Asking the right question

Traditional marketers ask just one key question:

What do we need to tell customers to make the sale?

Then they flood the environments (both virtual and actual) with competing claims, trying to outdo each other in their efforts to prove that they have what customers want. This barrage of noisy advertising and one-up salesmanship is inefficient, wasteful, and, to many, an unfortunate source of social pollution.

A better initial question to ask is this:

What do I/we have uniquely to offer?

When you start right off by examining yourself in the mirror and identifying your genuine, honest-to-yourself strength(s), you’re many laps ahead of most marketers, whether you’re selling something as simple as your résumé, as complex as a new high-tech product, or anything in between. Your unique strengths form the core of your offering, and you should keep building your strengths in ways that are true to your identity.

Whether you’re marketing yourself (perhaps you’re a consultant or someone else who offers individualized services) or a business, you can’t make consistent and efficient headway by deceiving yourself and trying to deceive others. The more true to your core the marketing message is, the more effective it is. If you can’t find any unique qualities to advertise, postpone those media purchases and work on self-improvement or product development. (Perhaps you simply need to listen harder to what your customers say and make sure they’re so happy that they recruit new customers!) Then come back to your program with a stronger set of claims that any customer can clearly see are of benefit — that is, unique benefit, not just a run-of-the-mill, everybody-does-it-that-way benefit.

If you draw a large enough circle around your market, you’ll probably encompass competitors who are better than you. There are so many people out there, working hard and innovating, just like you. So as you work to improve your offerings and become ever more unique and special, draw that circle appropriately. It’s the equivalent of your bar, so don’t set it too high. Perhaps you should try to be the best distributor of alternative, organic, and local foods in just one city. After you have that city sewed up, expand to the next closest market. Don’t, however, try to advertise and distribute across a ten-state area right out of the starting block. Knowing yourself means knowing your limitations as well as your strengths.

Marketing programs communicate benefits. Benefits are the qualities that your customers value. For example, your product may offer benefits such as convenience, ease of use, brand appeal, attractive design, local sourcing, healthiness, or a lower price than the competition. A service business, or an individual who provides services like consulting, may list benefits such as expertise, friendliness, and availability. The right mix of benefits can make your product or service particularly appealing to the group of customers who value those benefits. Make your list now: What are your core benefits, things that you can honestly say you’re good at and that customers may value?

Even if you’re better from a logical or rational perspective, customers may still choose the competition. Say your new soda scores better in blind taste tests or is made of organic ingredients. So what? Who wants to buy an unknown soda rather than the brand they know and love? No, this trust issue isn’t rational, but it still affects the purchase — which is why you absolutely must take a look at the emotional reasons people may or may not buy from you. Is your brand appealing? Do you use an attractive design for your packaging? Is your presentation professional and trustworthy? Do people know you or your business and look upon you favorably? Positive image isn’t hard to build for free when you market locally or regionally; you just need to show up consistently in ways that demonstrate your concern for the community.

Image isn’t everything in marketing, but it is just about everything when it comes to the emotional impact you make. So pay close attention to your image when you’re looking for ways to boost sales (see Chapter 3 of Book 5 for more about taking stock of your business image). To truly know your customers, you also need to explore the answers to these two questions:

• What do customers think about my product? Do they understand it? Do they think its features and benefits are superior to the competition and can meet their needs? Do they feel that my product is a good value given its benefits and costs? Is it easy for them to buy the product when and where they need it?
• How do customers feel about my product? Does it make them feel good? Do they like its personality? Do they like how it makes them feel about themselves? Do they trust me?

To answer these questions, find something to write on and draw a big T to create two columns. Label the left column “What Customers Know About,” and put the name of your brand, company, or product in the blank. Label the right column “How Customers Feel About,” and fill in as much as you can from your own knowledge before asking others to give you more ideas. Keep working on this table until you’re sure you have an exhaustive list of both the logical thoughts and facts and the emotional feelings and impressions that customers have.

Then, if you have access to a friendly group of customers or prospective customers, tell them you’re holding an informal focus group with complimentary drinks and snacks (doing so helps with your recruiting) and ask them to help you understand your marketing needs by reviewing and commenting on your table. The goal is to see whether your lists of what customers know and feel about your product agree with theirs. Do they concur with how you described their emotional viewpoint and/or their factual knowledge base?

