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Designers Market-Link™ Newsletter
"Smart Marketing Tools for Architects, Designers, and Allied
Professionals"
Online Issue No. 7
"If You Don't Know, Ask!"
by Susan Bilenker
If the 90s have taught us one thing, it's that we can't afford to become
complacent about the loyalty of clients or the types of services we offer them.
So even if your business is comfortably ensconced in a particular niche or two, as
owner and fearless leader you must regularly scout new markets and new clients. Only thus
can you build in the diversity and flexibility your company will need when a favorite
client or market type departs.
However, in the age of lean-and-mean, it's not cost-effective to simply identify a
market, rent a contact list, and start mailing out brochures. You need to test the waters
first, to see how deep with potential they run. Otherwise, no matter how graceful and
athletic your marketing high-dive, you could discover a pile of rocks just beneath the
surface of the glistening pool below!
According to Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don't
Work and What to Do About It (Harper Business), "Poor market segmentation or
strategy" is one of the "top ten reasons for small business failure."
(quoted in Home Office Computing, May 1994)
What is market segmentation? It's a way of dividing all your potential
and existing clients into sub-groups of individuals who share similar needs and
preferences.
For example, one of my clients designs concert pavilions. These are large, tent-like
structures that cover an orchestra or band and sometimes the audience.
In developing a marketing strategy, we could have mailed information to all people who
organize concerts. But we thought a little harder and realized that the needs and
interests of rock promoters were markedly different from those of symphony orchestras.
One difference was in the physical design of the tents themselves. Acoustic
music -- the norm for classical performances -- requires a roof surface that's curved to
properly project the orchestra sounds out to the audience. Amplified music -- as in rock
concerts -- requires a tented space that provides sound dampening or absorption.
Another difference between these two submarkets was cultural and organizational.
Symphony orchestras are typically set up as non-profit corporations, with a CEO and a
board of directors. The classical music world has historically been conservative, peopled
with college-educated individuals with highly refined tastes and sensibilities.
The rock/country/pop/blues world is a tee-shirt-and-jeans, street-smart, highly visual
and auditory one, with a short attention span for the written word -- unless it's song
lyrics on the back of a CD. The rock promoter is a for-profit, high-risk-taking
entrepreneur.
So we concluded that even though we were selling one service -- the
design of concert pavilions -- we really had at least two separate audiences
for our marketing message. Realizing this, we knew we'd have to customize our marketing
materials to address the particular idiosyncracies of each audience.
How do you go about finding out what a particular market segment wants
to hear from you?
We coudn't rely on gross generalities like the ones offered above. They wouldn't give
us an in-depth understanding of the particular needs of the real people in each group. And
to be effective in marketing, you must always imagine talking with one person at a time.
To gain insight, we read trade publications and industry association newsletters in
each market. This also introduced us to some of the more visible players through news
items about them or articles written by them.
Then, we more narrowly qualified our markets. For example, because custom
concert pavilions are expensive, we presumed that our best prospects in the symphony
orchestra market would be orchestras with an annual budget of $1 million or more. Through
a trade publication's annual directory issue, I made a contact list of presidents and
managing directors of these orchestras.
But we still didn't have enough information about these decisionmakers. And they didn't
know who we were yet, so we needed a way of warming them to our message.
We did this by sending a brief survey to all the people on the contact list,
along with a copy of an article we'd recently published in their trade association
magazine. The survey demonstrated our interest in each of them, and the article gave us
credibility within their industry.
As an incentive to fill out the survey, we promised to send each responder a copy of
the survey results. The number of people responding to the survey was sizable, and 90% of
those who replied requested a brochure about my client's services. Our next mailing to the
symphony orchestra presidents announced the survey results, and to stretch its utility we
also formatted it as a suggested article for one of the aforementioned trade magazines.
Susan Bilenker is a marketing and publicity consultant. She specializes in strategic
thinking and implementation for architecture and design firms, working directly with the
principals to identify and open up new markets for their services. Involved with the
Internet since 1995, she publishes several informational Web sites, including DesignSite
and Rivertowns Online.
copyright 1997-2005 Susan Bilenker
Communications.
Updated 1/24/05
Please send comments and suggestions to Susan Bilenker at
info@design-site.net.