Insure that You Are Giving Them What They Want
With a thorough understanding of the needs of your ideal customers, you should then strive to create an offering and proposition based on four criteria that will give them:
exactly what they want from you
precisely when they need it
in a way that is convenient for them
at a price they can afford and are prepared to pay
If you are not convinced that your sales proposition meets all of these criteria, then you’ll need to study the profile of your customers again and revise your offering.
Is it about quality or quantity of prospects?
A precision-driven marketing approach-where you have a high-quality list of prospective clients or leads-will, dollar-for-dollar of marketing spend, prove far more productive and profitable than an untargeted blanket approach to generate sales. Quality of leads, based on your understanding, knowledge, and careful profiling of your customers and their needs, will massively increase your ability to convert them into sales.
Pinpoint what Your Customers and Prospects Need or Want
Having selected your ideal customer groups you’ll now need to be absolutely clear about what they want and need, and exactly what it is that you are going to offer them. This understanding will enable you to develop the specific marketing message and proposition that will most effectively sell the benefits of your product or service to them.
If you get these messages wrong, then it’s almost certain that your marketing efforts will fail, as your customers will buy from your competitors instead. Your product, service, or business proposition will have missed the target completely.
Speak to Target Customers Before Developing Your Marketing Strategy
Before you start to develop or choose your marketing strategy it’s always worthwhile to speak first to a sample from your target audience. By doing this you’ll be able to check that your profile of your intended market has been the right one, and test your assumptions about what you think they want and why they could buy from you. You could do this by speaking directly to a group of people or you could undertake a survey in the form of a questionnaire, which can be mailed to a sample of target customers. Alternatively, you could talk to passers-by in a location that is frequented by your ideal customers.
What to Avoid
Failing to Test
The most common mistakes made when targeting products and services toward specific users or customer groups are caused by not testing the assumptions you have made about your audience. You’ll waste valuable time and marketing budget if you launch a campaign toward an audience when you have not accurately identified who those customers are, and cannot precisely define what they want and why they could buy from you instead of your competitors.
Lack of Focus
Do not buy into a list of unknown prospects, no matter how attractive it seems to get names of thousands of people you can blanket-sell to in the short term.
Find out who they are, where they are located, and test your assumptions about what you believe they want. By testing, you can either confirm that your profiling was right, or you can adjust your offering until you get it right. Being precise will lead to more sales more quickly, and more profit over the longer term.
Source: BNet
