Opinion: Who are your customers and what do they want?

Adding to a string of deep dive articles on marketing strategy, Emma Cole from UK Growth Coach looks at engaging and gaining value from each of your existing and potential customers…

Many view marketing as a cost, others an investment. It depends on your mindset but also whether you know what you’re getting from it. If you don’t track the results and therefore know the result, arguably it’s a cost. Alternatively, if you know that for every £10 you spend, you’re getting £200 of revenue, then clearly this is an investment. Think of it like this. If you gave me £5 and I gave you £20 back, I would imagine that you would see this as a good thing and keep doing it. If on the other hand, the situation was reversed, you might think about stop giving me money. That’s the key thing. Know what you’re spending and understand what it’s giving you back.

Marketing is a series of mechanisms designed to attract, progress, and maximise opportunities for business. Best known, always beats best product or service, so how do you become the best known?

Marketing is one of the broadest topics that as a business coach, I cover. It’s a significant topic and specialism in its own right. Here, I’m going to try and give you an overview that can help you on your path of getting the right marketing working for your business.

As business owners, we know the importance of marketing but what marketing strategies should you adopt? The first questions to ask are:

• What is it we really want from our marketing?
• Why do we want that?
• What would achieving this allow you to do in your business and life outside of it?

It would be easy to say things like, “I want more sales” or, “To make more money, so that I have a better business, less stress and more enjoyment.”

These answers are pretty generic and quite ‘top level’. The truth is, you really need to dig into the heart of the ‘what’ and ‘why.’ By making it more specific, it allows you to target your actions and therefore be more effective and achieve better results.

To help be more specific, I use a model called the ‘Common 10.’ This model allows you to breakdown your marketing objectives that are common to all businesses in a simple and concise way.

• Improve your brand message and audience perception
• Maximise your findability, visibility, and reach
• Build a data base
• Nurture your prospects and enable enquiries
• Increase your sales conversion
• Maximise your sales values
• Build your lifetime customer value
• Capture and present your proof
• Reactivate your past clients and prospects
• Build and market through your alliance and introducer partnerships

There’s a world of opportunity out there that you could potentially try and tap into, but that would give you that dreaded one size fits all answer, which in real terms, brings limited success. The art of getting marketing working best for you and your business is to understand your audiences, defining who are they, what they want and what tone you need to use when you ‘talk’ to them. Just think about how you might talk to your best friend or partner and then think about how you might talk to your doctor. They would be very different in terms of style, tone, language, speed at which you talk or even volume.

I would recommend that you break down your customers into avatars. Who are they? Where do they live? What’s their age, their family type, job role or occupation, ball park annual income, education level? Make them as real as possible, even give them names.

Once done, get more detailed. Think about and identify their goals and values, what their sources of information are. Identify their challenges and pain points and then list out any objections and the role they take in the purchase process. Gaining clarity to your ‘who’s’, ‘how’s’, ‘why’s’ and ‘what’s’ will enable you to make your marketing more targeted and far more effective.

Thinking about the Common 10 model, let’s start with improving your brand and messages. This is the foundation on which all your marketing rests upon. Don’t try to short cut it as it will cost you dearly down the road. They way to break it down is this.

• What is your brand identity? What’s your businesses persona? What type of language or imagery do you?
• Do you have a clear vision and mission? What’s your end goal look like and how does it feel if you’re a customer?
• What’s your brand’s values?
• You’ve identified your target audiences already and built their avatars. Where will your brand be present and recognised?

How to increase your visibility, findability and reach for potential customers comes in one of two ways. They either find you or you have found them. To do the first, you need to ensure ease of findability and visibility as this will be crucial to bring this prospect to your door. For findability there’s multiple ways to do this, either off or online through using social media, blogs, websites, YouTube etc. The visibility element is the level of presence and authority that exists within all of those channels and platforms. Reach is all about the number of people you either contact or connect with and then how your messages are shared onwards or outwards.

Whichever way you decide to go, or methodology used, I would always say it’s crucial to develop a content and campaign calendar with clear outlines of what key messages you want to communicate across the year. Content leads to enhanced engagement and campaigns lead to uptake of any offers and orders.

