'm on the phone. So you've got to ask questions. Turns out this guy owns the largest carpet cleaning company in Phoenix, where I live. I said, "Okay, where did you send all the mail that didn't get results?" He said, "We picked a few neighborhoods real close to the plant, so it would be easy for the guys in the trucks to take care of the customers." Geographic marketing.

I said, "Okay, what can you tell me about the people who live there?" He said, "They live close to the plant." I had that. I was moving on to what's called demographics and psychographics. Big words, simple concepts. Fascinating when you know how to use them

Demographics are statistical information about groups of people, because birds of a feather really do flock together. Demographics are like head of household, occupation, income, do they have kids, not have kids, that sort of thing.

Psychographics are even more interesting, because they're predictive of buying behavior. Psychographics have to do with what interests people: what magazines do they subscribe to, what books do they buy, what products do they buy, what have they spent money on, how much money have they spent, how frequently do they spend money.

And as I said, all of that information is readily available if you know where to look for it and how to get it, so you can precisely match yourself with only the high-probability prospects and you can omit others.

Are You Wasting Your Money Targeting This
Type Of Prospect Too?

To prove to him, the owner of this carpet cleaning company, the incredible importance of all this, we did free research for him. I got in his car with him at 5:00 in the afternoon and we drove up and down the street to these neighborhoods where he'd been sending all his unsuccessful mail.

And by the way, if you do consumer marketing and you haven't gone out and looked at them lately, venture out. Take a look. You've got to go into their own habitat, late in the day, 5:00, 6:00 is a good time. It's when all the ordinary folks rush home to the caves, but they don't put the rocks in the holes right away. So you check them out.

So we're driving up and down the streets, the carpet cleaning president and I. And here's what we find. Real small lots, chain link fence around just about every lot. Small, cheapest block construction house on a slab you can build. Almost every front yard, driveway or both, there's one old broken-down car or truck up on blocks, parts laying around.

It's happy hour. Papa's out on the porch, the concrete slab extension to the foundation, enjoying the ambiance of the evening. He's got on an old greasy undershirt with holes in it, droopy plaid shorts, beer bottle tucked in one pocket, and he's sitting in one of them lawn chairs, the green and white plastic, crisscrossed straps, two straps missing, papa's hanging a little low.

Next to him, on most of the porches, mama's out there enjoying the ambiance of the evening with him. She's got on a matching undershirt. Hers says, "His," his says, "Hers." Greasy holes, droopy plaid shorts, the baby wearing nothing but a diaper, no shoes or socks, is out playing under the car on blocks, in the car parts, the mud and the grease, being supervised by the old, mangy, flea-bitten, three-legged, one-eyed dog.

I say to the carpet cleaner, "Do these look to you… slow down, look close. If they clean them at all, once a year before the poor relatives come for vacation, they run down to Target, the get a gallon of blue glop for a $1.98, they rent a machine and they move the furniture around. It doesn't make them bad people. It makes them terrible prospects for a carpet cleaning service."

Second big question to ask yourself. In your own way, are you making the same, dumb mistake, wasting bullets on targets that even if you hit them, it doesn't count? The biggest leverage you are going to find in taking small amounts of money and getting big results, small amounts of effort and getting big results, is learning, understanding and using target marketing.

Let's assume for the sake of our conversation, we figure that out. We've got two of the three things. We've got a powerful marketing message. At it's core, a great Unique Selling Proposition. And in our sites, we have exactly who we want to deliver the message to and we have excluded a whole bunch of people we do not want to waste time or money delivering the message to. So we've got a great message, we've got a great market.

What do we need next to be successful? You'll discover that in lesson 4.

Click here to go to lesson 4