Target Your Market

I hope you enjoyed my guest blogger, Suzie from Suzie Guzman Solutions, and her comments about Out of the Box Marketing.  One of the topics Suzie covered was about knowing your target market.

In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes those of us in community relations do is that we do not define our target market.  Or, we need to more narrowly define it – we do not hone in on a segment well enough.  This becomes especially important in times when budgets are tight.  We do not have enough bandwidth to be everything to everybody.  So, instead of being willy nilly with your approach to community, decide what is strategic for you to do.

Where can you make the most impact in the community and how can you tie this to business goals.  It’s better to be a big fish in a little pond than vice versa.  If you can really make a huge difference in a small segment of your community, aren’t you doing more good than if you are spreading a whole lot of small contributions around to several different organizations but making no real impact?  If that is what you are doing, you are not being a change agent.  You are not getting to the root cause of any situation.  It’s like putting a band aid on it.

I used to work with a fabulous woman named Barbara Clark when we were at Motorola back in the 90s. I learned well her message about systemic change.  She did an incredible job with her educational outreach, along with her peers at Intel.  Their efforts at making systemic change in the educational system were Herculean, making unimaginable inroads into improving the educational environment here in the Valley of the Sun.  And, because of their focus, and their ability to really hone in on an issue, their efforts are still paying off in today’s educational system.