An important lesson from our last post, “Sneak Peak”, is that even major, global conglomerates, with massive marketing budgets, focus their strategies on geographic or regional target markets. This is a strategy that can be highly efficient and effective for small business marketing efforts.

Clearly, it depends on what type of product or service you are promoting and how you want to market or advertise your message. If you have a digital information product such as an e-book or an audio-book, the world may very well be your oyster but it still makes sense to focus your ad dollars regionally – just like Mazda does.

If you run a traditional bricks and mortar business or profession, you may only want to market locally. Two ways to approach your market are by geography and by customer category. For instance, a local Financial Advisor may have two or three different Chiropractors as clients. It would be prudent for the Financial Advisor to focus on marketing to all Chiropractors within their local area for several reasons. Social proof is one of the big ones.

The Advisor can get testimonials from their satisfied Chiropractor clients and include those testimonials as part of their outgoing marketing message. And the existing client Chiropractors can also become an excellent source of referrals or as centers of influence. The strategy is for the Advisor to target market both regionally and by customer category.

If you’re a small business selling an e-book on the other hand, Google Adwords can allow you to target your ads both geographically and by customer category as well. Your Adwords campaign can achieve a global reach but nonetheless, still be highly focused by a region or customer category that you hope to reach.

Google does an excellent job – and is getting progressively better – at matching your ads to appropriate, content rich, websites that will suit both your desired region and targeted customer category. Technology allowing even small business marketing campaigns to act like those of a global conglomerate.