So at this point you might be wondering to yourself, “Why marketing on target?”
I started in the marketing field when I was 15. Now, it wasn’t officially called marketing it was called being a server at the local golf course restaurant- but stay with me. At that time little did I know but I was learning the intricacies of figuring out my audience. Through the years I became better and better at the finesse of it and post college landed a coveted job in an established restaurant in downtown Omaha called M’s Pub. (A small aside, I did finish college with a graphic design degree but I was sure at that point I wasn’t ready to sit down in a cube) At M’s the saying was M’s supplies the product and the space, but you need to sell it and make it a great experience for your diners, aka audience. I learned about people. How they behave in their leisure time, how they react, what they expect and how to react to them. I figured out how to continually adjust my marketing message shift to shift, table by table, customer by customer.
After a few years the lure of the regular hours and 401k started to look quite appealing. A friend that I worked with at the time recommended I apply at my current company. Thankfully the manager that interviewed me saw my transferable skills and hired me. Now audience targeting at a granular level is my central focus. Through the years I have been involved with different stages of the service that we provide but the overall message is the same: Find your target audience and eliminate wasteful media spending. So, I am back to (or I guess I never left it) how do they behave, how do they react, what do they expect and how do we react to them on behalf of the client. Concepts ring true, only the tools are different. How do we adjust the message market by market, system by system, household by household?
The top layer of my marketing experience is the degree that I am currently working on in Internet Marketing. I have found a passion with online marketing as I think the audience targeting and analytics potentials are amazing. Tracking is at a level never been seen before in media and so the how and what of the audience is getting sharper by the day. Geographic, demographic and psychographic behaviors crossed with quantitative elements can create a user experience that is practically mind blowing.
So, how do we adjust the message page by page, click by click and minute by minute?
