When you have a limited advertising budget you can sometimes make the mistake of painting with broad strokes when you are developing your advertising promotions. The assumption that you can save money by developing a single message rather than multiple messages for multiple targets can do you more harm than good.

Think of your relationship with your customers as a relationship with a significant other. You would act differently in different phases of your relationship with your husband or wife and you should follow the same basic premise when communicating with your customers. In the infancy of a personal relationship you might try to bring to light some of your better attributes in order to win the heart of the object of your desire. In this courting phase the significant other is getting to know what you are all about and deciding on whether or not they can trust you. Here is where the foundation of the relationship is laid. Later on in the relationship there is really no need to keep emphasizing to your partner that you can be trusted or what kind of person you are because they should already know. You can do your best to maintain their view of you but it would be a waste of time to highlight the same things that you would in the courting phase. Your time would be better spent on growing your relationship and exploring newer areas of experience and emotion.

The same holds true with your customers. Once you have initiated a relationship with a customer and have established that you are competent, cost effective and dependable, any money you spend on communicating with them shouldn’t be spent on continually trying to hammer those points home. A better use of those advertising dollars would be on bringing to their attention that your services can be utilized in different ways, or other products that you might offer that would be beneficial to them. Making a distinction between existing customers and potential clients might seem to add an apparent additional cost to your advertising efforts, but in reality, wasting money on over-emphasizing a point to a market that doesn’t need the additional reinforcement can be seen as an expense that you can easily eliminate.

If you have a limited advertising budget and cannot afford to address too many different groups with your marketing campaigns you still might find that it will be worth it to at least make a distinction between existing customers and potential clients and craft your specific message to them accordingly.