The basics of marketing include having a memorable and distinctive brand, including your logo, colors, slogan, and so forth. But a successful marketing campaign requires more than just a great image or even a great product.

The best that Madison Avenue can dream up for you is worthless if it doesn’t reach the people who are most likely to buy your product. That’s why targeted marketing is so important to your success.

Sometimes the process of placing things in front of the right eyes is easy. If you sell diapers, you sponsor children’s television shows. Sports gear promotes well on baseball field fences, and it makes good sense for a locksmith to apply a sticker nearby while installing deadbolts. But it takes so much more skill to be successful with other products that have a broader appeal.

One of the most effective methods of knowing who will buy your product in the future is tracking who has bought it in the past. Businesses who have a successful marketing campaign use customer intelligence systems to track who bought what and why, and to use that information to assemble a demographic profile of their most frequent buyers. From there, they can target marketing to the places and times when that demographic is most likely to be around.

Some businesses choose to shower the entire market with their promotional campaign, figuring that if they try to reach every consumer that they will reach all the consumers that want their product. But this approach is ineffective for several reasons, which backs up the idea of gathering customer intelligence.

Here’s where saturation marketing goes wrong.

It Makes Too Many Assumptions To Save Money

Any form of advertising costs money, but obviously, some methods are more expensive than others. When a company tries to flood the market with their name and logo, they typically favor the lower-cost methods. It’s the only way they can afford such a broad-based campaign.

That leads them to try billboards and social media, which don’t always catch the right market. There is still a large sector of the economy that utilizes printed materials such as magazines and newspapers, so other methods will probably miss them.

It Doesn’t Catch Customers At The Right Time

Just because you are in front of the customer’s eyes doesn’t mean they are interested in seeing you. A roofing company that hands out stacks of personalized sticky notes will be on every desk in town after a while, but that may not be the best moment to get people thinking about shingles.

Instead, the company should be installing signs in or near home-improvement stores, so that customers will see the company’s name first when the idea of a new roof has just come to them.

It Numbs The Customer’s Mind

Science tells us that many animals can only detect their prey when it moves. Advertising is much the same way. If the name or the logo is permanently in front of our faces, we tend to let it blend in with the scenery and forget about it. That’s why large companies often re-brand things periodically, changing logos or altering color schemes.

When your name is out there in every corner of the advertising world, consumers stop noticing it. You have to strike the right level of advertising to be fresh without being obscure, and a carpet-bombing campaign most certainly is far from that balance point.

Advertising and marketing are expensive. It pays to target it to the right customers at the right time. Of course, your starting point is purely an estimate, but over time, you can analyze your results and see what adjustments to make. Customer intelligence gives you that feedback. It lets you fine-tune the process so that you can get just the right amount of exposure with just the right people.