Marketing Strategy: How to narrow your target customer and grow faster
Peter Brissette • October 8, 2019
All right, welcome to the Review Me Marketing Monthly Training, Coaching and Q&A Call. We're on call number six today. And real quick I wanted to hit on a little bit of strategy just in terms of marketing in general and then we can answer anybody's questions about this or anything else.
So the one thing I wanted to talk about is how do you actually narrow your market and narrow your target customer. So a lot of times, especially newer businesses, I see this in, they don't have a really good defined target customer or market that they really want to go after. And it really makes it difficult to get all their marketing put together to have their content organized and really to have, what is the problem I solved?
So all that gets into the basics of marketing. Who's my market, what's the problem they have and how do I solve it? And then what is all the information just around that space that does that? We often go way too broad in our marketing. For example, real estate agents. Real estate agent, they want to sell a house or help somebody buy a house. Well lots and lots of people buy and sell houses, right? So they just go after anybody with a pulse. That's just natural starting now because it's a hard market and you've got to try to find a deal. So you're like, I need anybody who even thinks they want to buy a house. That's who I want to talk to. But you can actually narrow that market even and be much more strategic and be able to build referral partners and relationships and connect all your marketing to that.
So one example of that is a local gentleman, and I don't actually know his name, I wish I did, but what he promotes himself as, he's a real estate agent, is he sells garages with attached houses. So what he's done is taken his hobby, which is the love of cars and connected that to be a piece of his marketing strategy and narrow his market. So he goes to car shows. If you go to this website, it has information, you'll see a picture that is a garage with lots of nice cars, Maserati or Ferrari sitting in the garage. Then you can explore the rest of the website to see the rest of the house, that kind of thing. So his business card, it's him sitting in a car, nice car. So that's a way to narrow your market.
So I want to give you seven quick ways to become the best in your world, in your marketplace. And few ways to do that. One I gave you was a hobby, so you can connect your hobby to it. One's location, so you could make it specific to a city, county, a state, whatever it is. A demographic, so this could be an age, this could be an income, it could be several different things that you pick out of a demographic for your market.
Having a much more narrow product. Like you could offer a lot of different services depending on your business, but can you just narrow it down? So you know, maybe you are a financial planner that can do all this financial planning, but you want to focus on just one area. Maybe you want to focus on life insurance. Even though you can do everything else, that becomes your focus and you can always add those other things on.
Another way to do that as a personality. Personality is the dealing Doug's right? The Jake Jabs, that kind of stuff. So if you want to make that, that's a way to become best in your world. Size of client, size of project. Have a handyman friend right now that's wants to really keep things focused in the handyman space and not have big projects come up that take up a lot of time. So it's two hours to two days, that's his max. So that's the size of project that he'll do, won't do something bigger than that.
And then another way is expertise. So expertise can be, you go and you speak on that topic, so you do training on it, you write blog posts, maybe even write a book about that particular thing. And so you become known as the expert in that particular niche, in that particular space.
So those are seven common ways to do it. Another way that you can differentiate yourself in narrowing your target customer is to offer a guarantee. So if what you do is just almost the same as what everybody else does, but if you're able to offer some type of guarantee where your competition doesn't do that, that can help you as well. But the idea is with these different things is to create a much narrower market, a smaller market where you can be the number one in that market and that's what you're trying to do.
So you just cutting out niches within niches and making smaller niches until you can be in that number one spot. Of course, the other things matter, right? Do they have a big enough problem that they're willing to pay money to solve this problem? And is that market big enough to sustain a business and to grow a business that's important to the equation of this, when you're talking about narrowing your market. Because if your market's so narrow and there's only 10 people in the world that would want what I have, that might be too narrow. So somewhere in the middle there is the balance.
So that's our strategy review for this month. Hopefully that was helpful and we look forward to being on the call next month.
