If you’ve been in business for more than five minutes, and are still trying to sell your product to everyone, you might want revisit or rewrite your business plan. Contrary to what you may believe, everyone does not want and need your product. You have to understand who and what your target market is if you plan on surviving in business anytime in the foreseeable future. You will lose time, sleep, and money trying to sell everything to everybody.
I had to learn this the hard way as I phased out the Wedding Videography section of my business. We had a great 5 year run at doing wedding videos and constantly were upgrading and changing our services to really make our wedding videos pretty much like small films. We were upgrading equipment, learning new skills, and adjusting prices accordingly.
The only we weren’t changing was our target market.
We were still advertising our services in the same places we had advertised to the wedding couples who had paid for our services when they were a couple of zeros cheaper.
Now if you’ve ever dealt with the wedding industry, you know that brides will make you go through a lot of hoops for their business. They are expecting a full red carpet, skip to my lou, standing backflip, shuck and jive presentation. And why not, it’s just the MOST important day of their life. But what we found is that trying to sell our high end videography packages in a frugal bridal market, we were working a lot harder to justify the pricing, and our marketing strategy and budget suffered that year because of it.
The last year we offered wedding videography services, we spent several thousand dollars on advertising in high end magazines and expensive bridal shows. It was there where it became super easy to sell a five-figure wedding videography package where before we would have been lucky to sell our cheapest package.
Even though we phased out the wedding videography department of our business (concentration conflicts), we learned a valuable lesson on making sure you are marketing your business in your target market. I have no business passing out my hip-hop CDs at a Garth Brooks concert. Just like you don’t need to be selling your night club services at Sunday morning service.
Go where your business needs to be, and watch your closing rate increase. Otherwise, I hope you have very very deep pockets.
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