You need to know your business audience to fine-tune your marketing pitch

Q: How do companies fine-tune their marketing approach to customers who are interested in starting a health and wellness journey?

Henry Kisitu, president

Jajja Wellness

A: The challenge with an audience like the one you describe is it could be anyone from a person living paycheck to paycheck or the most wealthy person in the market. This means that the first "tuning" should be in firmly establishing your target audience.

In your case, your current distribution looks to be in co-ops and healthy food-related businesses, so this indicates some things about what kind of people may be your targets.

You want to reach relatively affluent people, and perhaps by convenience in your launch, that starts with people in the city rather than the suburbs.

However, as you grow, you will want to tune the marketing based on what you learn about customers in the first distribution.

For instance, you might find ways to tie rebates or coupons for free products to providing information useful to targeting the people who actually buy your product.

This should include gathering information about the media channels these individuals lean on — particularly social media. That knowledge can lead to choices in marketing as you roll out into other tiers of this market, or into other urban areas.

Once you know the kind of people who align with both the product and the message of the brand, look for trends in the data gathered to decide where to put your marketing efforts.

Along these lines, you likely had to push the product into the current outlets. With a social media campaign to likely customers, you may be able to pull the product into new stores.

You want people to ask for the product at outlets into which access has not yet been given. This eases the barriers to getting your product into new locations.

You may also find that people in your target audience will go out of their way to find your product, making sponsorship of events or other opportunities of interest ways to create connections to those who will seek out the product. Again, the more you know about the audience, the easier it will be to align marketing.

Mike Porter is the faculty director of the MS in Health Care Innovation at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business.