: : Blog, Business Mastery, Financials, Leadership, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Systems, Team Building, Time Management : ( words)

Is defining your target market, truly something that’s critical for your business?. Whether we’re marketing online or off, the most important thing in any marketing strategy is who we’re going after. Why? Because it’s who we’re going after that defines what it is that they’re interested in. It defines why they would want to buy from you.

It defines how we’re going to find them. And only once we’ve defined all of that, can we then say, well, this is the right avenue. This is the right process to reach that market. Now, one of the things is very often I talk to business owners and those business owners are saying, well, my target market is everybody. Or my target market is every business owner or my target market is anybody with hair?

If I’m a hairdresser, yes, that’s your target market. But the problem with doing that is how do you know who they are? How do you know where to find them? How do you know what they want? This is why most people’s marketing fails because they haven’t done the real thinking that’s required to be able to understand exactly who it is that they’re going after.

Exactly what it is that they’re trying to create. The more narrow we make that market, the more we can say, this is exactly who they are. This is exactly what they want, and this is what they’re going to buy. When you know who you’re going after you can look at where do they congregate? Where do they shop? Where do they relax right now?

If I make it too narrow then I’m losing out of other markets, you don’t have to have only one target market. You can have lots of target markets. Marketing is about chunking it down so that you know who you’re talking to. And what you’re saying, I’ll give you a great example of this.

My favorite example is if I’m a hairdresser and I’ve just got my shingle out there going hairdresser on your haircut, how enticing is that? But if I go, who am I going after?. Now I don’t have to limit myself to that, but I have to choose people that I’m going to market to. For example, am I going to market to men or am I going to market to women?

If I choose women, then am I going to chart market to younger women? Middle-aged women? older women? Each of them have something different that they’re looking for right now. I don’t have to change the fact that I’m cutting hair. I have to change who I’m talking about. Even as far as are they married? Are they single? Do they have kids or not? All these things are going to shift. What’s going to be important to them. And if I understand those things, then I can make my marketing more effective.

If I understand those things I can start to look at, well, if who I’m trying to market to right now is young mothers. Let’s say young, single mothers, why not? Where do young single mothers go? Where do they shop? What are they interested in? What’s most important to them, right? That’s going to be different too. If I’m looking at marketing to professional women. And if I can narrow that down and I can truly understand who I’m going after, what it is that they want, what they’re looking for that. And only then can I make my marketing effective.

This is one of the keys to building your business and growing your business and to grow your business, you need to take it through the six steps. It all starts with the foundation. The foundation is what provides the stability for your business. Just like if you were going to build a building, if you’re going to build a house, you need a foundation underneath it. If you’re going to build a skyscraper, you need an even bigger foundation underneath it. Now, luckily in your business, you can start with a small foundation that you would need for a small business and then grow a bigger foundation. As you grow your business. And the foundation consists of four basic pillars.

Pillar #1 is your destination mastery, understanding where you’re going and how you plan to get there.

Pillar #2 is your money mastery, understanding all of the numbers in your business. How do they work together to generate the end result, which is cash in your pocket.

Pillar #3 is your delivery mastery. Understanding where are the bottlenecks? How do you make sure that you can deliver consistent every time? Because at this level, consistency is key. We want to make sure that we’re always delivering consistently so that our clients and our can count on that. It’s going to be consistent every single time.

Pillar #4 we have self-mastery or time mastery. This is understanding how we get the most value out of ourselves and our team. Once we have this step in place, then we have gone from chaos to control.

We now have the stability to put on the next step. The next step is our niche level. This is where we look at marketing. This is where we understand that marketing is an investment and that every dollar that we put into marketing should give us more than that in return. This is one of the keys to making sure that we can grow our business.

Now, it doesn’t mean we weren’t getting customers back at the foundation level. It means that now we’re focused on it. We’re making sure that all the testing and measuring is in we’re making sure that we can predictably produce cash. We got stability, then we got cash. Now we move into systems. Systems are all about leverage. It’s about making sure that we get more out of what we put in. So that we’re always generating more from what we’re putting in. This is the point where we’re going to systemize everything in the business so that it all can be done easily and consistently every single time.

This gives us back time. So we now have the ability. We have cash. We have time, and now we can start to focus on our team. This is not like we’re going to build a team here. Although we probably will build a team here. We’re going to build a team here. We’re going to have a team that works together as a synergistic unit, a team that will run the business as well as if not better than you do. This is where you’re going to put in team leaders or a general manager to be able to run the business without you there. You have to understand the cycle of business at this level.

This is where you understand that the job of the owner is to take care of the team, to make sure that everything that the team needs is handled. They have all of the resources. They have all of the training. They have everything that they need to take really good care of the customer. If the team understands and takes very good care of the customers that customers will take very good care of the business and the business will take very good care of you.

The owner, this is the way business is supposed to work. Now, once we have that in place, we have the structure for growth, which is our next step growth. This is the point where we can take that step back, know that the team is going to run the business. The business is going to be able to run without us, and we turning up the volume on our marketing and looking for cracks in any of these levels so that we can shore them up and make sure that we can keep growing and keep scaling our business up.

That takes us to the final sixth step, which is Results. This is where we get the time, money and freedom out of the business that we went into business for in the first place.

Now below this video, there is a link to an incredible download. This download is our insider’s guide to success in business. It gives you everything that you need to be able to build that solid foundation for your business. So please click that link, download that document, get yourself, building that solid foundation.

If you got value from this video, please like it. And leave me a comment. I love to read the comments. I want your questions. I want to know what’s going on in your mind. And after you’ve done that click on subscribe so that you can subscribe to the channel and click on the little bell so that you get notifications, so you don’t miss a thing whenever we post a new video, thank you for watching. I’m Doug Barra.

I look forward to seeing you in the next video.

About the author,

With 14 years of experience in working with small and medium sized businesses to help them grow, Doug is committed to seeing business owners thrive. Business coaching is what drives Doug.

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