Who are your best customers? Where should your direct your marketing activities? Where and how should you allocate your advertising and promotional efforts? Target marketing provides direction for all of your sales activities, and guidance for other aspects of your overall operational planning. It helps you make the most efficient use possible out of your scarcest resources, time and money. Target marketing helps you to understand specifically what needs to be done to reach your objectives. It is both a planning and an action tool. The process is straightforward. Plan what needs to be done, then implement the specific activities needed to turn these plans into reality.
Target marketing provides a simple, direct and effective eight-step process to help identify those segments of the market most apt to become your customers. Once identified, developing the rest of your marketing strategy becomes much easier and guides your other operational planning. The customers themselves then help to define these other aspects. Success here is not a matter of spending a lot of money or even requiring sophisticated staff. It is instead the result of careful application of some basic principles. These are principles, which a small firm or a single operating department today can apply with sometimes even greater benefits than a larger company. A customer orientation and small size allows a clear focus on needs satisfaction and great flexibility to change when the circumstances change.
The Strategic Management Learning System (SMLS) is a proven business management training program developed by Dr. William R. Osgood and adopted by the U.S. Small Business Administration as their first complete learning system created by a single author. © 2008
