Do customers come to you like water? Or do you have to fight for every single one?
Marketing is all about understanding your customer so well that your offer turns on the taps and sales flow.
Seth Godin talks about the importance of creating a change in your customer. The customer is in his own world and you come along and you want to change something about that world. Why should he pay attention to you? Why should he care? Why should he change his comfortable life? Why should he take a risk?
You don’t have to answer those questions. Sadly the business owners who don’t end up offering a product or service that is very similar to most other companies. It’s hard to get customers and they cost a lot to acquire. It is easy though as you don’t have to think. You just copy what other people do.
A marketing strategy takes a different approach. It starts with the customer and not with you. It thinks about what she wants and why she thinks, acts, feels and behaves the way that she does.
As importantly it thinks about the pain and discomfort that she feels right now and then how the pain can be removed, soothed away, by the service that you offer.
Many entrepreneurs are enthralled with the idea that they have. “I will build this” without ever thinking about the customer and what they think about the idea and whether the idea will solve a real problem for them.
Marketing strategy looks at this and then digs down into where you will find the customer, how you will reach them, and the best way of talking to them.
Do I need help with my Marketing Strategy?
Do you get a lot of business from referrals? Do you always get five-star reviews? Is your lead pipeline always full? Do customers decide to buy quickly and easily?
If you’ve said yes to the above questions your living in a charmed place and you are doing a lot right. If you are stacking up the nos then there is room for improvement.
When I look at marketing strategies we start at the beginning. If you have customers we look at who they are and whether they are the customers you want. If you don’t have customers we see who they should be and try and understand how they want to be engaged.
We build your marketing strategy so that we remove as much risk and uncertainty as possible fro the plan. This means creating a hypothesis about how customers behave and how they will react to your campaigns. Then we test the hypotheses with small experiments. Only when we are certain, based on real data, that the world is the way that we think it is done we risk lots of time and money on big campaigns.
Case Studies
B2B Email Marketing Case Study – Using the power of email marketing to get a new business to its first million dollars in sales.
B2B Content Marketing Case Study – We used content marketing to get hundreds of top spots in Google and generate thousands of high-quality leads
Great marketing works really well with a great product or service. It can’t turn a sow’s ear into silk. What we can do is to make sure that you aren’t selling sow’s ears to start with.
When we get it right sales can grow at 10- 30% a month. Faster than that and you get entirely different types of problems. From a standing start, it will normally take one to three months to get your marketing into a position where you can start growing quickly.
To do that we need to do two things together
nail the strategy
set up the execution
The time that the strategy takes depends on how many other things you are juggling at once. The execution relies on being able to find the right people who can do a quality job. That either takes money or it takes time.
Whichever way you go we can get your marketing and sales team delivering far more than they do now.
