Fishing Where the Fish Are

I used to fish in a lot of Bass tournaments.

It was a lot of fun, flying across the lake in my 20 ft bass boat, pushed along by a 200 Horse, fuel injected Merc engine. But I never caught a lot of fish because I could never figure out where the fish were! I read in a fishing magazine that 80% of the fish were in 20% of the lake. The problem was that they were very big lakes.

Advertising has the same challenge. 80% of your customers are in 20% of the country, or marketing channels, or media.

I once gave a presentation before an audience of around 1000 marketers and I asked if anyone in the audience had a $100 million or more ad budget to work with, no hands were raised. “What about $50 million,” I asked, and two people raised their hands. I didn’t see more than ten hands go up until I dropped below $10 million and the vast majority of hands rose when I hit $3 million or less.

When you have a limited budget, and I’ll make a safe bet and say, ‘That means you.” you cannot afford to waste one dollar on advertising to people that will never buy your product or service. You must fish where the fish are.

Now I may not be a very good fisherman, but I’m a pretty good marketer and I’m going to tell you how to find out where your prospects are.

A best customer profile
You start by clearly identifying the characteristics of your best customer, we call this a “Best Customer Profile” (BCP). How old are they? Gender? Where do they live? How much education? Do they have children? How old? Pets? Hobbies? Income? Etc.
The same technique is used if you’re a business marketer. Look at your business customers and identify your BCP.

You then start looking for prospects that match your BCP. In our agency we have mapping software that allows you to overlay all of the different best customer values and
you begin to see the areas where your prospects are that match up with your BCP. We call these areas “Opportunity Zones”. They are where you want to focus your limited marketing budget to get the most bang for your buck.

Here’s an example of how this technique worked very successfully for a client.
In 1997 we launched PetFoodDirect.com (PFD), a dot.com start-up that sold pet products. PFD had a marketing budget of around $5 million.

At the same time Pets.com launched a competitive operation with a marketing budget of over $100 million. Pets.com hired a big, broad market advertising agency and started spending money like a drunken sailor on a Saturday night. They created the Sock Puppet mascot and ran TV spots all over the country, including Super Bowl ads.

We did our homework.
23% of all the pet owning households in the USA, with a household income of $50,000 or higher, and a wife and two kids are located down the I-95 corridor between Connecticut and Carolina. And guess what? 80% of all pet product purchases are made by females. We knew what our Best Buyer Profile was and we knew where our best prospects were.

We targeted 100% of our marketing efforts on those pet owning women who lived in that small part of the country and had the money to pay for the product.

Long story made short, PetFoodDirect.com today is the largest, web-only pet product site in the country. Pets.com went bankrupt after a few years and the last I heard, the Sock Puppet was shilling loans out of an alley in Las Vegas.

Fish where the fish are.

Jon