Video Transcript: All right, hey guys, Peter Brissette here, Digital Marketing Dude, and I wanted to share with you something new about Google reviews that you want to be aware of. So Google now will allow users to update their profile, their name on their profiles, so they can be more anonymous. So they're not entirely anonymous, but if they want to use an initial on their last name or shorten their first name, you know, if it's Jennifer and they just want to put Jen or whatever, Dogmom1234. They can change that on their reviews. So that change here just recently was updated means a couple of things. I just wanted to go through this article real quick and talk about that. So what exactly changed in the review system? So Google now allows any user to set up custom display name and profile image, which will appear on all reviews, photos, videos, and contributions across maps and search. It's also retroactive to all the other reviews that they have left as well. So you don't need to have a different Google account to protect your identity. You can just update your profile information. So in practice, what this should mean is that customers can leave reviews under a nickname instead of their full name. All past, future Google Maps contributions, adopt the pseudonym, applies across Q&A, images, and videos. So Google still knows the account behind the review, only the public name is going to be different. So it should allow, in some industries, folks to be able to leave reviews where maybe in the past they haven't. For example, legal services. So in legal services, can you imagine if you were charged for a crime and your attorney helped you and kept you out of jail or whatever it was, and you went on to post, hey, I got charged with shoplifting. And thankfully, my attorney helped me out. You may not want to put your name on that and have it out there. So things like that, mental health is another big area, various medical or health care practices, a lot of health care practices, I think this could affect. Definitely addiction treatment and recovery, financial advisors, and some sensitive home services. The big question is, does this is, The Increase fake review risk. Most people don't think so. Again, this article is from taprocard.com. They certainly don't think so because it's still a real account. It's not like it's a fake account or something like that. So I think it's still going to produce good reviews, but it should increase the number of reviews. And that's really why this matters for business. You should be able to get more reviews. What you want is more frequent reviews, more recent reviews, and that will help build trust from potential customers. And even with all the AI hype and everything that's going on, it's going to help you with your SEO in maps and search, in particular from phones. So how do businesses adjust the review request strategy? How One thing that can be added when you're requesting reviews is to mention if you'd like extra privacy, Google now allows you to leave reviews under a custom display name. And so that can be something that you add in there. I'm also going to put a link here in the post on how to change your Google display name so that you can see that and be able to offer that for your clients as well. So I just wanted to throw out this quick little update. If you have any questions about this, I want to talk about how your reviews are being managed right now. If you're using our services or someone else and would like to talk about that, please reach out. Thank you again, Peter Brissette, Digital Marketing Dude. Visit our website at dmdude.com. Here is the link to the original Post: https://taprocard.com/blogs/article/google-anonymous-reviews-update-2025 Here is a link that explains how to change your display name on google. https://support.google.com/maps/answer/15294714?hl=en
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The last question that should we follow our competitors on social media? Sure, why not. You know, you want to see what they're doing and see what's happening there. You know if you're going to be active and you're really trying to use social to build your business then having a good idea what's what your competition is up to is probably important. And you know sometimes what I find with so called competitors is that we you know often times find people that we can collaborate with. It doesn't necessarily mean they are competitors so we work with a number of other marketing agencies and provides some services for them for their clients that they don't necessarily do, but they hire us to do it for them. So like I work with other marketing agencies, so they're not necessarily, you know, your competitor and everything. So but yeah, see what's going on you know, investigate, read up on them, see what they're doing, check out their websites, see what they're ranking for. You know, the more you understand the competitive landscape, the more you know what you should be doing and what you need to do.
And the last question that we have is, can you say more about running a test on TikTok yeah, I so I'm not on TikTok I'm not using tiktok. I wind up watching a lot of TikTok videos on Facebook and the Facebook reels. I think it's fascinating. I find it very interesting. But it's not a platform that I've taken the time to jump on at this point. Again, based on where I'm at with strategy and so forth, it's not a fit for me. But anytime you're using any platform, if you're going to do something, you want to come up with some means of measurement. How am I going to measure success? What does success look like? Is it I, you know, posted a video and I got a thousand views. Is that success you know or is it actually driving traffic and are you tracking how much traffic and then are you tracking what happened to that traffic? Did they fill out a form, did they make a phone call? Like what's the, where do you want that to go? So we really need to step back and think about that whole process. Of creating content, I'm pushing this through to, you know, to my website. And this is what I want to have happen. This is what I wanted the results to be. And then how am I going to track it? How am I going to measure it and do that so anytime you're spending, anytime you're doing something new in particular. Or you're spending any money you need to track it all the way through. All the way through.
The next question that we have is if you have a GoDaddy web page already and are having some issues, are you able to switch over somehow? You can build your website on any other platform and then just you just change the domain where the domain points. So yeah, you can do that anytime. Thank you, Peter.
Next question is how powerful are paid plans to things like Google Adwords or whatever it is called now regarding driving traffic, how can you possibly compete when you don't have the cash to put towards such programs? Yeah, so that's where you gotta get creative. So again we're small businesses and we don't have you know, unlimited funds to you know, just throw a bunch of ads up and you know compete with some other big companies so. Again, this goes back to what are the things I can really do better, because chances are your website is getting some traffic and it could be getting good traffic, but if your messaging isn't clear on your website, you're not getting them to take the next step. They're not making a phone call or filling out a form. So where I can put energy and effort is in that messaging and that and being very clear about who I'm working with, the problem I solve, how I solve it. So that whoever does come across my radar, I have a much higher chance of converting that person then someone else. So you know it's not the best product that always wins, it's who's the best communicator. And so that's why I talk about what you own and what you can't can control and making sure that is dialed in. And doing what it's supposed to do so that if you do go I, if I'm dialed in and I know everything is working well with my website and it's communicating clearly now, I can spend a small amount on ads and drive a small amount of traffic knowing that I'm probably going to get a decent amount of conversions because my messaging's on point and so I don't have to spend as much as the big guy. But I can be more effective because I've spent time working on the stuff that really matters. Thanks, Peter.