Kevin W. McCarthy

The Professor of On-Purpose

Blog

Do You Know Your Target Audience?

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Are your sales not where you would like them to be?

With many new clients, I often find that the failure to aim narrowly at a specific target audience is

  • confusing clients
  • extending the sales process
  • demanding on salespersons
  • losing them business

Is your marketing strategy and plan truly promoting your goods and services to the right people?

Time and again when interviewing business owners, salespersons, and marketers, I find their marketing message falls short because of confusion over a target market versus a target audience. This simple strategic marketing mistake costs dearly as the customer is left confused with messages that speak at them instead of to them. Confused customers are less inclined to buy.

Conducting a target audience analysis identifies specific needs, wants, hopes, and aspirations.

When you speak the customer’s language it offers assurance that you understand them and know how to solve their problem. Their comfort that you can identify their specific problem draws them to a conclusion that you are more appropriate and capable of caring for them.

When you’re perceived to be a less risky purchase, then the value proposition tilts in your favor. More sales can follow.

Communicating in generalities leaves customers guessing.

Here are two examples of ads from home heating and air conditioning companies in a local paper.

Ad #1 reads: “We’re the number one HVAC specialists. Call us for all your needs.”

Ad #2 reads: “Has your home air conditioning system just stopped? Call and be cool soon.”

Advertiser #2 has invested a bit more time that speaks to the specific needs of his target audience. It may appear a more expensive and narrow strategy, but the real test is not the number of calls, but the number of qualified calls. What do you think, will #2 beat #1?

Follow this simple On-Purpose Business Person rule of thumb:Market in your self interest.

Now that you’re thinking about the concept, who’s your target market and target audience? Want to talk it out? We’re here to help you.

How Solid Is Your Core?

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A solid core is the source of inner strength.

This isn’t to say that fears, doubts, and concerns don’t creep into our lives. The difference is when they do creep in, do they find an unguarded home to invade?

Pileated_Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpecker

You are better positioned to withstand the storms of life with a solid core of purpose, vision, missions, and values.

(Look for the bonus footage on today’s On-Purpose Minute about the cost of having a hollow core versus a solid core. After hurricanes pass over us, we see just which trees have maintained a solid core.)

Did you know that woodpeckers peck at trees to find the rotting trees? That’s where the bugs are. At the solid-core trees, the birds sound them with their beaks and then move on to easier hunting.

At our core, we are spiritual beings.

And at the core of your being is your inherent purpose, your reason for being. Purpose isn’t learned or earned. Purpose is; it exists. Purpose isn’t optional. Your purpose came with your birth package.

People can be woodpeckers who pick and poke at you.

A solid core gives no ground to their offenses. A hollow core makes you susceptible to critical natures and comments. Life gets better all around when you know who you are and you live it solidly from the inside out. That’s being on-purpose!

How Are You Building Your Confidence?

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Gaining confidence begins with a decision to become confident.

The lack of confidence can negatively influence every aspiration and aspect of your life and work. Personal leadership and personal confidence go hand in hand.

Avoid falling prey to the “Fake it until you make it” crowd who believe in building on lies at best and self-deception at worst. Being truthful about a matter where one isn’t experienced serves no one.

Confidence comes with experience and achievement, which can’t be faked.

Confidence, however, is speaking the truth about one’s experience and achievement and allowing the miracles of graciousness and kindness of others to accept you as you are rather than pretending to be someone you aren’t.

How are you gaining and building your confidence?

Please share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section. Thank you!

How Many Friends Do You Have?

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(This Classic On-Purpose Minute first aired in 2009. Where I say 2010, insert 2018. Start creating friendships today so your tomorrows can be richer.)

Are you hiding behind your avatar pretending to do life?

Who really knows you?

Despite the proliferation of social media, digital connections, and the means of communicating via FaceTime, Skype, text, phone, email, and a letter, do you truly have friendships?

Facebook friends are not the same as true friends. Hiding behind our Facebook profile has become an art form but not necessarily a form of friendship. These one-way communication postures allow us to talk but not be challenged.

I’ve often said that one of our greatest fears is the fear of being known for who we really are and what we’re really thinking.

These “unmentionable secrets” create strongholds of deception that undermine our confidence or cause us not to act. Confession is a sacramental exercise for good reason. It frees the soul to be right with God, self, and others.

When no one really knows us, we can be so lost and alone in the midst of our tribe. Adding more “friends” becomes an unfulfilling addiction in our search for identity, connection, and meaning.

Perhaps you aren’t even aware there is a different way.

  • Has the number of your connections become your measure of the meaning of your life?
  • Do popularity and followers define your worth and character?
  • Have the online hours spent building your network left you busily distracted, desperately lonely, and lacking? Is something still missing?

Consider this, however: a true friend knows what doesn’t get posted on social media or knows it before it gets posted.

Try an experiment this week: Make fewer new connections and have more conversations with a handful of people whom you love or truly would like to know better. Instead of focusing on your burgeoning network, try investing in going deeper with the relationships you do have.

Begin by writing down the names of 2 to 4 people whom you identify as worthy of becoming a better friend.

