Are you making this costly 'ad-killing' mistake? (And how to fix it instantly)

If you’re running ads, or are about to, you NEED to understand this principle in order to have them make you a lot more sales and avoid a trap that many businesses fall victim to…

Imagine you own a shoe shop. Your business is surviving, but not thriving. You get the odd drifter, and sometimes they might pick up a pair of shoes so long as they feel particularly whimsical.

Everyone needs shoes…  So you think the simple way to do business is to sell all different types of shoes to all different kinds of people, right?

So you might have signs up for trainers, and posters for slippers, and run ads for dress shoes. Making sure you get everyone’s attention.

But what if I told you that ‘selling to everyone’ is a sure-fire way to make less money, and is one of the most common marketing mistakes?

Reason being, Since you sell to everyone... You stand out to no one. And standing out is the key to getting traffic into your business.

We can fix that by identifying a profitable market within the shoe selling game.

How do we do that? Well, we could start by looking at the types of people that walk into our shop and observing what kind of shoes they buy. If they buy it, there’s a market present for that kind of shoe.

Stylishly dressed man comes in and buys a pair of loafers? There’s a market indicator.

Young girl buys a pair of glittery trainers? There’s another market indicator.

Athlete buys a pair of quality running shoes? You get the idea…

Identify who it is that tends to frequent your business more, and recognise their characteristics, interests, personality, etc.

Before you know it, you will have an avatar of the type of person who is most likely to give you money, simply because you have exactly what they're looking for.

Then just strip down in order to sell exclusively to one niche in that market. For example, selling only trainers and sports shoes for athletes. This is referred to as 'Niching down', and it can be very profitable to do so.

Let’s take this idea further by applying it to another business with a more subtle market.

Let’s say that you’re a wedding photographer. So your target market is… people that are getting married right?

Well yes, that’s correct, but you can take it a deeper level.

So, who gets married? A whole lot of people as a matter of fact, but not all of them want the same type of wedding.

We have traditional weddings, same sex weddings, luxury weddings, non-traditional… So on and so forth.

So since you can’t put everyone who’s getting married into the same category, selling yourself as a ‘wedding photographer’ isn’t making the impact that it needs in order to pull in more of your target niche.

But what you CAN do, is choose a category and get a clear picture of the biases towards the type of people that fall into it, and then sell to those people.

To find those biases, ask questions like:

“What do these people tend to be interested in?”

“What age range do they tend to be in?”

“What kind of areas do they tend to live in?”

This allows you to target those people powerfully in your ads and your brand messaging so that it cuts through the clutter.

You COULD just choose to pick all different types of weddings… but if we go back to the shoe example, selling to everyone means that you stand out to no one.

So at the end of the day, you should test out different markets and see which one yields the best results for you.

If you want to know what else you could do to make your business more profitable, get in touch with us today for a free marketing analysis.