Market to your customer, not to yourself!
Are you marketing through your own lens or to your target audience? Are you ensuring your advertising resonates with your ideal customers, or are you letting personal biases skew your strategy? This episode dives into the importance of focusing your marketing efforts on your audience’s preferences rather than your own inclinations. Discover how to gather insights effectively and why adapting your message is critical to attract the right clients.
Listen to this new 5-minute episode for strategies to fine-tune your marketing efforts and ensure they align perfectly with your target audience’s needs and interests.
Episode Summary:
In this episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast, I delve into the importance of marketing to your customer, not to yourself. Fresh from publishing From Browsing to Booking with Brian Lawrence, I share insights on how wedding professionals often fall into the trap of using their own tastes to guide their marketing strategies, which can lead to misguided efforts. I discuss how crucial it is to understand your target audience—whether they’re Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z—and shape your marketing to resonate with them. I also talk about my use of AI tools like ChatGPT to refine content for specific demographics and the ongoing process of validating marketing approaches through customer feedback and research. Tune in to learn practical tips for better aligning your marketing with your audience’s needs and preferences.
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View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/
Market to your customer, not to yourself. Listen to this episode. See where I’m going with this. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I just finished publishing a book. You might have seen the new book, From Browsing to Booking, Right. New book by Brian Lawrence and I.
It’s a website and SEO book for wedding event professionals. And. And part of the book, my part of the book is about design and it’s about insight and strategy and things like that. And one of the things that I talk about in there is that you need to be marketing to your customer, not to yourself. And this is where a lot of people go wrong with their advertising and marketing and things like that, because you’re looking at it from your lens, which is just natural human nature, you’re looking at and saying, do I like this, not like this? Or whatever. And if you’re not your ideal customer, if you are not the avatar of your ideal customer, then you’re completely biased in the wrong way to decide if this is the right marketing for this. I was doing sales training at an event recently and the room had the boss was Gen X. The people there were mostly Gen Y, but there were some Gen Z in the room as well.
And you need to get these opinions from the people that represent more of your target audience when you’re looking at things like your website, your marketing, and different things that you’re doing. I’ve been talking about this on the podcast a bunch, a lot of things that I’ve been doing with AI. And one of the things that I’m doing is when I have text that I’ve written about things, sometimes I might go in and say, okay, tweak this. And I talk to ChatGPT like it’s a person. Tweak this as if it’s for a reader who is a millennial. And it could possibly be a younger Gen X or it could possibly be an older Gen Z, but rewrite it for that. And I’m just curious to see what it comes up with in terms of the wording. I was very happy that when I ran the words on my website through, it changed very little.
When I said to rewrite it for a Gen Y audience with a little bit of, you know, Gen X and Gen Z, which good. I mean, that was good for me. On the one hand, I was kind of hoping it would tell me to do something different thinking because I do like change. If you heard the other episode, I did did that. But I was happy to see that I’M you know, staying in tune with my target audience because I am not that. I am not a younger Gen X or a millennial or an older Gen Z. I am none of those things. So are you going through your lens and saying, I like this, don’t like this, whatever, or are you getting the opinion of the people that you’re trying to attract? And if you don’t want to ask them, if that’s not something you want to do or can do, are you paying attention to what they’re paying attention to so that you can emulate more of those things not by copying, but by taking cues from that? What websites do they visit, what TV shows do they watch, what movies do they like, what music do they listen to? And what type of language is being used to speak to them in these places? So that you can take cues from that in terms of, oh, I need to show visuals that show this.
I need to have more video because they’re the TikTok generation. I need to keep things short because of a short attention span. That’s everybody these days anyway. But what are the cues that you can take from that? Because you don’t want to be marketing to yourself if you’re not your target audience? I know who my target audience is. My target audience is more Gen X probably than anything these days. But there are baby boomers in there, there are Gen Y in there, and there are Gen Z in there. So that’s why I went on to my the text on my site and said, okay, well, so maybe these Gen Xers, maybe they’re getting a little older and I have more of the millennials in. Do I need to tweak the wording there? Do I need to change what I’m doing there for that? I’ve done that with my speaking topic titles as well as just running things through.
Get an idea. Should I be tweaking some of this wording and will it attract the audience that I know is going to be there? In other words, if I’m fishing, I know the right kind of fish. I know the right kind of bait for that fish. But not because I think so, because I get validation of this from other places. So quick episode here just to get you thinking you are not. If you are not your target audience, and I shouldn’t say that even if you are your target audience. We don’t want to lump everybody in and say that every millennial is this or every Gen X is that or every Gen Z is that, because they’re not. So not everybody buys the way that you do.
Not everybody is attracted to the same things that you do and just because you live in a certain area or went to a certain school or have a certain level of education doesn’t mean that everybody that ticks those same boxes is going to like the same things. So go back and can you go back into your reviews, go back into the people that you’ve worked with and think about the avatar of your ideal customer and then do research in terms of what does attract them. I’m going to do another episode on things I’ve been doing with ChatGPT with reviews in order to find that you’ll find a lot of it in there but remember if you are not your target audience and the ideal avatar within that target audience you do not want to be being the opinion of you like or don’t like whatever that marketing is because you might love it and then you attract nobody and that’s not good for business. So thanks for listening.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected] or you can text, use the short form on this page, or call +1.732.422.6362, international 001 732 422 6362. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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