by Michael Harrison

In the past, marketing channels were big pipes through which you pushed everything from direct mail to newspaper advertisements to radio spots to tell the public of your service or product offerings.

This scattergun approach to selling and branding a business was unfocused, making it expensive. Your message was delivered to everyone and all you could do is hope for the best.

Today businesses have more options to reach out and touch very specific people.

Consider. You have an existing client base. You have hot leads, warm leads and stone-cold calls to prospects that have better things to do than listen to a 15-minute scripted pitch from someone who doesn’t know you or your business.

It’s not effective, it’s pricey and it’s totally yesterday. With a variety of tools, you can more specifically target your marketing, identifying “grains” within your database, “grains” who have contacted you but haven’t been closed, “grains” who’ve expressed mild interest in your products or services, and you can even target “grains” that have never even heard of you or your business.

Granular marketing is more specific. The message is sent to a more refined, specific list of recipients at various stages within the sales cycle.

Granular Marketing 101

Through the use of a variety of tools and resources, you can more narrowly focus your marketing, sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Example.

Take an automated email site like www.constantcontact.com.

Constant Contact allows you to target email marketing campaigns with greater and greater accuracy by analysing response metrics. So if you send an email to every client, past and present, and use the metrics provided by Constant Contact, you know who received your email newsletter, who opened it and, when you see a spike in inquiries, you can easily calculate the cost per acquisition.

Using metrics, you gradually refine your marketing efforts, targeting clients, leads and prospects with greater and greater specificity and greater effectiveness.

So, a cold call creates a warm lead and captures an email address. Over the course of several weeks you drop an email to that prospect in a series of auto-responders – emails that are sent in a specific sequence based on the response of the recipient.

The whole point of granular marketing is simple. You don’t contact everyone in the telephone book with the same message at the same time. You target grains of sand from your sandbox with a highly targeted message at just the right time.

Timing is a critical part of granular marketing. Let’s say you’re a car dealer who’s had a prospect walk into your showroom but hasn’t bought yet. An email AR that offers free service for the life of the car, sent two days after that prospect met with your top salesperson, just might close that prospect and make that sale.

Granular Marketing Tools

Even the smallest business should have some form of client relationship management (CRM) software. This tracks orders, notifies you and your staff where each order is, where log jams are forming and who needs a telephone call this week.

CRM simplifies granular marketing by more easily identifying the status of past transactions, current transactions and prospective transactions that can be cultivated with laser precision.

Surveys are another useful tool that can be used to breakout your existing database of clients and prospects, and there’s plenty of free survey software that equips you to develop a specific survey to answer specific questions from specific buyers.

Using our car dealer as an example, it just makes good sense to send out a customer satisfaction index (CSI) to find the holes in the delivery of your dealership’s services. These surveys are simple, adaptable to any business and they provide invaluable information on how to improve client relations and prospect closing ratios. They tell you what clients and leads want so you can deliver.

Mobile Phone apps

Mobile telephone apps enable you to push information, promotions, money-saving offers and other incentives to existing clients and warm leads. Once you capture that phone number you can send text messages, helpful informational content and other goodwill building text regularly – to the right people at the right time.

Today, your business can have its own mobile phone app built for a couple of thousand dollars, opening a new conduit to push information to clients and prospects, keeping these people and companies tethered to your business.

Traditional marketing outlets are, by nature, passive. A billboard is seen by thousands of drivers but very few are actually looking for your services as they whiz by. Same with a newspaper advert or radio spot. These marketing channels hit everyone, making them expensive, unfocused and unproductive.

Using granular marketing tools and strategies targets clients, leads and prospects with pinpoint accuracy. You deliver the right message pro-actively at just the right time to close the sale.

Michael Harrison is a business strategist who works with Professional Services firms that seek to grow and increase revenue, margins and profits. His DigiTouch marketing service provides turnkey marketing solutions for clients looking to position their business, generate leads and increase sales. He can be contacted on 0418 822 666 or