Why Marketing Professionals Use Target Marketing
 by Gene Muchanski, Editor
The Dive Industry Professional

Target marketing is the art of reaching a specific audience.  Professional Marketers pick and choose their audience prior to creating a message they intend to send them.  I’m sure you’ve seen the image of a single arrow hitting the bullseye.  That’s target marketing.  In a more descriptive manner, marketing educators teach their students to aim for the bird instead of shooting at the flock.  Apex predators like the Lions know that it is better to chase a single prey and eat that day, than it is to chase the herd and go hungry.   One choice involves strategic planning, less energy output, and a higher degree of success.  The other requires no planning, more energy output, and less probability of success.  So how come our industry marketers don’t understand this simple process?

If you are a Dive Industry Professional and have been following my editorials for the past twenty-two years, you know that I either talk about diving or the business of diving.  Mostly about the business of diving, because that is where the greatest need in our industry happens to be.  We are all surrounded by Dive Industry Professionals who know everything about diving, diving equipment, dive training, and dive travel.  The bar is so high that many of us struggle to keep up.  The bar for proficiency in good business management in our industry, on the other hand, could use a little improvement.  That is the Mission of our Association and Non-profit Foundation – to Raise the Bar of Business Professionalism and Success in our industry.

Besides using monthly editorials as education vehicles, many times an editorial is sparked by an event or an occurrence that we experience in our daily business lives in the diving industry.  This month’s editorial, in part, was prompted by the excess number of emails, from a select few dive companies, that our office has been getting for the past two years.  There are a few companies in our industry who have gone overboard with the quantity and frequency of their email messaging lately.  As a Dive Industry Professional on the receiving end of email advertising, I want to go on record to say that this practice is only going to hurt them in the long run.  I know email broadcasting is inexpensive, but one can overdo it and wear out your welcome pretty quickly.  Advertising via email messaging should only be a part of your overall marketing strategy, not your entire strategy.

The second prompt to write this monthly editorial is the fact that I too use email messaging as part of our association’s marketing strategy.  I believe it can be a powerful tool to use if it is done correctly.  To do justice to this topic, I have written a separate article in the November Issue of The Dive Industry Professional, that covers messaging, marketing, and advertising.  I hope you will find Target Market Messaging informative and helpful.

The Dive Industry Association maintains a diving trade database of about 8,000 Dive Industry Professionals that work in the Global Diving Business Network.  Our goal is to acquire and maintain a business relationship with the buyers and sellers of diving equipment, training, travel, and lifestyle products.   As a trade association, we are more interested in developing business relationships with our colleagues rather than just compiling a mailing list.  In the past two years our association has also been building rapport with dive instructors, divemasters, and certified divers in the Global Diving Community.  Our current database for diving consumers is somewhere over 20,000 divers and growing.

When you are dealing with a large database of Dive Industry Professionals, targeting your messages becomes extremely important and is the professional thing to do.  That is the situation we are currently dealing with.  Our monthly trade publication, The Dive Industry Professional, started a new column entitled Caribbean Dive News.  The content we publish is fit for any dive industry professional to receive.  We can safely write articles about diving equipment, dive training, dive travel, and lifestyle products that pertain to diving in the Caribbean.  However, writing articles and sending catalogs that contain dealer pricing is not a subject matter intended for every sector of the industry. Therefore, we had to put out a notice to our database that if they had a Qualified Retail Buyer at their business, they needed to register with us to receive information and pricing that pertains to them.  As you might know, when we started the Dive Industry Association, we separated the Global Diving Business Network into eighteen sectors, or industries.  At any moment, we can customize our messages to have applicable content to the manufacturing, retail, training, and travel industries.  That keeps our messaging relevant to the targeted audience and cuts down on the unwanted, irrelevant, and voluminous emails that are sent out by certain members of the industry.

The advantage to target marketing is that you can reach a particular sector of the industry, like Dive Stores, and yet individualize your message so that it addresses a specific person at each store.  In case you didn’t know it, dive stores don’t buy merchandise or certify dive students.  People at dive stores do!  Your ability to individually address specific people in a mass mailing is a professional reflection of your knowledge and understanding of modern marketing vehicles and commonly accepted marketing principles.  You should always strive to present a professional image every chance you get.

With the modern marketing vehicles, apps, and programs available to small businesses today, there is no reason you cannot conduct a pin-pointed, targeted, mass marketing campaign to thousands of individual divers across the county.  It is unprofessional and unforgivable to receive an unsigned form letter addressed to Dear Diver or Dear Dive Store.  Especially if you have been a customer of that business for many years.  Does this industry really need to raise the bar of business professionalism?  You bet it does.

I learned a long time ago that you have a higher degree of success if you advertise to an audience that has a need for your products, wants what you sell, has the resources to purchase it from you, and is given a call-to-action to easily acquire it.  I also believe that if you try to market to everyone, you’ll sell to no one.  There are many reasons for marketing strategically.  First of all is the cost.  It takes a lot of time, money, and manpower to conduct an advertising campaign.  That is why we have a channel of distribution in the Global Diving Business Network.  With over six million divers in the world today, a single company cannot possibly market to everyone.  Each link in the supply chain must do their part to market and advertise to their immediate customers.   What we have in the diving industry today, are foolish companies attempting to vertically integrate the supply chain by taking on the role and responsibility of reaching and selling to the final consumer.  That is a costly and foolish strategy.  I firmly believe that is why we see so much email advertising in the industry today.  It is the cheapest method of advertising and the only way some companies know how to market.  It’s time to raise the bar!

This is an exciting time to become part of the Global Diving Business Network.  For more information about target marketing, contact Gene Muchanski, Executive Director of the Dive Industry Association, 2294 Botanica Circle, West Melbourne, FL 32904.  Phone: 321-914-3778.  Email: gene@diveindustry.net  Web: www.diveindustry.net

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