If you haven’t heard about my neighbour’s cat that stole my heart then you’ve missed out on two great blogs and two very important marketing lessons from my feline friend, Ginger. How to WIN your ideal client and Gingie Strikes Again.
Today’s thoughts are once again centred around my favourite four-legged pal, but this time it’s about his PURR, and of course, there’s a marketing lesson in here as usual!
Pain Points
This is where the marketing journey starts, every business needs a reason for their customers to buy from them or use their service. You may have the most wonderful product or service on the planet but if nobody wants it or believes they need it – they won’t buy it! Once you have the knowledge and understanding about your customers and potential customers problems/pain points, you can then begin to educate them that you are the business they should buy from and why it will benefit them to do so. One question that should be at the top of your list is… Why do your customers need you? What is their need and how do you solve it? Remember, 30% of People Purchase to Gain Something and 70% Purchase to Solve a Problem (convinceandconvert.com)
From here you can start to produce different forms of content to target potential customers at different stages of their journey. Not to mention those who already buy from you – cross-selling and upselling other services/products are a really smart way to increase your income by not doing much work. It’s ten times easier to get someone to buy from you again, than it is to get a new customer.
Understanding
Understanding your customers is key. The more you know about your customers, the more effective your efforts will be.
Who are they?
What do they buy?
Why do they buy it or why do they use your service?
When they buy?
How they buy?
Building a buyer persona is the best place to start. There’s no better way to describe your ideal customer in great detail than through a persona. What’s the relevance? You may think a lot of the information really isn’t relevant but let me tell you it really is. Getting the full picture can help you to establish deeper connections and really make your customer the focus of your marketing.
Not only is it important to understand your current customers, but you should also pay attention to the customers who are not converting (not as easy to understand as the customers that do buy, but still super important as they can tell you a lot!) Why are they not converting? Do you need to change your messaging? Refine your offer, maybe? Is there a flaw somewhere in the customer journey? Does your form have a broken link? Maybe your follow up approach isn’t strong enough?
So, once you have that understanding about your customers and yet to be customers, it’s all about targeting them with the right message at the right time.
Relevant
It’s not just 2020, that’s been the year of constant change (although it certainly feels like it). Year in year out the small business world is always changing, and businesses must continuously evolve to keep up with industry changes, customer habits changing and the ever-changing world of social media – just to mention a few.
Look at the content they’re engaging with. Once upon a time, you could write a hefty long Facebook post or text-based blog pages long and 90%+ would sit and read it. Nowadays, those numbers are much lower. The world is FULL of content to be consumed, and people are getting lazier! So although some pieces of content (such as this blog) will be longer, when you’re trying to capture someone’s attention – keep it short and sweet where you can, but as long as it’s relevant to them, you’ll manage to get their attention. (If you’re still not doing video marketing – read this blog to see exactly why you should be.)
It doesn’t have to just stop at the outreach content though… what are they looking at? What are they clicking through to? There are so many tools such as google analytics that can show you which pages of your site are the most popular, and when it comes to email marketing, most CRM’s that have a marketing element built-in will enable you to see who has clicked on which emails. Data is knowledge, and knowledge is power when it comes to selling!
If you’re still running your business without any sort of email marketing or social media nurture, it’s really time for a change in 2021. How can your prospects know that what you do is relevant to them if you’re not talking to them?
Remarkable
If you want to stand out, and you want prospects to come to YOUR website, and remember YOU and want to work with you or buy your products over your competition, you need to be different.
We’ve recently written a blog called ‘stop marketing the same as other competing small businesses!’, you may find some useful advice in there that you can implement in your business straight away. Have a read here.
Closing thoughts
Here at Flamingo Marketing Strategies, we offer a 60-minute marketing strategy call to find out what you do, how you do it and give you lots of ideas and pointers on things you could and should be doing. It’s simple to book one in, just choose a time and date here.
2021 is a new year and exciting opportunity to really market your business properly.
In June of this year, we had our lowest income month for all the obvious reasons, in November (as in yesterday!) we have had our highest income month and achieved our goal we set when we started the business.
How did we do it?
Marketing! We pushed really hard in July, by September the revenue started to increase month on month.
A combination of LinkedIn, Email Marketing and Content Marketing. All areas you can explore if you are a B2B business, if you’re a B2C, swap out LinkedIn for Facebook and you’re onto a winner. In 3 weeks, we generated a client of ours over £60,000 of revenue, with a £1,000 ad spend on Facebook.
There is lots of opportunities out there, you just need to a) know how to do it or b) seek help from someone who does!
Have a great last month of the year!