6 Ways to Saturate and Dominate Your Market on a Budget

“We have such a great product,” says every organizational leader. “If we can just get the word out, we’ll be on our way.”

Every brand marketer wants more: more eyeballs, more engagement, more clicks, and more leads that ultimately lead to more customers served and more dollars in your pocket. Obviously, to get more of these things you need to do more, right?

Not necessarily.

The best way to get more of all of that important stuff is actually with less.

MYTH: Broader targeting will help me reach more people with my digital ads.

It’s true that when you cast a wider net, you may reach more people, but are they the right people? 

When you try to reach too wide of a target audience, your daily ad spend is stretched thin over a broad population of Internet users. Unless you have an infinite marketing budget, your ads will quickly hit their daily limits and stop running before the right people have a chance to see you.

MYTH: If I can get more people to see my ads, I will get results. 

In reality, if you get people to see your ads more often, you will get results. 

You are likely familiar with “7 Touches,” the idea that it takes on average seven encounters with a brand before a customer will raise their hand and request more information. Consumers are bombarded with content that is trying to get their attention. Depending on what you sell and your customer lifecycle, it may take 7 or 17 or perhaps even 70 exposures to your brand before someone finally is ready to talk.

SOLUTION: You need to be able to saturate a market to get results.

Saturation means that everyone who is a fit in that market has heard your name. The more you build brand awareness with a population you are confident will need you, the more likely it is that your brand will be the one they call when they need you.

Each person in that market that you can help needs to have seen your ads multiple times over a sustained period.

I’ve never encountered a business with an infinite marketing budget. (If you know one, I’d love an introduction.)  Most of us are working with limited budgets.

The solution is NOT to scatter your limited budget far and wide. The solution is to define a target market that’s small enough you can afford to saturate it. Here’s how:  

6 Ways to Narrow Down Your Markets to Saturate and Dominate

Apply as many of these filters as possible, until your audience is small enough you can afford to saturate it with ongoing marketing:

Target by Geographic Area (B2C and B2B)

Don’t target the United States, pick specific states. Don’t just pick states, pick specific cities. Don’t just pick cities, pick neighborhoods in those cities. The more specific you are, the better.

Target by Demographics (B2C and B2B)

Most organizations can target their ads by age, gender, marital status, financial situation, income level, whether they own or rent a home, whether they have children of a particular age, and more. 

Special Note for Credit, Employment, and Housing: For several special audiences like credit, employment, and housing, demographic targeting is restricted so as not to discriminate unfairly. You can still target based on interests, however, and the major social and search platforms utilize their own machine learning algorithms to display ads to your target audience; in these cases, getting your geographic targeting, landing page content, and ad messaging right matters even more.

Target by Psychographics (B2C and B2B)

Show your ads to people with certain beliefs, interests, problems, or needs. You can do this by targeting keywords they’ve searched for, topics they’re interested in online, groups they are affiliated with, publications they read, and more.

Target by Industry (B2B)

Pick one or more specific industries you serve best. You can even narrow your focus to specific NAICS or SIC codes.  

Target by Job Title (B2B)

Don’t reach every person in an organization, target only the people who make buying decisions or influence others to make buying decisions.

Target by Company Size (B2B)

Focus on organizations large enough to afford and benefit from your services, and within a range that you’re best equipped to serve well. You can target based on revenue, assets, number of employees, etc.

As I help clients with strategy, the #1 thing I do is help them make their markets smaller.

If you aren’t sure how to do this, we’d love to talk. Spire has some especially effective tools to help B2B companies build hyper-targeted prospect lists and quickly begin reaching the right people with targeted messages that convert.

Whether your business primarily serves customers directly or other businesses, the key to dominating your market is to create frequent and compelling messaging that saturates the target audience you’ve honed down to a specific and precise group of likely buyers. 

Let’s get at it.