What Does Your Marketing Strategy Say About Your Business? The Big Mistake Small Business Owners Can Easily Avoid

You use marketing strategy about your ideal clients so that you can build stronger relationships. In the same way, potential clients engage your marketing strategy to collect information and gauge interactions to see if you qualify as a potential provider.

While clients research and compile their lists in the background, small business owners are missing prime opportunities to attract qualified, genuinely interested prospects. 74% of buyers choose the salesperson who was first to add value and insight in their buying process.

If an incomplete marketing strategy is preventing you from making a clients list, read on. In this post, I provide tips on not just completing your marketing strategy, but doing so in a way that motivates more ideal clients to engage with you.

To develop a complete marketing strategy you must narrowly define your customer instead of just going after anybody who has a business card. Ask yourself, who can you deliver the most value too. This is the group you’ll have the greatest impact on and can potentially bring in immediately.

Begin by segmenting your client base between normal accounts and your most successful (profitable) accounts. Your best clients or most successful accounts have these two core characteristics: they are profitable and also talk about your business to others.

The secret here is to understand if there is a certain product, service, or even a problem they have that is the most profitable.

Here are the other characteristics you’re deep diving for once you have determined who those best clients are:

Interview

Now take a handful of those best customers, email or phone them asking for feedback on their experience with your organization, service or product. During this phase, you need to be “Oprah-like” and  ask open ended questions.

Some of the things you’re after is the PLACES your customers give their attention (eyes and ears) too, the LANGUAGE your customers use when describing why they buy from you, the WORDS and PHRASES your customers use when explaining what they value about what you do, and the DESCRIPTION of the perfect buying experience. You can’t get that by asking them to rate things from 1 to 10.

Understanding your ideal customer is critical if you want their business. You need to understand their pain points, wants, and needs and be able to address those needs in your marketing efforts.  Narrowly defining your customer  is the most important thing as you look at growing your business.

The next thing that contributes to a complete marketing strategy is your message of speaking to problems, before solutions. If you don’t take this seriously, everything else you do in term of marketing will be far less effective.

When you’re taking the time to  address the problems your ideal customers see and feel before offering your solution,  there is little chance the marketing activities you’re implementing to establish credibility and trust won’t resonate.

If you’re having a tough time thinking about your ideal client’s problems, think about the conversations you had leading up to your sales meeting, the things addressed in your client interview or hopefully, you’re a good note taker and can revisit those for some insight.

For example , a lot my firms prospective clients might say things like — I just want my phone to ring, I want to be on the first page of Google, I want more referrals, I want less marketing headaches, I want my website to generate leads, I feel like I’m wasting money on ineffective marketing, etc.

So my firm doesn’t sell strategic marketing or marketing plans or even consulting — all my ideal clients need to know about what we do is:

Another example, a massage practice:  They might have the best tables, oils, and most highly skilled therapist but all their customers seem to care about is that their pain and discomfort go away.

So that’s the promise they need to communicate, shout about and promote. The rest is an expectation — I mean doesn’t everyone in the massage business have highly skilled therapist.

That’s it — that’s how you retarget your message so it’s no longer about you and your remarkable products and services and it’s all about your remarkable clients and the problems they want to be solved.

Thinking about a complete marketing strategy forces you to push your ideal customer and messanging into every marketing activity. I’ve developed a very powerful approach to building this kind of framework.

My approach is a concept that asks you to create communication, processes, offerings, and campaigns aimed at strategically moving prospects and customers through five stages — Awareness, Education, Sample, Purchase and Refer. By viewing each of these stages as a place to appeal to ideal customers and reinforce your messanging, you create the kind of framework that facilitates sales.

Awareness —  This is the phase where sales, social media, content, networking, public relations will do well and even search, advertising, and referrals start here.

Education —  This is the stage where once you attract prospects to your website or location you have to give them reasons to come back, reasons to relate and even reasons to like your team and also provide reviews, success stories, and customer testimonials.

Sample —  Now that prospects are wondering how your solution might work for them it’s  time to demonstrate  to them with downloadable documents, galleries, reports, ebooks, webinars and very detailed how-to information. You might also have an assessment, audit, seminar, evaluation, trial version or low-cost offer here.

Purchase —  For this stage, the focus is still on educating but from the standpoint of a new customer

Refer —  The customer journey is ultimately about referrals

If you can’t seem to find time to complete your marketing strategy, try breaking it up into monthly themes. Schedule (in your calendar) a block of time per week to develop your marketing strategy. Every time you incorporate a bit more information and actively plan out who your ideal customer is?, what they value?, what problems you solve?, you improve your chances of making a sale.

Learn more ways to take your marketing from incomplete to a working process with our small business marketing guide, 7 Components of a Successful Marketing Plan