Smart Marketing - Bud Brewer: Marketing Planning: Chapter 4

Now that we’ve touched on the fundamental question, "Who is the customer?" in last month’s Smart Marketing column, let’s zero in on the equally important question of "Where is the customer?"

WHERE IN THE WORLD? "Where" in this context has two elements. The first has to do with domicile, the second with geography. Assuming for the moment that your customer is residential, then is he or she in a single-family home, duplex, multi-family low rise, multi-family high rise or mobile home? Some folks in our business only do single family while others focus on congregate facilities. Some do mobile homes, while others don’t touch them. When doing direct mail marketing, the answer or answers to this question can save you from delivering mail to people you don’t serve as customers.

The geography question is a bigger deal, and one that is often difficult to answer. What, fundamentally, is your service area? Adapt these geographic categories to your circumstances and answer as honestly as you can, because it truly matters how you view your ability to provide service within a specified geographical area.

Are you able to provide service to the entire area covered by your local television, radio and daily newspaper media outlets? Television usually covers the widest area and has delivery capability to the largest audience. Radio is next and newspaper follows radio. Of course, you need to consider that there usually are fewer daily newspaper choices than radio choices, and fewer radio choices than television (and cable) choices. The bigger the market, the more fragmented the media choices.

Do you service one or more cities or counties within your overall market? Sometimes, pest management professionals limit their service area to that which they can most economically and quickly cover. And sometimes there are county or municipal cable franchises that meet this media need. Sometimes there are local or otherwise zoned editions of newspapers that are circulated on a county or citywide basis. Radio and over-the-air television can, in certain situations, over-reach your ability to provide service and therefore include listeners and viewers that you pay for but don’t want to service.

LIMITING CIRCUMSTANCES. Within a larger city or market, is your service area limited to a portion of that market? Is yours, in essence, a neighborhood business? Electronic media or daily newspapers might be too costly for you, but direct mail, outdoor advertising and/or highly localized print media might effectively and efficiently serve your interest.

In creating a profile of the "target customer" on whom you wish to zero in, and assuming you’ve addressed to your satisfaction the demographic gender and age spread (women ages 35 to 54 or adults ages 25 to 64, for examples), the next issues are, again for examples, single-family homeowners or residents on the north side of Chicago, or multi-family residents in Hamilton County, or all property types in the Tampa/St. Petersburg/Clearwater market.

By properly designating the property type and general geographic limits of your targeted marketplace, you’ll hit more of your desired prospects and spend less money doing it!

Next month, we’ll address issues relating to the duration or time period during which you’ll be doing your marketing, a key element of any successful marketing program.