We Can’t Be Everything to Everybody

By: The CITY Marketing Team

Marketing, Marketing, Marketing. Some may view the world of Marketing as a big elephant in the room. Where does one start? How does one even begin? Well, questions aside, Marketing is not as challenging as one might think. The key to an elaborate industry, like Marketing, is to break it down into consumable pieces. This type of process is one that is utilized by the CITY Marketing Team. Instead of your traditional, tactical sales team, the marketing team works strategically to cover a lot of different ground.

Speaking of strategy, one element that the CITY Marketing Team utilizes is a strategic value messaging workshop. “This means diving into who makes us who we are, who do we want to be, so we got rid of all the external distractions,” said Emily Hauber, CITY’s Marketing Manager. Overall, the workshop is an analysis of who CITY’s ideal customers are or who are the most profitable customers for CITY. With the workshop completed, it was revealed that industrial manufacturing, food processing, and wholesale trade were the top industries for CITY.

The targeted industry focus helped bring more clarity to CITY and the CITY Marketing Team because it gave us a sense of direction. “That helped me because it got me more of a narrow focus, and made me realize, we can’t be everything to everybody,” said Emily.

Once your audiences are defined, a way to reach these targets is through targeted messaging. Targeted messaging is the process of catering content for a particular audience. Say, for example, you want to appeal to twenty-year-olds; you need to use language and terminology that is relatable to them. Therefore, you need to avoid talking about things that would have been before their time like cell phones without Wi-Fi. That same mentality could be used for a variety of other groups of people. Targeted messaging is creating content-specific messaging, thereby utilizing precise specifications to reach specific people as efficiently as possible.

While target messaging is more common today, “back in the day, any place that had a front door, we thought we could do business with them, but then we said no, and thought, of these 20 businesses, only five really make sense for us, so we should dedicate more sales, and more marketing efforts to getting those five, because if we get those five, we can do everything else in our plant more smoothly,” said Emily. Meaning, that while finding customers can be a challenge in the first place, it is also just as important to find customers that fit with your business structure.

Luckily for CITY, “we’re well past feeling the need to advertise to anyone, anywhere; we are now able to hone in on who exactly we want to reach and reach our target audiences in the process,” said Lexie, CITY’s Marketing Coordinator.

Alongside searching for the right customer, “people get so focused on sales, and they may overlook branding, and they think it’s something that can just happen later on,” said Emily. This kind of mindset can potentially cause setbacks for not only your company’s Marketing but also your business as a whole. It is essential to have a big picture, proactive approach to Marketing, so branding does not get left in the dust.

Case in point, “the ideal customers are the ones that come to you because they know what you do, and they want to do it and is what is so great about Marketing. Also, with some of the content that we are putting out, people are asking us follow-up questions. I think it is great that we have done so much work, and people are recognizing it,” said Emily. In an ideal Marketing situation, once you find your Marketing sweet spot, people will be seeking out not only you but also your business.

While CITY is gaining more recognition, we continue to look at every day with a “how can we improve” mindset. People are beginning to recognize CITY’s brand, “so now how do we continue to add more value to our audiences through content to the point where more people want to talk to us about how we can help them,” said Emily. For a business in any industry, it is one thing to be known as a company, but it is another to be known as an expert. So, if you want people to seek out your company specifically, you need to have something that sets you apart and gets people intrigued.

In essence, if you take all of these things into consideration for you or your business, “you can grow your business at an exponential rate,” said Emily. Broadly, it takes having the right people on board, patience, and thoroughly understanding your key audiences’ demographics. So, we can add value to those people, in the long run, turning regular clients into raving fans.