The First Step to Turbo-Charging Your Marketing

By Carma Spence-Pothitt

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Is your business blooming and growing?

Are you seeing regular increases in income or customer base?

Do customers and clients come looking for you?

If you answered "no" to these questions -- if you are working overtime looking for new clients and customers -- you may have a stale or ineffective marketing funnel.

And this is something that you can easily fix.

The first step is to thoroughly know your target market. You can't build a magnetic marketing funnel without this information. And, I can't stress this concept enough. It is critical to building a sustainable business.

Think about it, would you rent a car without knowing where you were going to drive it? Would you choose an outfit before knowing where you were going to wear it? Would you pack for a trip without know where you were going?

Then why would you develop a marketing plan without knowing who you were going to market to?

You are building your marketing funnel, also called a marketing pipeline, product funnel or sometimes sale funnel, to help solve the problems of your ideal clients. It may sound counterintuitive, but the tighter you focus on your chosen market, the easier it is to attract them and market to them.

When you market to broad, general categories of people, it is hard to develop a compelling message they will respond to. So, you need to clearly define your target market and find out as much about them as you can. Here are some questions you'll want to ask yourself about your target audience:

• What is your chosen market's common thread?
  Is it age? Career choice? Industry? Gender? Hobby?
• Where does your target market live?
  Locally? Nationally? Globally?
• What types of publications does your chosen market read?
  Are they newspapers? magazines? forums? blogs? ezines?
• What is your target market's typical salary range?
• What is your target audience's career level?
  Are they beginners? executives? middle management? entrepreneurs?
• What is your target market's relationship status?
  Are they single? Married? Have children?

These are just a small sampling of the things you need to know. Basically, you're trying to get at what makes your target market tick so that you can develop messages that will resonate with them. This will also help you develop products and services that they will want to buy.