Does Your Marketing Strategy Help You Reach Your Ideal Customer?
During the early days of a business, any paying customer is an ideal customer. The reality of trying to make payroll, gain experience and develop a reputation drives many entrepreneurs to accept any paying work that comes their way.
But pursuing and accepting work from any customer leads to a brand that is not differentiated, which is a recipe for lackluster performance over the long run.
The upfront question to consider is – ‘does our current Marketing Strategy result in consistently reaching our ideal customer?’
A Clarified Marketing Strategy Helps You Understand and Develop Your Competencies
There’s power in a laser-sharp focus. It might seem counterintuitive to narrow down the number of your potential customers instead of going for a broad approach, but it’s beneficial in many ways. When you identify your ideal customer, it empowers your team to focus on your core competencies and live out of them as a business. In other words, as a business, you can do what you do best, which will be precisely what your ideal customer needs. Tell the world what you are best at, and then only serve those customers that need what your core competencies offer.
Please excuse my incoherent, rambling Marketing Strategy.
Receiving a long, rambling letter or email is frustrating. We'd much prefer to receive communication that is short and to the point, as the famous sayings "If I had more time, I'd have written a shorter letter" helpfully drives home.
Here are elements that you and your team need to clarify to ensure your Marketing Strategy comes accross as a short, coherent communication:
Words You Own: What terms have you named? What activities do you perform with your customers that you could name. For instance, do you name your discovery or account management activities to help differentiate you from the competion?
Ideal Client Profile: The demographic, geographic and psychographic profile of your ideal client. This level of specificity allows your marketing team to go out and create a list of ideal prospects to pursue.
Products/Services: Identify the products &/or services your clients buy which sets up the next element.
KPIs: For each product/service, what are the internal measures your team can track - we call these "Kept Promise Indicators".
Brand Promise Guarantee: Jim Collins calls this a "Catalytic Mechanism" - a promose or guarantee that drives home the promise you are making your customers, and has consequences if you don't fulfill your promise, such as "Pizza delivered in 30 minutes or its free".
Visual Illustration of your Customer Journey Process: Don't tell your prospects someting you should be able to show them - a condensed one page graphic representation of the journey you will take a prospect on if they become a customer.
Avoid Being Distracted
Once you know who your ideal customers are, you won’t be spreading yourself thin anymore trying to please everyone. If a customer doesn’t fit with the perfect customer profile, just say “no.” Remember that you don’t have to take every opportunity that presents itself — only the ones where your company can deliver the most value. Drop those who aren’t a good fit. The odds are that you can’t keep them 100% happy anyway, precisely because they aren’t your ideal customers.
The Power Of Focus
Your employees will find it much easier to find and target the right prospects with outbound marketing once they know who are your ideal customers. The clear focus helps your marketing and sales teams collaborate more closely. When they start working in synergy to find your ideal customers and convert them, you will see desired results. Increased revenue, more sales and customers overall, higher customer satisfaction — those are some of the benefits you will see as a result of laser-sharp focus. And your delivery or production teams will have the competencies and experience to service that ideal customer.
So What?
The bottom line of focusing on your ideal customer is that it helps your business focus on what it does best, thereby attracting more ideal clients and work. In the long run your company will develop a reputation of being an expert in that field, which further propels attracting even more of the right kind of customer.
Next Steps
Visit NavigateTheJourney.com and schedule a call with Tom Barrett to discuss how he helps entrepreneurs get what they want from their business.
About The Author
Tom Barrett is a Leadership Team Coach based in Nashville, and is a Certified Scaling Up Coach™, Certified Pinnacle Business Guide, & former Certified EOS Implementer™. He helps his clients build scalable businesses by clarifying their vision, simplifying their strategy and achieving their goals one quarter at a time.