Are You Really Looking for the Right Answer?

A couple weekends ago my wife asked me to vacuum a couple of rooms, which is normally no big deal.  But things got a little complicated when I tried to plug the vacuum in to the first “outlet”.

It was next to a chair in a spare bedroom and even though I couldn’t see it directly, I could reach around and plug in the vacuum, was my thought.

Take a look:

Now when I first attempted to plug in the vacuum, my view was non-existent.

I just knew that there was something there that would probably work.

I’m going to stop a second and apply this to business marketing.

And because I work for WOWO radio, I’ll use radio in this application.

I recall a business owner telling me a few years ago that he tried radio and it didn’t work.

I smiled when I asked him if it was the batteries or the cord.  He smiled back and said his radio worked fine, but when he tried advertising on the radio, on his favorite radio station, he got nothing back.

We talked further and discovered that his favorite station was targeted to teens and 20 year olds, even though he was 40, he was not their typical listener.  His ideal customer was someone age 45+.

As you can imagine, the radio station he advertised on was not a good fit for his business.

Sort of like this mystery outlet in my spare bedroom.  I moved the chair to see what was going on and saw this:

See those letters, T.V. ?  Apparently this house we bought last year that was built 40 years ago has wiring behind the walls for a rooftop TV antenna. And sure enough, there is a rooftop TV antenna on top of my house which we don’t use.

Even if I figured out a way to modify the plug on the vacuum or modify the outlet and was able to connect the two, it would not work. And I was smart enough not to try.

Some people will try and force something to work marketing wise that is simply a lost cause.  You can’t run more and more ads to the wrong people to get them to buy your stuff.  Instead, find a better place to run your ads so your target market will hear and respond.

I did just that with the vacuum.  I plugged it into an appropriate electrical outlet and everything worked the way it was supposed to.

Apply this to your business marketing and you’ll discover by looking a little closer what can work to help spread the word about your business.

(Or you can just throw away the vacuum.)