Addressability is a measure of how easy or difficult it is to get in touch with your customers. A highly addressable market can be reached easily and quickly.
For many years I sold to the wholesale stationery, office products and artist materials market worldwide. This is a highly addressable market. In fact, it was not necessary to do any general advertising whatsoever as I knew each and every target customer world-wide for my products. They were all members of trade associations and were easily found and sold directly.
If your target market is this focused you don’t actually need to market to any large degree you only need to focus awareness and sales campaigns at your target list. This makes selling so much easier and this kind of market very desirable.
I am often surprised that businesses with very clear and defined targets spend money on marketing instead of selling directly. If a business is selling table linen to London restaurants then marketing is useful but the best and most effective plan is to go out and sell them directly! There are thousands of restaurants in London but it is easy to segment that list by area and the types of restaurants that are likely to purchase or rent table linen. Once the list is created it becomes a very basic introduction, awareness and sales program. Not every restaurant will buy right away but all target restaurants are placed into the sales funnel with the objective of selling to them eventually.
A sales plan for this type of business includes a series of introduction letters, emails, telephone calls, in-person sales calls. The process is placed on a cycle which continues over and over and over for the life of the business. Surprisingly. Many businesses miss this very clear opportunity and run around trying to find new markets instead of putting the effort into conquering their primary market.
Is your target market clear and defined?
Is it possible to define it to such a degree that you can create a specific target list?
If you know who buys your products and services then sell to them! Forget the rest of the world.
Political parties understand this very well. They know who is voting for them or who might vote for them. They only pitch to the converted or to those that can be swayed. They do not try to win anybody else over to their side.
Who is your audience? Where do they hang out? How can I connect to them as effectively as possible?
Ask yourself this question often!
The answer will keep all of your business on purpose!
