When your marketing group begins to prepare new postal promotions or email advertisements, a step that needs to be completed before any design work commences is identifying your best prospects. After all, you will not know how to properly design a mailer until you know who it is going to because different people react to different marketing messages. Also, your best prospects, or highly targeted audience, will be much more likely to respond to your offer and vastly improve your return on investment (ROI).
Best Prospects
Identifying the best prospects for your marketing campaign begins with investigating the best business marketing sources for your particular industry and offer.
The best source for determining audience is your existing customer or client list. Who are these people and why are they buying from you or working with you? Repeating success of the past is frequently easier and less expensive than forging ahead in new directions.
However, there comes a time when you need to stretch out and take a chance on new markets. Whether you are interested in sending out snail mail postal promotions or a short message to your email lists, want to identify certain criteria that coincide somewhat with your existing customer base. Perhaps they work in a closely related industry or belong to the same professional association.
What other business marketing sources besides your own records can you use to identify the ideal prospects?
1 – Conduct proper research on trusted sources like Census Bureau data, small business administration information and association member lists.
2 – Identify the influencers – the niche-specific “celebrities” that interested people pay attention to for information and recommendations – in your target industry or niche and contact them through social media, their own websites or directly through email or postal mail.
3 – Get out there and mingle with the type of professionals you think would be interested in your product or service. This is a rather old-fashioned way of finding prospects and is not particularly cost-effective because there are only so many people at each physical location. Still, talking face-to-face is probably the most effective way to know immediately if someone wants more information or not.
4 – Go straight for business marketing sources that have already identified and conglomerated all the contact information of potential prospects for you. These postal and email lists from a trusted source, like Bethesda List, include highly targeted prospects you can use right away to develop, design and send out your direct mail marketing message.
How to identify your target market
If you are involved in the creation of a marketing campaign for your company or organization, the first step is always to identify the ideal audience for best prospects that are most likely to respond to your offer. If you send an email or postal brochure or letter to a general list of contacts, your ROI will be miserable. Identify your target market and build a campaign that specifically focuses on their interests and needs in order to find greater success no matter what you are selling or offering.
