This is a guest post by Tom Harris, Your Marketing Coach. Tom helps entrepreneurs and small businesses develop and execute marketing plans. He specializes in website usability and effectiveness.

Do all of your customers and potential customers have exactly the same needs?  David Meerman Scott, in his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR, talks about “buyer personas”, the various sub-groups contained within your “market”.  He offers the interesting example of a website for a college, which would clearly need to focus on a number of different groups; current students, prospective students, parents of current students, parents of prospective students, alumni, and so on.  So a buyer persona is a description of a group of people who have clearly distinct needs.

Can you segment your overall market into distinct groups?  If you can, do you have a distinct message for each group?  Does your website address the needs of all of these groups, or does it just have a single one-size-fits-all message?  How about your printed materials, business cards, email marketing, etc?  Do you have several variations of your “elevator pitch” that you can select from based on a little knowledge of the person you’re with a the moment?

Probably some of your groups are more important to you than others.  Are you giving the appropriate amount of attention to each group?  Do you have one or more minor groups that maybe you should not be focusing on at all?

The goal of all your marketing efforts must be to focus on the buyers’ needs and goals, not on your products and services.  As David Meerman Scott says in another of his books, World Wide Rave, “nobody cares about your products”.  Buyers care about their own needs, and if your marketing message includes information for both Group A and Group B, that means that no matter which group you’re talking with, at least part of your message is not relevant to them.  Try to identify the various Buyer Personas that you might have, then tailor a custom message for each group.

Tom Harris, Your Marketing Coach