This week, we’re offering the second step out of five steps to modern marketing.  Last week we covered defining your value, and this week, we’re moving on to defining your audience.

Hint: it’s not everybody.

Even if everybody would buy it, you can’t market to everyone. Trust me, you don’t have a budget big enough and there is no way to be effective at marketing to every single person on the planet. Or even every person in your community.

So start by asking who would be your best customers, the first people in the door. Or if you’ve already started, ask who your happiest customers are. You know more than you think – list out their age, education, geographic location, do they have kids, drive a car or take public transport, do most of them own houses, do most live within a radius of your store, or do most of your customers come from one industry.  List out as many common characteristics as you can. If you want to reinforce this, send out a survey to your happiest or most frequent customers.

Now you may get different groups, different audiences, what then?  Rank them by primary and secondary audiences.  Your primary audience is the group who are most likely to buy or the most likely to create a long-term relationship with you. The secondary audience will still buy your product or service, they’re just a smaller group or need more efforts to make a purchase.  Remember, you have to rank your resources to ensure you get the most for your marketing dollars – spend wisely with the audience most likely to buy.

After you get your audiences more clearly defined, take time now to create a customer map on paper – answer where does this group mainly work, play, pray, shop, socialize, and surf online? (Not sure, send a survey to your customers and ask). You’ll need this info for step 4, but it’s a good idea to map it out while you’re thinking of your customers now.

Welcome to the end of December, the end of 2010. This is the time of year when we see plenty of “Top 10 of 2010” lists and summaries of the past year (along with a few predictions for the upcoming year). Yet in spite of the pundits and the headlines from national news outlets, I wanted to informally poll my friends and social networks to see how they’d headline the year.

Why? Despite the headlines and top stories, we tend to have our own filters and perspectives on what represents a whole year. 

So we posed the question in Mad Lib format: “2010 Was the Year of _____.” From our network, here are few of the results that came our way:

 “2010 Was the Year of the American Identity Crisis” – @tarynp

 “2010 Was the Year of the Lady Gaga Meat Dress and Tea Party Politicians (both over the top!)” – @theshiramiller

“2010 Was the Year of the Someone Else’s Life. (therefore, I call dibs on 2011!)” – @aparkour

 “2010 Was the Year of Writing, Social Media, and Mostly Good Times in a Bad Economy” – @georgiawebgurl

 “2010 Was the Year of the Social ‘Me’ versus ‘We’” – @alizasherman

“2010 Was the Year of the iPad (of course!)” – @eholtzclaw

 “2010 Was the Year of Blame” – @raidschmitt

“2010 Was the Year of Competing Rights” – @looking_glass

So what was the year to you?

For a follow up from our ealier presentation, Social Media 101, I presented a second session at today’s PRSA/GA Annual Conference in Atlanta, Ga. More conceptual, this session was focused on discussing the forthcoming trends, some of which like Real Time and geolocation are already happening.  While the audience was PR professionals, these trends are certain to impact brands and bottom lines in the near future. After all, it was only 3 years ago when people were saying, “What’s this Twitter thing about?”  Like my earlier session, I used the new Prezi format, which won rave reviews from the audience.

Oh, and if you’re really geeked now, check out Akoha, a company that blends geolocation with good deeds, and augmented reality app Layar which let’s you see, what you don’t see,  and keep your eyes on other companies pushing the envelope of what’s possible. Or drop a note here and let us know who those companies are.