The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

I had a call with a friend (and now client) Susan Meyer this morning. She wanted to talk to me about using my services because her products aren’t selling as well as she’d like. As we talked about what she was doing and who her target audience was, a potentially problematic disconnect began to come to light. Namely that while Susan is doing a lot of great online marketing stuff - blogging, commenting in other people’s blogs, writing articles for and buying advertising on websites that are targeting her audience, etc. - the reality is that the majority of her target audience (primarily retirement-age women who are entering a new stage of their lives and are trying to figure out what to do next) aren’t actually spending a lot of their time online.

Oh sure, they’re shopping or using the net for email and other basic tasks - this isn’t exactly a generation of tech dummies we’re talking about. If anything, they’re quite familiar with the Internet and possibly even retiring from jobs that relied heavily on computers. But, unlike younger audiences, they’re most likely not spending a lot of time on blogs and forums, reading online articles and otherwise just hanging out online to the extent that the lowest hanging fruit of small scale online marketing will be effective in reaching them.

Once we got to talking, we discovered that Susan’s target audience spends much more time watching tv, going out with friends, brick-and-mortar shopping and otherwise NOT living online. Ergo, a lot of what she is doing, while smart for someone whose audience is spending a large chunk of their time working or playing around in cyberspace, is not particularly useful in her case.

Which brings us to the next question - what is useful? Susan is a solopreneur. She can’t afford the big, expensive tv ads or newspaper inserts that would be the most obvious and most easily successful routes to get her marketing message in front of her audience. So how do you cheaply and effectively get the attention of a group of people who spend far more time in “meatspace” than cyberspace?

Well, we’re still working on that. But now that we know where the roadblock is, we can more easily work around it.

Getting Up Close and Personal

It’s not enough to just know about your customer, or to have a demographic range. If you really want to get the right message delivered to the right person at the right time, you have to know your customers like you know your best friends and closest relatives.

One of the things I’m asking Susan to do is to create a “calendar” for her customer profile - literally printing out a blank weekly calendar page and filling it with the sort of things that her customers would fill their days with. She is familiar enough with the people in her audience to make a good stab at this, so it should serve to help us home in on some of the places she could be getting some attention, without spending tons of cash.

For example, she mentioned that in New York City where she lives, a lot of women in her customers’ demographic range tend to go out to the theater together in groups. Maybe there’s a way to reach them there. Another popular target for gatherings is Early Bird specials at restaurants. So that’s another potentially useful bit of information.

We’re still in the early stages, so there’s a long way to go before we pin down some really good options. And of course, no one’s saying that Susan should cease all Internet activities, although we’ll need to spend some time to make sure that she’s using that tool as effectively and as closely targeted as possible. But it’s a quick lesson in the necessity to know thy customer.

5 Tips For Creating Better Sales Through Better Customer Targeting

1. Know thy customer

You need to spend some time getting to know your customer. And I don’t just mean mapping out their demographic range. I mean really getting to know them. Create a customer profile - several of them if necessary - that reads like a character sketch for a writer. Give your customer a name, age and ethnicity. Where does she work? How much money does she make? What are her hobbies, her religion, her upbringing? How does she spend her day? Where does she live, and in what sort of home? Why? Is she married? What are her kids’ names? What are her motives for buying the sort of thing you sell?

For each type of customer you have, you’ll want to create a different persona or two. For example, a coffee shop has target customers ranging from business commuters buying their morning Joe to the self-employed types who use their corner table as an ad hoc office to soccer moms who buy their post-yoga smoothies there on the way home from the gym. Each customer type should be represented in character sketches.

Create a persona detailed enough so that he or she becomes real enough to you that you can predict how they’ll respond to a certain headline, or where they’re most likely to be receptive to coming across your marketing message. When you write marketing messages, write as though you’re talking to just this one person. Make them real enough that you catch yourself adding them to your Christmas card list or email group.

And yes, you can use real people, if you know folks who really are your target customer. Do you have a “best” customer? How about a friend or family member who fits the bill? That’s fine too, and makes it even more real. Plus, you really can send them that Christmas card (and ask them for help reviewing marketing messages, if they’re really, really nice).

2. Put your message where your audience will see it, not where it’s convenient for you to be

All the billboards in the world won’t attract the blind. And if your target audience resides primarily in Texas, then it’s a waste of money to send out your ads nationwide. This is common sense. However, sometimes people get blinded by what they’re familiar with or get very excited about doing things one way, and don’t see that their customers aren’t coming along for the ride.

The Internet is a glorious and beautiful thing to behold. But there are still significant portions of the population that, for reasons ranging from age to income to personal or religious beliefs, just don’t spend that much time online. It’s easy and cheap to put up a website, and for most businesses it’s a no-brainer. And for those of us running a small biz or organization, it’s almost a knee-jerk reaction to blast the interweebs with all the bullets in our marketing magazine, mainly because it’s cheap, easy and familiar.

But just because you put build it doesn’t mean they’ll come, and just because it’s easy or cheap doesn’t mean it’s actually going to be useful to you. If your target audience isn’t likely to be online, you’ll need to find other ways to reach them.

3. Get creative

If the easy routes aren’t feasible, you’re going to have to work harder to come up with something that is. This doesn’t mean that you can’t come up with something fun, affordable and effective. It just means you’ll have to think outside the box to do it.

Explore your customer profiles - are there any activities, mindsets or habits that spark ideas? And think beyond the obvious. If a customer profile has kids, what does that say about what they read or where they go? How about advertising in their kids’ school newsletter? Or buying ad space on park benches? Or partnering with a local babysitting firm to deliver discounts or special services?

4. Mine before you hunt

Existing customers are your best source for new customers. After all, they’re already interested. All you’ve got to do is convince them to tell all their friends. How about pass-along coupons, or “buy one/give one” sales?

And don’t forget that reselling, upselling and cross-selling to existing customers is by far the cheapest way to boost sales; far cheaper than getting new customers. Make sure that your marketing strategy doesn’t favor tracking down new buyers at the cost of ignoring existing ones.

5. Get some leverage

Just because you don’t have a lot of traffic, online or offline, doesn’t mean that the traffic’s not out there. A good number of Susan’s target audience are online somewhere, some of the time. One goal of ours is to find places that her customers already go and figure out how to leverage that traffic for her use. Examples would be buying ad space, partnering to create a special offer, getting exposure through article writing or interviews on the site, etc.

The same process works in meatspace as well. If there’s a local store where your target audience shops, can you find a way to tap into that traffic? What about other retail options? Is there an upcoming concert that appeals to your customers’ tastes? Find out how much it costs to advertise on the program or set up a table in the vendor area.

It’s all about leverage - you put your product or service on the end of the stick, balance the stick on the point of a great idea and use the mass of traffic or attention that someone else has created to launch your business into the stratosphere.

Photo credit: Sanja Gjenero

customers, internet, marketing, sales, target audience, target customer, traffic, web marketing

Tags: Business //