By Paul Groth
Your business needs to define its target market. Without a defined group to target your marketing message to, all of the associated costs will be lost and your message will be sent out to a majority of people who are not interested. One of the worst steps you can take in business is attracting and accepting the wrong type of customers —“any customers.”
Attracting the “any customers” is often a quest by businesses to get the ball rolling in their businesses quickly, but also to build up great portfolios of work to show off to their potential customers (their real target markets), to show off that they have a long list of customers who like their work, and to generate instant income. To attract these customers meant that businesses’ pricing had to reflect what these customers were after, which were the best prices they could find in the local area. This quest might sound like a reasonable one, and to some – a good plan of attack to start out in business. But businesses should not fall for this quest. Here’s why…
– The products and services offered become more and more aligned with the low-priced “any customers,” and therefore not in line with businesses’ real target markets.
– The output or finished results of the businesses’ services are not of a high enough quality to be attractive to those higher-priced clients (their real target markets).
– Their pricing attracts customers who only want the cheapest, and those customers will always shop around and get it elsewhere if it’s cheaper.
– “Any customers” are always expecting businesses to do more work and produce more samples for no cost.
When you want the higher-priced clients, you really need to seek them out one-by-one. Finding the clients calls for other, more time consuming methods. Avoid the mistake of attracting the “any customer” instead of going only for your real target market from day one. Define your target market, make sure it’s a good one that will bring you plenty of profits, and stick to it. Do not under any circumstances do any work for people outside of your target market with one exception — if you find a client that’s a step up from your target market, you might want to consider it, but beware that there could be some business killing problem that arises from taking on that work.
If it’s confidence you lack in getting those higher-priced clients, do something about it there’s plenty of self help media available. As for fear of inferior products or services, more research will help you with that. Keep researching from multiple sources until you find the answers you seek, and take it from there. HBM
