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.