Don’t sell to the market, sell to your dream audience!

When I got fired from the Beer Store, I was in a dark place and it was hard for me to get out of the house and enjoy life.

Oddly enough, I started to go to a market down the road from me on Tuesday’s to get my meats and veggies for the week. 

The Beer Store knew they were wrong in firing me so I was given a “golden handshake” so to speak, a lot more money than they needed to give me so I wasn’t left stranded. That for me was the perfect stepping stone in starting my entrepreneurial journey.

Little did I know, going to the market on Ottawa Street here in Windsor and buying my meats from Zaccagnini Meats would have taught me such an important lesson in marketing.

For me, It was a bonus having the market so close, and the more I went, the more they got to know me. It was to the point where I would go in so often, they would have my 4lbs of ground beef packaged into 1lb bags as I got there. 

I became Zaccagnini Meats dream customer and I definitely was a “satisfied customer” mainly going there for my ground beef. The odd time I would go to a different market for steaks but when it came to my ground beef, I was a “satisfied” customer/regular.

If you’ve seen anything on my personal social media platforms, you’d also know I’m a massive craft beer lover and you’ll notice that Chapter Two Brewing here in Windsor is like the bar “Cheers” to me. That is my go-to spot, neighborhood bar and a place I like to work from near the end of the week. 

When I say I’m a “satisfied” customer at Zaccagnini Meats, I’m a “diehard” customer at Chapter Two Brewing.

Not only do I love the beer at Chapter Two, the team there is hands down the best from the front staff, to the brewers and all the way to the owners. I can walk in there at any point and they’ll have a Danger Bird IPA ready for me in my personal #38 mug from the Mug Club.

You’ll notice in the last couple paragraphs, I’ve just used two words and I have put them in quotations for a reason. When it comes to the marketplace, there are 3 types of people. The Die-Hard, The Satisfied and The Frustrated.

If you look back over the past 12 years, I have been a Die-Hard BlackBerry fan. No matter what you said to me, what you told me about any other phone maker, I would have never switched. Now that I have a Samsung…that’s a story for a different day.

When it comes to Breweries here in Windsor, although I will visit others and enjoy their great beer, I’m a Die-Hard Chapter Two fan, nothing you say will convince me there is a better beer out there. Like I said, that’s my “Cheers”.

There are other things I’m satisfied with and if there is a better opportunity out there, a better product or something that might even be cheaper, although I’m satisfied with something I could be persuaded to switch.

When it comes to being frustrated, that reminds me of my D-Link Router. I have had D-Link products for most of my life and it wasn’t until the last year or 2 that my router started to intermittently disconnect from the internet. As a remote business owner, you can image how frustrated I was.

Having that router for many years I figured it was at the end of it’s life so I bought another D-Link product only to have it do the same thing just a month later.

After upgrading the firmware, switching locations, and trying to have it plugged into the wall directly other than the surge protector….it continued to fail and make me even more frustrated. That was the last straw and I moved on to a different product. 

As I started to research for a product that was similar but obviously from a different company I was starting to get ads from D-Links competitors. They knew that I was an audience they wanted to market to, someone that was frustrated with my current product so they were hoping to get my business.

You hear it often, people will ask you what your target market is but in reality the question should be, what is your target audience. The market is a place where your audience hangs out, you just have to know who your audience is and then market to them. 

If I go to the Ottawa Street Market in Windsor, Zaccagnini Meats is going to make their strategy work around the audience that is frustrated with other markets and try to bring an audience from there to the market they are in. 

It’s really that simple, as long as you know the difference between the market and your audience you’re all set and ready to go!

Speaking about knowing your audience and how to market to them, that’s exactly what Russell talks about in his book Expert Secrets. It has a lot more detail as well. 

If you’re ready to market to your audience and take things to the next level, getting Experts Secrets for free and is the obvious next step.

Click below to get it!