Build a permission data base. We engage with all sorts of people, all of the time. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can build a database and what that could do for your business.  A simple CRM system allows you to record that all so important information and ensure you have permission for ongoing communication. So many business owners think that they need more customers. In fact, they probably just need to re-engage with the people that they’ve already interacted with in the past. There’s a wealth of untapped potential just from these people.

Nurturing prospects and enabling their enquiries
Not everyone will turn into a customer day one. it doesn’t mean they don’t have value; it just means they aren’t ready to buy yet. Many businesses focus on the clear and easy wins of the instant yes group, but this isn’t a great long terms strategy. How many enquiries getting answered by a ‘one and done’ email, if at all? How often do you re-engage with your previous customers or people who’ve made an enquiry? By staying in touch, building rapport and trust you are in fact building a future pipeline for your business.

Increasing your sales conversion
Effective salespeople all possess one common characteristic, they are fabulous at preventing objections. Please note that’s preventing not handling, there a big difference. Great salespeople are the ones that can pre-empt many possible objections by handling them in advance. By listening to what your customer is truly saying, being observant and even understanding some of their behaviours you can be far more effective at building relationships and getting that sale.  To truly see the benefit of increased conversion, you need to understand your sales process. Mapping the customer journey and looking at the points of contacts you have, the sales scripts you use and the tools you have to pre-handle objections, the far greater likelihood of success.

Maximising your sales value
That old favourite of McDonalds, “Do you want large fries with that?” Are all your customers aware of all that you do and sell, each service you offer? It might seem obvious but if someone buys a bike from you, do they know that you can service it? So often we make the mistake of assuming everyone knows what we do, and the reality is they don’t. By refining and understanding your sales processes and putting systems into place, you put your business in the best possible place to make them aware of just that.

Increased customer lifetime value
Managing customers on a long-term basis can take some effort, but it’s always worth it. Who are your top 10 ten customers? Quite often the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Reminding you of the warning customers love to buy but hate to be sold to, think about how you demonstrate your value. It could be through new learnings, new products launched, industry insights and possible recommendations. Always remember to use things that will engage with people emotionally, help generate aspiration and visualisation.

Capturing and presenting your proof
We can sometimes find it difficult to ask for things such as reviews or testimonials, but I bet no one books a holiday without looking at just that. By asking for reviews and sharing them with potential prospect’s we’re demonstrating our worth and creditability. We all want to know what it feels like to be one of your customers.

We can use these pieces of marketing gold in several ways. On our websites, review sites, social media or attaching a relevant review to an enquiry about a product or enquiry that can increase the rate of acceptance and build consumer confidence in their choice.

Reactivating past customers or prospects
As I previously mentioned, businesses sometimes only see the immediate customer but those customers or prospects that have gone into hibernation can be incredibly valuable with an enormous potential. What system do you have in place to periodically contact and re-engage with customers or even those who haven’t yet bought, or bought a long time ago? Are you regularly reminding them of our value and ‘keeping them warm?’ I was working with a client recently who hadn’t been keeping in contact with just these types of customers and by re-engaging using a simple e-shot, they gained three enquiries which lead to around £25,000 worth of sales.

Building alliances
Can you build alliances with businesses that have the same type of customer as you but are not competing? This can increase your visibility and thus potential customer base. Look around your networks, local business parks and see who’s out there that serves your customer already. Obvious ones might be cafes that you could sign post to each other, or perhaps less obvious ones such as car dealerships or other outdoor pursuit stores? By building alliances and your community, you stand the best chance of becoming a potential customers first choice.

I have only touched on the very surface of marketing here. However, my top tips are;

1. Have a clear Brand Identity
2. Build customer avatars for each of your types of customers and market to them accordingly
3. Remember your customers in hibernation have value too
4. Have clear sales scripts and processes that make it easier to say “yes” to rather than “no”.

If you would like to understand more about effective marketing in your own business, please contact me by email emmacole@growthcoach.co.uk quoting code GCCIN3 and I can book you in for a free 90 minute business review and coaching session.