One very important part of advertising is who you’re targeting. If you want to appeal to a certain audience, it is important to find a way to set yourself apart from the competition. Additionally, you need to show that you are uniquely qualified to provide the type of products or services that your target audience needs. Sometimes through small business advertising, the urge to be everything to everyone comes up. Too often, the end result of this type of “one size fits all” marketing approach is that the audience you are trying to reach can’t recognize that your product or service is specifically geared towards them.

It is almost a given that your product will not appeal equally to everyone. It’s a waste of valuable advertising resources to advertise to people that aren’t interested in your product. Believing that your have a larger target audience than your actually do is a big mistake that a lot of small businesses make. They sometimes attempt the brand awareness approach to try an get customers that might want their product or services in the future, rather than narrowing the way they do advertising towards their target audience. Thanks to extremely high advertising budgets, big corporations can often have this approach work for them, but for small business it’s too high of a risk. Effective advertising resources that could have reached a larger target audience and raised brand awareness are wasted using this approach.

As a general rule, people are only interested in advertising when it is perceived of immediate benefit to them. An easy way to attract them as customers is to find out what type of product or service they’re interested in now. And of course, those that aren’t interested will simply ignore the advertisements. If you put a lot in trying to attract the uninterested group, then don’t expect a lot in return.

The first step towards maximizing your small business advertising efforts is identifying the perfect customer. Whoever most benefits from your product or service is the ideal customer. They being the ones that would bring in the most profit, and that you’d enjoy doing the most business with. Although most targeted advertising is geared towards a niche, identifying and focusing upon this “ideal customer” can help small businesses put a face on their target audience, which will help determine the best advertising methods to use.

Take print advertising for example. Rather than advertising in a huge variety of magazines, your ads should focus and be fine-tuned towards specific types of magazines that best appeal to your audience. Use demographics when targeting your audience if you’re using direct mail advertising. Even internet marketing can be fine-tuned towards different types of audience by adding various landing pages for each type.

Targeted marketing can make your small business advertising much more effective. Of course, there’s still a chance that those outside your target audience will notice your advertisements and take action occasionally. But attracting your ideal customer is a lot more likely.

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