Filling the awareness gap

Are prospective customers even aware that you exist? If not, then you need to bump up your marketing communications and get in front of them somehow to reduce or eliminate the awareness gap, which is the percentage of people in your target market who are unaware of your offerings and their benefits. If only one in ten prospective customers knows about your brand, then you have a 90 percent awareness gap and need to get the word out to a lot more people.

If you need to communicate with customers more effectively and often, you have some options for bumping up the impact of your marketing communications and reducing the awareness gap:

• You can put in more time. For example, if customers lack knowledge about your product, more sales calls can help fill this awareness gap.
• You can spend more money. More advertisements help fill your awareness gap, but of course, they cost money.
• You can communicate better. A strong, focused marketing program with clear, consistent, and frequent communications helps fill the awareness gap with information and a positive brand image, which then allows interest and purchase levels to rise significantly. Communicating better is usually the best approach, because it substitutes to some degree for time and money. See Chapter 5 of Book 5 for more about marketing communications.
• You can become more popular. Sometimes you can create a buzz of talk about your product. If people think it’s really cool or exciting, they may do some of the communicating for you, spreading the news by word of mouth and via social media (this is sometimes referred to as viral marketing). If your customers are active on any social media, then you need to be, too; see Chapter 6 of Book 5 for more information.

Focusing on your target customer

Your target customer is the person for whom you design your product and marketing program. If you don’t already have a clear profile of your target customer, make one now; otherwise, your marketing program will be adrift in a sea of less-than-effective options.

To craft your target customer profile, assemble any and all facts about your target customer on a large piece of poster paper: age, employer, education level, income, family status, hobbies, politics (if relevant), favorite brand of automobile, or anything else that helps you focus on this person. Also list your target customer’s motivations: what he or she cares about in life and how you can help him or her achieve those goals. Finally, cut and paste one to three pictures out of magazine ads to represent the face or faces of your target customer. This is the audience you have to focus your marketing program on. Everything from product design or selection to the content, timing, and placement of ads must specifically target these people.

You can further increase your focus on your target customer by deciding whether he or she prefers marketing that takes a rational, information-based approach; an emotional, personality-based approach; or a balanced mix of the two. By simply being clear about whom to target and whether to market to them in an informational or emotional manner, you ensure that your marketing program has a clear focus.

You can further target your audience by knowing their specific generation. Times, technologies, channels, and needs have changed and so, too, has the way you connect, engage, and sell to your customers. With all this change, the gap or differences in the various generations is getting wider as people’s attitudes, perspectives, and the way they live, shop, and engage with brands is redefined by technology, media channels, and social trends. The primary “shopping” generations are roughly broken down as follows:

• Millennials: born 1981-1996
• Generation X: born 1965-1980
• Baby boomers: born 1946-1964

Although a ton of information about each generation is available — from books to white papers to videos and more — the main thing marketers need to understand is what each generation thinks of brands, what they expect about brands, and what they respond to in terms of values and stimuli.

Each generation has a unique way of looking at the same brands and assigns different expectations for how it wants to be served.

Millennials (see Table 1-1) don’t trust brands or authority in the same way their parents did and do, and they have high standards for how brands should behave toward consumers, employees, and the greater good, which is a strong trend in consumerism.

Table 1-2 focuses the values of Generation X and how you can respond to them.

Baby Boomers, their values, and suggested responses to those values are the focus of Table 1-3.

Identifying and playing up your strengths

One of the best steps you can take as a marketer is to find your chief strengths and build on them so you can add an additional degree of focus and momentum to your marketing program. The key is to always think about what you do well for the customer (don’t get hung up on shortcomings) and make sure you build on your strengths in everything you do.

