You can divide marketing up into a wide variety
of categories. It can be based on the way it is meant to appeal to
someone. Moreover, even within those categories you can reduce things
down even more into other subcategories.
For this article, I am going to discuss two particularly broad types of
marketing, which is the difference between focused and unfocused
marketing.
Both are going to be important to a large scale marketing campaign and
so you should be well aware of each of them. In addition, identify what
exactly they can do for your marketing.
Focused marketing deals on creating marketing that is specifically
aimed at one group or another. The niche market is a more extreme
example of focused marketing, but even marketing aimed at a broad
audience can still be considered focused.
One of the defining aspects of focused marketing is how you get it to
your customers. If you set up a system of direct mailing where you pick
certain people to send your material to, than that is going to be
focused marketing.
The type of message you present can also be indicative of focused
marketing. Let us say you were planning to print some custom greeting
cards in an effort to target people who have never shopped at your
store before. While the nature of a group like that is naturally going
to be broad, the way you design your custom greeting cards and the way
you get it to the people will be what makes it focused. You are honing
down your marketing to better appeal to these specific people.
Unfocused marketing is usually things like business cards. You are
going to get business cards made to promote your business in general,
but you might not have any one group of people in mind that you’re
going to market to with them.
Business cards can become focused when you personally hand them to
certain people, but if you instead just start handing out business
cards to anyone, you see they become unfocused. The same is true for
handing out flyers on the street. While you have a limited amount of
focus based on the area you are handing out the flyers in, you still do
not know anything about the people you are handing them to, and the
flyers are likely meant to appeal to anyone.
Knowing the difference between the two becomes particularly important
when you are trying to target one group or another. You cannot use
unfocused marketing to effectively market to a specific group. As I
mentioned with niche marketing, this will require a much more focused
marketing push, requiring you to understand exactly what focused
marketing is.
The more you know about anything the better you will be at handling it.
You need to make sure you know as much about marketing as you can
before embarking on any major marketing pushes. | 
