“Define your perfect customer and market to them.”

If you’re in business, you’ve heard that a zillion times. Sometimes it’s not easy to define your perfect customer. Beyond that, sometimes it’s harder to turn away the less than perfect customer because they’re willing to pay you. That’s why businesses, especially small businesses, attempt to market to everyone. They think, “Make your message as generic as possible and you’ll land more customers.”

Except you won’t.

Delivering a targeted message to a targeted audience is increasingly important, even for us. My company builds large scale web apps, but also builds web sites and provides marketing services to small businesses. How do we market that? Answer: we can’t. It’s impossible. That’s why we created Web.Search.Social. It gives us a branded service offering that we can effectively market without diluting the app side of the business.

You also have to keep evolving your perfect avatar over time because it can change. Your avatar in a good economy may not make sense in a bad economy. Your avatar may change from season to season. Your avatar may be affected by external factors such as an increase in the cost of petroleum.

But it’s not just your avatar that changes. You and your business change. Maybe you don’t like doing what you do any more. Maybe you got divorced. Maybe you want to start a family and need more money.

What can be helpful to your business is to define your avatar economically first. That’s another way of saying, “sell and market to people that will pay you the most money.” Refine from there. When that avatar ceases to be economically viable, redefine.

It’s not a set it and forget it kinda thing.

Don’t believe me?

Chances are your avatar changed since you started reading this.

These are my 300 words for the day. I am Ralph M. Rivera.

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