For example, imagine that customers say your pricing isn’t as good as larger competitors, and you also feel that your brand name isn’t very well known. That’s the bad news, but the good news is that existing customers are loyal because they like your product and service. The thing to do here is build on this strength by creating a loyalty program for customers, asking for and rewarding referrals, and including testimonials in your marketing materials and on your website. Also, remind customers and prospects that you are the local alternative. “Shop Locally to Support Your Community” may be a good phrase to sneak into every marketing communication, whether on paper, signs, your vehicles, or the web. Building on your strength in this manner can help you overcome the weaknesses of your higher pricing and lesser name recognition.

Focus on your strengths by clearly and succinctly defining what your special strength or advantage is. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and start your sentence like this: “My product (or service) is special because ….” Take a minute to think about what makes your firm or product special and why customers have been attracted to you in the past. Then make sure you talk about your strengths or show them visually whenever you communicate with customers.

Discovering the best way to find customers

Another aspect of your customer focus is deciding whether you want to emphasize attracting new customers or retaining and growing existing customers. One or the other may need to dominate your marketing program, or perhaps you need to balance the two. Marketing to new prospects is usually a different sort of challenge from working with existing customers, so knowing which goal is most important helps you improve the focus of your marketing.

“What’s your best way to attract customers?” Here are some of the most common answers — things that marketers often say are most effective at bringing them customers:

• Referrals: Your customers may be willing to help you sell your product.
• Social media: Your presence as a provider of helpful or interesting content can’t be underestimated in its potential impact on brand development and as a source of customer leads, so try to get ever more comfortable with blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and similar options (see Book 5, Chapter 6 for more on marketing and social media).
• Trade shows and professional association meetings: Making contacts and being visible in the right professional venue may be a powerful way to build your business.
• Sales calls: Salespeople sell products, so make more calls yourself, or find a way to put commissioned salespeople or sales representatives to work for you.
• Advertising: Advertising sells the product, but only if you do it consistently and frequently, whether in print, on radio and TV, outdoors, or on the web.
• Product demonstrations, trial coupons, or distribution of free samples: If your product is impressive, let it sell itself.
• Placement and appearance of buildings/stores: Location is still one of the simplest and best formulas for marketing success.

As the preceding list indicates, every business has a different optimal formula for attracting customers. However, in every case, successful businesses report that one or two methods work best. Their programs are therefore dominated by one or two effective ways of attracting customers. They put between one-third and two-thirds of their marketing resources into their primary way of attracting customers and then use other marketing methods to support their most effective method.

To find your business’s most effective way of reaching out to customers, you need to ask yourself this important question: What’s my best way to attract customers, and how can I focus my marketing program to take fuller advantage of it? You can’t look up the answer in a book, but you can take heart from the fact that, with persistence, you’ll eventually work out what your winning formula is, and then you may have to make only minor changes from year to year to keep your program working well.

When you answer this question, you’re taking yet another important step toward a highly focused marketing program that leverages your resources as much as possible. Your marketing program can probably be divided into four tiers of activities:

• Major impact
• Helpful; secondary impact
• Minor impact
• Money loser; very low impact

If you reorganize last year’s budget into these categories, you may find that your spending isn’t concentrated near the top of your list. If that’s the case, then you can try to move up your focus and spending. Cut the bottom tier, where your marketing effort and spending isn’t paying off. Reduce the next level of spending and shift your spending to one or two activities with the biggest impact.

This is the marketing pyramid. Marketers should try to move their spending up the pyramid so their marketing resources are concentrated near the top (which reflects the most effective activities). Ideally, the pyramid gets turned upside down, with most of the spending on the top floor rather than the bottom. What does your marketing pyramid look like? Can you move up it by shifting resources and investments to higher-impact marketing activities? Ideally, your marketing pyramid should have clear distinctions between the primary, secondary, and tertiary activities so you know where to concentrate your resources for best effect.

If you haven’t done much marketing yet, go forth and ask nosey questions. Find marketers who sell something at least remotely similar to what you plan to sell, and ask them what activities bring them customers. First, draw out a list of at least six different things they do to find or close customers. Then ask them which are the most and least effective. Combine all this data into a speculative marketing pyramid, and begin to get quotes on and experiment with the methods yourself. Hopefully, the benchmark information you gathered will get you closer to an effective program the first time around, but plan on testing and refining your methods. Each marketer’s winning formula is unique. There is no one surefire marketing plan that everybody can use.

