The number one rule in marketing is to identify who you are marketing towards. There’s no point spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a marketing campaign to target everyone if you know only a certain niche is going to reply. Equally, you want to make sure you’re targeting the right niche, and not wasting money on, for example, students, when it’s clear your demographic is the over-65s. Identifying your target market...

In the past, business advertising was a lot less specific, taking more of a scattergun approach. There were fewer concerns whether a customer belonged to the appropriate target group for that particular product. While there was the possibility that somebody might take up a product advertised via this method, this was by no means typical behaviour. Businesses were spending money, time and resources without being confident of success. So...