Market To People – Not Demographics

What is people based marketing and how do you use it to differentiate yourself in the market?

Traditional marketing, advertising and sales relies on four key pillars

1. Interrupt and Engage with your target client
2. Use lead scoring to identify “now buyers”
3. Nurture future buyers so they remember you when they are ready to buy
4. Have a sales process that measures and rewards success

Since it starts with getting the attention of your target buyers, marketers are always looking for new and better ways to get in front of your target audience. One of the reasons TV was so successful in the early days was because everyone was watching. That gave big brands an advantage as they could buy TV time and get their messages to lots of people. Overtime the built in advantages of big brands has narrowed. Today digital advertising, social media marketing, even cable advertising allows an ever more targeted messaging.

The advantage shifts to smaller marketers the more specific they get with who is their target market and the niche they serve. By focusing on a niche and a target market the regional financial planning firm, for example, can compete with the big boys, develop an audience and content that is especially relevant to their target prospect and win.

As with all marketing, to stand out you must speak clearly, avoid jargon, solve your client’s most pressing problems AND maintain top of mind awareness.

Over the past several years, especially in the digital space, as a marketer we could identify target markets based on demographic profiles, take existing customer data and create “like” audiences, research keyword search activity and build marketing funnels for each search criteria. It worked but it still meant adverting to the people who were shopping now and a whole lot that weren’t.

The marketing pyramid shows that only 2% to 3% of any audience is actually looking to buy what you sell right now. Since 100% of sales comes from now buyers, advertising to all the rest is a waste of time. At best, you can capture their information and nurture a relationship, what we call DRIP marketing, so they will remember you when they are ready to buy in the future.

The next wave of marketing is coming … people based marketing.

Since practically 100% of all purchases are researched online first, people based marketing means using “big data” to determine who is actually a now buyer based on their individual web usage. Then if you know who is actually InMarket for what you sell you can focus your advertising on them specifically. Not on some demographic profile, but on them as an individual. The more expensive the purchase, the more research is done online first.

What about SEO and Keyword advertising?

They work but have two major drawbacks. SEO is slow. It takes a great deal of time, patience, and investment to become a recognized expert. That’s what all the search engine are looking for with organic search. Who can they recommend that actually knows what they’re talking about. Keyword advertising is great but you still waste a lot of advertising on non buyers and future buyers. Perhaps they searched for your firm because they wanted to send you a sales solicitation and were looking for your number. Do you really need them clicking on an advertisement that cost you $20? I think not!

How do you identify the actual people who are searching for what you sell right now?

The good news is that is what we do. With our partners, we track the individual URL activities of 200 million Americans and by leveraging artificial intelligence have identified the specific actions that indicate the someone is InMarket for what you sell … by name. This is incredibly powerful for everyone. For our clients it means they can focus their marketing and advertising on the people who are actually InMarket for their product or service. For the consumer, it means they will see advertisements that are ever more relevant to what they need. For us, it means we can create an unfair competitive advantage for our clients!

Want to learn more?

Our team works with a range of professional service providers. We specialize in Financial Advisors, Wealth Managers, and Insurance Producers.

We work on an exclusive basis. Only once client in any one geography. This means either you work with us to put people based marketing to work for you and take customers from your competition, or they will use this technology against you. Your choice!

Schedule a 15 minute Discovery Call to learn more and see if working makes sense for us both. This technology and our process is special, so we’re looking for few special people to work with.