Many marketers want to cut to the chase and just target people that are rich. They only want the people that have the disposable income to spend on their purchases. You can certainly target a market that includes people that make over a certain amount of money, but that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll spend their money on your product.

To market to the wealthy, you need to change your marketing strategy a bit. Tweak what you do for your middle-class targets. Here's how to reach the rich:

Be where they are. People remember things by repetition. You need to hang your poster printing pieces and leave your brochures at rich people’s haunts. Most rich people have to go to the bank, so advertise in or around banks. Or you can hang some color custom poster printing on bulletin boards at gourmet grocery stores or other places you know the rich people flock to.

Be of use to them. Try to think of a way you can do them a favor. How can your product or service help them? If you own a children’s clothing boutique, offer to shop for their kids for them or offer some kind of babysitting/drop-off-your-kid service. Cater to them. Give them what they didn’t know they could have.

Beat TiVo. Most wealthy people can afford things like TiVo and satellite radio, which means any television or radio commercials you had planned for them won’t be seen. One way to get around this is product placement: paying a production company to include your product in their script. For example, if you have a chocolate store, you could pay for one of the characters to be eating out of a bag of your chocolates during the show. This effectively jumps over the fast–forwarding-through-commercials-on-TiVo hurdle.

Draw them in with your copy. When the rich look for your kind of product, what do they type in the search engine? Look for the Web sites that attract rich people, like Tiffany’s, and take note of the words they use on their site and in their marketing materials. Try to incorporate those words on your Web site and other marketing materials to describe your company and/or your product.

Be patient. Rich people are always being asked to contribute to one charity or another. They probably get a lot of hyped-up mail and email from advertisers who are afraid that they’re going to miss their big chance of getting that rich person’s money. Be patient and advertise aggressively, but give them time to make up their own minds. Use a lot of poster printing around their neighborhoods, or where they work (like in doctor office parks). Give them time to see your color poster printing pieces, brochures and other materials (remember, repetition is key!) and then contact them directly if possible. Don’t give them any time restraints, because they’ve heard all of those before and they won’t have any trouble finding a place that doesn’t restrain them!

Now that you know how to contact the rich, here’s a reason why it doesn’t always work. For instance, take people that make over $250,000 a year. You would assume that they have a lot of disposable income to buy your product, let’s say you’re selling a $1,000 purse. But perhaps they have many loans and a mortgage that leaves them with little cash. If you target these people instead of people who make $50,000 per year but have little debt, you could be missing out on many potential sales. The person that makes $50,000 per year, lives in a rent-controlled apartment and has no debt can afford that $1,000 purse. And, there are a greater number of these middle-income earners to target. But you’ll miss these people because you only focused on the household income of rich people.

Targeting only the rich is not likely to net you big profits. Sure, include the rich in your target market, but don’t let that be your only deciding factor.