  • Call them and tell them what you’re up to in terms of deepening the friendship.
  • Get together with them.
  • Grab a cup of coffee; invest yourself in what’s happening in their life.
  • Learn to listen and ask the deeper, more penetrating questions.

Instead of staying on the surface of life and activities, discover what they learned, how they felt, what concerns them, what gives them joy, and so forth. Laugh, cry, reflect, and just do life together.

Challenge yourself to add at least one true confidant to your life over the coming weeks and months.

Your reward may be a lifelong friend.

When we have friends, we can be apart from people, but not alone. Keyboards can masterfully sustain and keep true friends connected through time and distances. Having friends to talk things through, to be in the flow of one another’s lives with context and concern—now that can make all the difference!

This classic On-Purpose® Minute invites you to take a hard look around and see who is truly there standing with you. As importantly, are you at risk of being off-purpose and there’s no one there beside you to call you to task because you’re caught in the swirl of social media?

Read a summary of the Duke University research here.

How Are Your Marketing Strategy and Plans?

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Tactical terror is on the face of many a business person these days thanks to the fundamental shift in marketing due to the internet, especially as it relates to social media. Despite all the change, the core of marketing remains much the same as it has for the past 50 years. 

In today’s On-Purpose® Business Minute, may I introduce you to the importance of purpose in your marketing strategy and plans?

Purpose brings the power, spirit, or juice to the business model and marketing plan that engages employees, customers, and shareholders alike, yet each differently.

Before you design that new website or write that new brochure or ad, please give the fundamentals of great marketing the investment of your time and energy on the front end. It will save you a ton of time and money on the back end.

Having the fundamentals of marketing in place provides a higher probability that your goals will be met or exceeded.

  • Regardless of your company size, do you feel overwhelmed, confused, or frustrated with your present marketing strategy and plans?
  • Are you facing the tactical terror of chasing your tail and not getting the results you want?

Please place On-Purpose Partners  CMO Services on your mind to help you order, focus, build, and expand your business so it can go to the next level of performance. If you need help, please drop me an email at kwmccarthy@on-purpose.com.

As promised, here is a link to the Marketing Mix concept by Jerome McCarthy, the author of Basic Marketing (and who is not related to me).

What Is the Meaning of Life?

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Did you make the choice today that your life is going to be meaningful? If so, please tell me about it in the comments area below. What do you anticipate the implications of your decision will be over the rest of your life?

 

“What is the meaning of life?”

Now there’s a tiny topic hardly worth pondering! The graphic and T-shirt design below by artist Aled Lewis (used with his permission)29_the_meaning_of_life_big may provide as good a sense of “clarity” on the topic as one can find.

Kidding aside, the value of asking, “What is the meaning of life?” may be less in the answer to one of life’s big questions, but more in the very act of the inquiry.

Asking this question is a positive sign that changes in life, ideally growth and maturity, are budding.

There’s an awareness that can lead to a new life with the potential to lead to a life of purpose and meaning. Engagement in a greater reality has begun.

Change is a part of life, but a change for life needs to be self-initiated—owned if you will. Those around may demand or encourage us by saying “Change your life,” but at the end of the day, it is our responsibility and challenge.

How you go about embracing growth is up to you.

For me, my big shift change happened when I attended a Bible study of the book of Romans back in the spring of 1985. Like many, I had been searching for meaning in life. As a true student of self-help literature, I was well read in the classic and contemporary self-help writers. At some point, however, it all started to sound like the same stuff simply rehashed from a different point of view.

I was not a Christian, but I was curious and willing to give that “old and irrelevant book” and the institution of the Church a chance. The Bible, I discovered, had a ring of authenticity about it that none of my self-help books had. There were no lightning strikes or trumpets sounding.

It was mostly an intellectual pursuit to better understand

  • Who am I?
  • Why am I here?
  • What should I do with my life?
  • Is life meaningful?

The Bible was different because here was core wisdom instead of just knowledge.

What is the meaning of life?

It doesn’t matter what I say. You have to find your answer for yourself. What I will tell you, however, is this: life is meaningful!

Start with this basic assumption and go forward.

How Solid Is Your Leadership?

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The self-awareness and inner strength of the leader get transmitted throughout the team, division, or business.

It is hard to see ourselves for how we really are.

  • Some of us are hard on ourselves.
  • Others of us overestimate the strength of our leadership.

There’s one defining benchmark that will clarify how solid your leadership is.

I address it in this On-Purpose Business Minute.

Have you ever been led by a solid core leader? Count your blessings!

Where Is Your Pure Joy?

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I ask in today’s On-Purpose Minute, “Where Is Your Pure Joy?”

Life has a way of crashing in on those divine activities uniquely designed to bring us joy. I think of Eric Liddell’s statement near the end the movie Chariots of Fire and as recounted in Wikipedia:

Eric’s sister Jennie worries he is too busy running to concern himself with their mission, but Eric tells her he feels inspired: “I believe that God made me for a purpose (the mission) … , but He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

So what about you?

When do you feel God’s pleasure?

What activity have you been denying yourself that serves to refresh and renew your spirit, yet the cares and concerns of the world would crush? Where is your pure joy?

Please share your inspiration or thoughts in the comments section below.