Identifying your target customers will do more than help you define your digital marketing strategy. According to Forbes, failure to properly identify customers is the number one reason why 80 percent of small businesses don't survive the first 18 months. Here are some do's and don'ts for identifying your target customers.

Don't Try to Be All Things to All People

When you're passionate about your business, it's easy to assume that everyone will want your product. It's tempting to blast your marketing messages to as wide an audience as your budget allows, but the reality is that even the big guys can't afford to target everyone. Casting a wide net and using a generic, blanket approach to finding new customers rarely works and is a waste of time and money. A hypertargeted approach is a more efficient option.

With the constant increase in the number of TV channels, radio, print media, billboards and sponsored ads out in the world, you may feel like you need to take a scatter gun to your marketing message: If you target every direction, surely you'll hit some — if not most — of them, right?

This isn't the case, according to experts at Target Marketing. Launching a marketing campaign with a consistent logo, slogan and message delivered across different media will no longer cut it, and you could find that dreaded problem emerging — fragmentation.

What Is Integrated Marketing?

According to Integrated Marketing Week, integration means "No single channel can win out anymore. ... [Marketers must deliver] great customer experience through truly integrated marketing, across any and every channel: Web, social, mobile, broadcast, print, email, in-store, outdoor and beyond."

When we talk about digital marketing, we're not simply talking about a singular strategy to help you gain clicks. Digital marketing is an umbrella term for dozens of different strategic campaigns that are designed to increase visibility and traffic to your business. A single campaign on its own will yield some results, but they will pale in comparison to the opportunities created by a multifaceted digital strategy.

Budget and other resource constraints are always a factor in determining what strategies a company is able to implement at a given time. However, the relative cost-effectiveness of many digital campaigns means that you should be executing a combination of campaigns for your business. Here are some of the top methods for converting digital opportunities into tangible growth.

Casting a wide net is certainly a nice thought when it comes to growing your business. Why wouldn't you want to reach as many potential customers as possible? Although you never want to turn away potential leads, focusing your efforts through hypertargeted marketing can help you reach consumers all over the Internet that are most likely to be interested in your business. This type of marketing can also identify those leads that might become the much-desired repeat customer.

What Is Hypertargeting?

Put simply, hypertargeting is a method of identifying consumers who would be interested in patronizing a certain type of business. 

The Internet may be an ever-changing sea of information, but content that is posted online never really disappears. If you're not paying attention, negative content about your business can float to the top. Fortunately, there are reputation management best practices that you can use to promote positive content and push negative content out of the crucial first page of search engine results.

You can't make negative content disappear completely from the Web, but knowing how to manage it goes a long way toward ensuring that users searching for information about your business find the information you want them to see.