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Drew McLellan asks “Are you where your customers are looking?“. His post references online marketing and the SEM Gap that exists, but it also made me question the overall marketing reach of small business. Does your business have a marketing presence at all customer points of contact? How well do you engage with customers at each of these touch points?

Two Types of Marketing Reach

Physical Reach – Is it easy for your target market to buy from you at a specific touch point?

Example: Your target market buys books online; your website doesn’t offer e-commerce (Negative Physical Reach).

Emotional Reach – How well do you engage with your target market at a specific touch point?

Example: Your hardware store target market is do-it-yourselfers; your store is always short staffed, customers have a hard time getting their questions answered (Negative Emotional Reach).

Examples of +/- Marketing Reach

• Touch Point: In-Store
  • Your store is not located where your target market likes to shop (-)(Physical)
  • Your store always has friendly, helpful staff (+)(Emotional)
• Touch Point: Telephone
  • Your phone system is fully automated with no live attendants (-)(Physical/Emotional)
  • You have a live person pick up every call and they are qualified to help solve your customers problems (+)(Physical/Emotional)
• Touch Point: Search Engines/Website
  • Your website is poorly optimized and you don’t engage in search engine marketing (-)(Physical)
  • Your website can be found online but your navigation/usability are poor (-)(Emotional)
  • Your website offers an easy to find and easy to use quote tool that helps prospects find out the price of your product/service (+)(Physical/Emotional)

Make a list of all your small business’ marketing touch points. Are you physically and emotionally present at each point of contact? What can you do to turn negative physical/emotional reach into positives?

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By Mark Smiciklas

New Marketing should prompt small business to re-think the way they reach their target markets.

Old marketing is based on mass targeting – spend ad dollars and use mass media to push your message out to as many people as possible.

The idea: If you spend enough, spread your marketing messages far and wide and target the masses, people will eventually buy your product or service.

Old marketing asks questions like:

• “Can you really afford not to target as many people as possible?”
• “How much business are you passing up by not maximizing you advertising reach?”

New marketing is based on niche targeting – create content and use search engines/social media to engage interested people in your product or service.

New marketing poses questions like:

• “How many passionate customers do you need to run a profitable business?”
• “Are 100 truly interested prospects more valuable than 10,000 people who don’t really care?”

New marketing can be scary because it may not work the way you expect it to. It’s also harder than than old marketing because it forces you to:

• Focus – “Who are my customers?”
• Come up with content that adds value to your relationships and helps solve your target audiences problems

What do you think works better….Mass or Niche? Why?

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Image Note: The document portion used in the image above is attributed to Tim Morgan