Summer is a great time to work ON your business, so let’s talk about the first two things you should focus on when you evaluate or set forth your strategic marketing initiatives: casting a vision and defining your target market.
Casting A Vision:
A wise person once said, “Without a vision, the people perish.”* And the same is true in business.
Start at the beginning and look ahead to where you want to be because if you don’t know where you are going, how will you ever get there? If you don’t already have a vision statement, that’s the first step to setting your company’s course.
What is your vision?
Here are some helpful questions for defining your vision statement:
- What does your company hope to make of itself in the long term?
- What are your highest aspirations for your business?
- Why do you do what you do?
- What is the greatest good that you hope to achieve?
A vision statement is a short phrase, but it defines the long-range objectives that establish the purpose for which the organization exists.
Each and every part of your strategic marketing plan should stem from your vision statement. If the marketing plan is a train, the vision statement is the engine. It keeps the rest of the strategy on track and headed in the right direction. Casting your vision is the number one most important component of any good, solid brand strategy.
Defining Your Target Market:
The next step is examining and defining who your target market is. Our team meets with small business owners all the time and we are continually shocked at how few actually have in mind who their ideal customer is. A potential client told us recently, “I sell to commercial and residential, so everyone is my target market.” As kindly as we could, we let this lovely man know that, in fact, EVERYONE is not his — or anyone’s — target market.
Don’t think of it as who COULD I sell to … think of it as “Who do I WANT to sell to?” Who is the ideal person that needs what I have to offer, can afford it, will pay what I want to charge, on time, and be grateful for my help? Many small business owners try to catch “everyone” and spend an enormous amount of time, energy, effort, and money driving at the general population hoping to “catch” a client. We believe that you can spend less time, energy, effort, and money by first defining who it is that you are trying to “catch.” We often say, if you think of marketing as a fishing trip, the target market is what kind of fish you want to catch, the branding is the lure, the message is the bait and the channels you choose to leverage your marketing efforts are the body of water to fish in.
If you don’t care what kind of fish you catch, you can cast your line into the ocean all day and maybe you’ll catch something. But if you want to catch trout, it’s a whole lot easier when you go to a lake stocked with trout and use the bait and lure that trout like. You will be even more fruitful if you do it during their feeding time.
We encourage you to set forth a vision statement if you don’t already have one, and take the time to evaluate who buys from you the most: what gender, what age, what geographic location, what lifestyle, what income level? All of these criteria help you come up with your ideal client.
Remember, as we always say, “Hope is not a strategy. And everyone is not your target market.”
If you need help setting forth a roadmap for your sales and marketing strategies, that’s what we do. And we would love to help! Reach out through our contact form today!
Happy Summer!
Citations:
*Proverbs 29:18-19
