Tips - Confused Markets in Your Marketing

Your expertise probably already serves or can serve more than one market. That's the good news and the better news, once you are clear about that and then make choices on how best to reach them.

Whether you write how-to books, tips booklets, create videos, or do any other form of information product, it's crucial to decide how to clearly deliver your information to multiple markets right now.

Let's say your two most immediate and obvious markets are consumers and business/commercial, and you have determined that you want to serve them both. That's a typical situation with many of the building and maintenance trades and suppliers, for instance. You'd give a homeowner different tips on what to do about choosing floor covering in their house than you would a building manager for a high-traffic lobby area of a major commercial building. The concepts may be similar though the exact tips and suggestions will certainly vary.

A professional organizer offers ideas for organizing a computer hard drive. The specifics for organizing a home office computer hard drive can bear some similarities in concept to the networked computers of a 2,500-person corporate headquarters so that everyone who needs to access central files can do so. And the details will vary.

A psychologist works with individuals on their family issues and also goes to businesses to work with the interactions among employees and executives. While it's still about human dynamics and interaction, the contexts vary enough to require different specifics.

You're a travel agent who has clients that run the gamut of ages, from infants to seniors. This is another place where the concepts can be similar, though the details must be customized for the needs of each age group.

In just those examples it's obvious that your attempt to serve everyone simultaneously in one spot can end up serving no one. Offering what you view as all of your best information in the same books, booklets, articles, websites, and any other form of information product online or offline can become counterproductive to your markets and to your business. People won't recognize that you're talking about their needs, and you may be making them work too hard to find the information that truly relates to them.

Having information products and services all on one page that deal with the consumer, the commercial business owner, and the person who wants to learn how to be a colleague in your field couldn't be more confusing! At the very least, have a separate page on your website that is clearly titled for each of those markets. In your publications and promotions, you can add "for in-depth information about [a different market], you'll want our book on [title that clearly references the other market]."

You can always make reference to your other markets in any of your tips publications or any of your online marketing. It's not uncommon for a website to actually address multiple markets, as long as it's done clearly.