A common mistake made by almost all business owners, especially local business owners, is identifying their bias. You are not going to sell peanut butter to a person who has nut allergy or shoes to a person with amputated feet, not the best idea.

A lot of people assume there is no bias. 

Maybe I could just sell to anyone and it will all be fine.

Narrator voice:

It was not fine at all.

There is always a bias. Maybe you sell to men, maybe you sell to women, maybe you sell to a group of people with a certain haircut.

How it worked way back in the 60’s and still works nowadays.

Here’s a good example that worked, and is from the 60’s. You didn’t have the internet, didn’t have a fax machine, and you had very little in terms of targeting power.

The guy was doing seminars, going city after city and what he started to notice was that in the crowd, the majority of men in the audience were men that had crew cuts.

Light bulb, shaved head, the cut that people get in the army.

Like always, there was a bias in the audience.

What he started to do when he went to a city, he would hit up the local barbershops saying:

Hey, can you get me a list with your clients? I will pay for it obviously. Get me a list of the clients with crew cuts.

And then he mailed out. Like direct mail, actual mail, again, this was in the 60’s, with a promotional offer of the seminar. This boosted the response enormously because there is ALWAYS a bias!

If you talk to the right people, you will get a much higher response rate, much higher than anything you would get in a mass market. A lot of business owners do mass market. Putting their ad out there not targeting any specific audience.

There are some companies who do that, Coca Cola for example. What these companies also have is millions of dollars in marketing budget. But 99% of business owners don't.

Not everyone is your client, the right audience is. 

Cut through clutter like a hot knife through soft butter

If you want to sell botox services, most likely you will not sell them to men. You will sell it to women. You need to have a basic understanding of women's issues.

If you don’t know this because you are not a woman, that’s no problem at all.

You need to do market research and get a basic understanding of the target audience. 

Know their pain points, their lifestyle and communication style.

Understand your audience’s demographics, interests, behaviors. Make them feel like they are being understood and the first that comes to their mind is:

Wow, this guy totally gets it. This is made for ME.

A clear, focused message resonates more than an organic one.