You Must Know Your Customer

Marketing dollars are not unlimited. Everyone has a budget and it doesn’t matter if it’s written on a fast food napkin or keyed into Excel with fancy schedules and formulas. Whether annual marketing budgets are large or small, there never seems to be enough. Eliminating waste is essential to make marketing dollars stretch as far as they need to go. Efficient marketing is key.

Truly knowing your pool of potential customers helps ensure that you’re not wasting marketing dollars on people who have no need for your product or service. After determining your basic customer profile including age, gender location, and income (ability to buy), you’ll need to show your advertising and promotion in places where they will see it. For example, if you are trying to sell young singles on your new concert rating app, there’s not much sense in buying an ad in the Wall Street Journal. They’re unlikely to see it. Instead, find our where your audience goes for news about celebrities and the world in general and run your ads there. Is it Flipboard? Instagram? Twitter? There are plenty of choices.

The point is… marketing dollars are precious. Make them work as hard as you do.