Marketing is changing fast, but implementing slowly. Having a daughter in Marketing and Advertising production in the UK, at the leading Marketing Group in the world, I have a front seat at the developments in Marketing & Advertising.

One thing strikes me, the globalization of marketing and yet the personalization of marketing. Because of the Internet, the price of distribution of advertising material, to the entire world, has plummeted. The nature of the Internet changes access to the globe. It is the same price to reach a person next door as it is to reach someone in China or Australia. The implications of this are staggering. You can now advertise to someone in New Zealand from your bedroom with a computer and Internet terminal.

As Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, has said ‘it changes the business model’. It makes no sense being local, district or even National. Your market must now be the world population. Advertising locally is not taking advantage of the capabilities of your computer or that of your smart phone. Yet, most companies are very slow to grasp this. Over 75% of advertising is still targeted locally. I myself, a marketing professional for many years, find it difficult to change my mind set.

Now this is not to say it is an automatic reach. Because of the nature of social media, most posts go to your friends, family and close associates, and they are mostly local, this is because the algorithms in the computer works out that these are the persons most interested in your posts. However, you can chose to ‘advertise’ to the people in Canada or Russia by placing an advert and paying a relatively small fee to target these persons.

But this is just one arm of the phenomenal change that is upon us. While marketing and advertising is going global, it is also going personal. It is personal because you can target a specific person. That is you can target a specific person in China. Therefore it is not sufficient to go global but also to go specific through segmentation. That is, as a marketer, you must get to know the profile of the person you wish to market to. This profile has to be such that it is a profile that can find a fit globally.

An example will help better explain. Let us assume you are renting a holiday home in Tobago. You first have to determine the ideal person that would like to rent this home. Is it a single male or female, married with family, likes nature or the sea, quiet, away from the hustle and bustle and so on and so on… Then you can target an advert to this profile of person and with the help of social media platforms you can send that advert to such persons in Sydney Australia at no higher cost than it would take to send it to people in South Trinidad.

My daughter has informed me that the international firms are getting better and better at profiling because of your information on the said social media. Often for one product advertisement, they create 10 separate advertising messages (adverts) each targeted to a specific profile of target customer. She foresees the time when they will create a specific advertisement for each specific person. And that person will be anywhere in the world.

So really speaking, as a Real Estate broker or agent, you should not be worried about the state of the local economy. Rather be worried that you don’t know who you are targeting and what you want to say to them, and where in the world are they located. Because if you do, it is very low cost to reach them.