Strategic Marketing
If you’re currently looking at sitting down to write a marketing plan to generate leads and sales for your business it can be quite daunting looking at a blank screen. Before you spend a penny or start working a new website, brochure, adverts or marketing campaign it’s mission critical to know who you are speaking to.
Before you think I’m stating the obvious and press that little x in the corner of your browser, I am going to let you in on an industry secret that’s going to triple your lead generation and sales in less than a month. Just kidding. But on a serious note, one of the first steps we follow in our discovery phase when we work for a new client helps us design strategically and it should be just as helpful to you writing a strategic marketing plan.
What we do before we dig into a company’s brand values, it’s products/services and how it fulfils it’s promises is we need to fully understand the customer or client we are trying to speak to. We do this by creating a customer profile (or avatar) for each product or service, there might be multiple avatars which is ok but then those are prioritised.
Building a customer profile
You could look at what the customer needs, why they need it and when they need it by. This will really help you to build messages that are relevant and on point with those customer groups, you could say it takes the sales out of the sales process. Let’s be honest, no one likes to be sold to.
The customer profile should dig deeper into the demographics and psychographics of the person. To help you do that, here are some sample questions you could ask. And get creative with your profiling, do some doodles or create a mood board from magazine cuttings.
– Male or female
– Average age
– What brands are they used to buying?
– What car are they most likely to drive?
– What magazines/papers do they read, TV channels or radio stations do they listen to?
– What social media sites do they use?
– What are their values?
Building a customer profile for your target customers is useful. You can go a level deeper than this and build your ideal customer profile by looking at your current customers and specifically the ones you love to work with. What makes those projects, jobs or sales go really well is that you will have shared values or have a shared vision or purpose and we all want more of those kind of relationships!
Once you know who your target or ideal customer is, it’ll be much easier to communicate with them and to find the right mediums for reaching out to them and grabbing their attention.
We hope you’ve found this a useful exercise and feel free to share the results you’ve achieved with this simple step before embarking on a strategic marketing exercise.