When marketing any business, the media you use to get in front of your target market is extremely important as is the message you deliver to them. But more important than that is the lists of prospects you have generated or bought.

As a matter of fact, targeting within your list is even more important. What I’m talking about is a break down of any list of prospects you have into very defined, segmented groups.

Why is this so significant? Well, when you can super define your prospect and current client lists into hyper-responsive groups, you can take your message to market match that much further.

Here’s an example. Say you have a consulting business that provides automation engineering work for manufacturers. Let’s also say you realize that your target audience is food manufacturers and you perform your service work for any type of food processing. If you get yourself a list of 1000 plant engineers for food manufacturers, put together a marketing campaign on a specific topic they all need help on and put into the right media, you could get yourself a 1% to 2% response. That would be 10 to 20 interested parties and is typical for most marketing campaigns.

Now let’s say that you took those 1000 people and broke them out into segments of specific types of food processed (crackers vs. canned vegetables vs. frozen food, etc.) and production capacity. This may give you 6 small lists. Now you have a highly segmented list so that you can tailor the marketing message and media directly to each small segment of that 1000 people.

A slight change in the wording plus a change in media (like a niche versus a general food manufacturing magazine) could yield results that produce a 10%, or 100 prospect, response. That’s the difference between a typical campaign and a laser focused one.

To be honest with you, this is the kind of thinking most that most businesses don’t bother to do, which is odd considering the savings and results it produces. This thinking is what puts companies ahead of the competition.

For rented lists, this may cost a little more upfront but it should be very simple for your current in-house lists if you are collecting data from these prospects. Either way, I guarantee you that your response will skyrocket and your cost per lead and cost per sale will be dramatically reduced.

I highly encourage you to try this out first with your current list and see what happens. If you can’t segment due to lack of information, then use a quick survey with a free gift attached to it as an excuse to make a contact with your current list and ask for the information.