I admit that I have been guilty of marketing to myself. It's an easy trap to fall into. Now that I realize I've been doing this, it's as if the fog has finally cleared and I'm seeing through a different set of "marketing" eyes.
Whether it was giving feedback on a website design, a tagline, the look of a logo, or the marketing message behind our service, I found myself thinking, does this resonate with me? Would I respond to this if I had never heard of AttorneySync before? Unfortunately, these were the wrong questions for me to be asking. My personal response to the marketing message wasn't the correct one to be basing decisions off of because I am not the audience for AttorneySync's services. Now don't get me wrong, it's not as if my opinion has no merit. At the end of the day, I have to be proud of the marketing that is being put out into the public. That being said, I need to be asking myself questions that defines my audience, crafts a message for them, and then decide the best way to get the message out to those folks. This article from blog.inboundmarketing.com does a nice job of breaking down some of the questions:
Define Your Target Audience
Where are they located?
What level of education did they achieve?
What role do they play in their organization?
What is the necessary income/revenue?Craft a Message That Will Resonate
What are their interests?
What are their personal goals?
What are their past behaviors and how do those influence future decisions?Define Your Method of Communication
Where do they congregate?
What kind of information are they looking for?
Where are they when they need it?
It's one thing to ethereally understand you should be marketing to your audience rather than yourself. It's another thing to actually do it in practice.
Each decision you make regarding your marketing should be assessed from the viewpoint of how it will resonate with the audience your service is for. Unless you are a representative sample of your typical client, stop trying to create a marketing campaign around what appeals to you.
Photo by James Cridland
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