Today we're going to discuss how your product line and target audience will affect your marketing plan.

Product Line: First, take a look at your current product line. Is it attracting the customers that live in your store’s geographic area?  If there are slow items, consider dropping the line, focus more on what is selling. Then, find similar products and add them to the offerings. Prep your offerings for the store’s geographic area and the target you will identify. Then contact your vendors to see if they'll offer co-operative advertising. 

Target Audience: Find out everything you can about your current customers.  Yes, of course, name and address.  But also, email address, how much they spend each year, when they spend it and their social media status. Encourage your current customer's to follow your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc), so you can stay top-of-mind in their newsfeeds and help them refer their online audience to your business.

Also, another conversation with your vendors will help you find out who they think will buy their products. Defining your customer in the most detail as you can is important. It will help you decide what media will be best and how you talk with them. 

Stay tuned for Part Three of our Small Business Series!

Have you ever wished you could target your advertising to only the people within your delivery or service area? Or how about just marketing to the people who are most likely to be looking for your product or service? Well now you can do just that! 


The Oakland Press has partnered with Yahoo! to offer Oakland County businesses the ability to send out their advertising message to users based on their location (by zip code or region), age, gender, and behaviors! Now that's waste-free advertising! 


For more information, contact your Oakland Press Advertising Account Executive, or call 248-745-4595.

As a small business, you may never have taken a structured approach to advertising.  There may be an advertising budget that you outlined at the  beginning of the year, but you were well under or over that amount at the end.  Now that the economy is slow, you might be asking if it is doing any good.

The best approach is a structured advertising plan.  Compare the elements of a solid plan listed below to your market, your business and your customer.   

-Geography

-Target Audience

-Advertising Budget

-Media Types

-Marketing Message

-Placement

-Review

Today we'll start with Geography...

Make some measurements of the geographic market area that you serve and the people that live there. Find out who they are, how much money they earn, what stage of life they are in and where they live.

Consider how far your prospective clients are willing to travel for your products or services and use a free zip code radius finder to determine the area that you need to be geo targeting.

Geo targeting is the first step in ensuring that your marketing budget and efforts are waste-free!

Stay tuned for more tips from 

Morris in our small business series!