How well do you know your prospective clients?
For marketing to work, it needs to strike a chord with the recipient. It needs to ask a question or make a statement that stops them in their tracks and grabs their attention. To do this, your question or statement needs to be directly relevant.
This means you need to know what THEY consider relevant and important.
Here are a few simple ideas, which can quickly give you a much clearer picture of the needs of your marketplace and allow you to target them more effectively:
- Whenever possible, ask your existing clients about what they see as the threats and opportunities facing their business and their industry. Look for the most common replies.
- Put a survey on your website, for non-clients. Make it as brief as possible and offer some kind of reward for filling it in.
- Listen to your marketplace using social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Many small business owners treat social media as a way to sell, yet it can be of enormous commercial benefit, to simply listen and learn.
That kind of market data can be worth a fortune to you, and not simply as a way to better target your marketing messages! It can also help you develop new products and services, based on what your marketplace actually wants, rather than what you assume it wants or needs.
When your services and your marketing are developed around the needs and wants of your prospective clients, it makes everything you do massively more effective.
How do you remain relevant with your marketplace?
Jim Connolly can help you grow your business and achieve the breakthrough marketing results your hard work deserves. To find out more, simply click here!
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Excellent advice. Once you know what questions prospective customers are asking, you can perform Twitter keyword searches to find people asking for the solutions you offer.
Hi Tammi. I’m more of an attraction marketing guy myself, but I know Chris Brogan certainly feels the same as you on that one.
I learn a lot about potential clients from the words that are searched to get to my blog. Those search words often prompt a post if it seems like that is something that should be covered. I also listen to who is looking for my kind of services on multiple platforms and try to vary where I direct my posts. My own clients give me clues on additional services or markets that may need me more.
I’m constantly amazed at some of the terms people find my blog for, Julie.
You’re right though, it can provide some valuable insights on many levels.
I am a big fan of using surveys to farm data from your website visitors. You can learn a lot of things that you really did not know.
My fave tool? KISSInsights (http://www.kissinsights.com). Its a small one or two question survey at the bottom of your website that you can set to show up depending on different variables (i.e. the page the visitor is on, how many pages the visitor has accessed etc). You can get a huge number of responses because it is so easy for the user.
Unfortunately they don’t have an affiliate programme, but that wont stop me banging on about it.
Have used and currently use it to great effect. You can even try it out free.
Thanks for sharing the resource sir!
Not a problem Jim!
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Some brilliant ideas! I am now wondering if it might be a good idea to put a survey on my site, perhaps to ask businesses what sort of information THEY would like to know when looking for the type of services I provide (I am a freelance German to English translator). If done in the right way, the survey itself could even be used to draw clients in and show interest in their opinions.
Great post, Jim! I love using Survey Monkey to get information from my community. It has resulted in some great ideas for products.