Analyzing your four Ps

Every marketing plan needs to address the four Ps — price, product, promotion, and place — because, essentially, they represent the foundation of your business and the assets you have to sell and market your goods. You need to flesh out your product and pricing strategies, place of distribution strategies, and promotions so you can compare your strengths to your competitors’, monitor your progress in each of these areas, and see how your efforts get you closer to or further from your goals.

The purpose of your marketing plan is really to outline the actionable items most likely to push your product forward in the market, building out your places of distribution as efficiently as possible, pricing your products for trial and loyalty, and promoting your product and brand using the channels and tactics that best reach and influence your customers and their influencers. These may include print and digital ads, content marketing, engagement, and events, online and offline, to create awareness and sales and to build customer acquisition and retention.

Refining your list of possibilities

You need to find efficient, effective ways to positively influence customer perception. You want to use elements of your marketing program to motivate customers to buy and use your product (service, firm, whatever). The list of your current influence points for each of your four Ps (see the previous sections) is just a starting point on your journey to an optimal marketing program.

Now ask yourself the following questions: What can be subtracted because it isn’t working effectively? What can be emphasized or added? Think about each of the four Ps and try to add more possible influence points. Look to competitors or successful marketers from outside your product category and industry for some fresh ideas. The longer your list of possibilities, the more likely you are to find really good things to include in your marketing program. But in the end, don’t forget to focus on the handful of influence points that give you the biggest effect.

To craft your own winning formula, think of one or more new ways to reach and influence your customers and prospects in each of the four Ps and add them to your list as possibilities for your next marketing program.

Avoiding the pricing trap

Don’t be tempted to make price the main focus of your marketing program. Many marketers emphasize discounts and low prices to attract customers. But price is a dangerous emphasis for any marketing program because you’re buying customers rather than winning them. That’s a very, very hard way to make a profit. So unless you actually have a sustainable cost advantage (a rare thing in business), don’t allow low prices or coupons and discounts to dominate your marketing program. Price reasonably, use discounts and price-off coupons sparingly, and look for other tactics to focus on in your marketing program.

Projecting improvements above base sales

Base sales are what you can reasonably count on if you maintain the status quo in your marketing. If, for example, you’ve seen steady growth in sales of 3 to 6 percent per year (varying a bit with the economic cycle), then you may reasonably project sales growth of 4 percent next year, presuming everything else stays the same. But things rarely do stay the same, so you may want to look for threats from new competitors, changing technology, shifting customer needs, and so on. Also, be careful to adjust your natural base downward if you anticipate any such threats materializing next year. If you don’t change your program, your base may even be a negative growth rate, because competitors and customers tend to change even if you don’t.

After you have a good handle on what your base may be for a status quo sales projection, you can begin to adjust it upward to reflect any improvements you introduce. Be careful in doing this, however, because some of the improvements are fairly clearly linked to future sales, whereas others aren’t. If you’ve tested or tried something already, then you have some real experience upon which to project its impact. If you’re trying something that’s quite new to you, be cautious and conservative about your projections until you have your own hard numbers and real-world experience to go on.

Preparing for (ultimately successful) failures

Start small with new ideas and methods in marketing so you can afford to fail and gain knowledge from the experience; then adjust and try again. Effective marketing formulas are developed through a combination of planning and experimentation, not just from planning alone. In marketing, you don’t have to feel bad about making mistakes, as long as you recognize the mistakes and take away useful lessons.

What can go wrong, will go wrong … and you’ll be fine. Try to avoid being too heavily committed to any single plan or investment. Keep as much flexibility in your marketing programs as you can. For example, don’t buy ads too far in advance even though that would be cheaper, because if sales drop, you don’t want to be stuck with the financial commitment to a big ad campaign. Monthly commissions for salespeople and distributors is preferable because then their pay is variable with your sales and goes down if sales fall — so you don’t have to be right about your sales projections.

Flexibility, cautious optimism, and contingency planning give you the knowledge that you can survive the worst. That knowledge, in turn, gives you the confidence to be a creative, innovative marketer and the courage to grow your business and optimize your marketing program. And you can afford to profit from your mistakes.