5 Tips to help you focus your Marketing to get the best results

5 Tips to help you focus your Marketing to get the best results -  The Scattergun Approach Rarely Works!

In another blog, we talked about “low hanging fruit” and making sure you don’t use valuable resources getting new customers when you could be getting more business from existing customers.

Of course, new customers are always important and targeting can be applied to both existing customers and aiming for new ones.

Whether you are tracking your sales against existing customers to segment your data or working on increasing your customer base, you will need to review the aims of the campaign before selecting the group of contacts to target.

1. What problems are you trying to solve?

By understanding the problems your product or service is solving, you will have a better understanding of who has those problems and who will therefore benefit from your offering.

2. Define your potential Customers

Who would have the problems you are trying to solve. Any particular size of the company? Location? Individuals with specific interests? You may have different products or services that solve different problems – and therefore may have different target markets.

3. Who will gain the most from your offer? Who will suffer most from these problems? Who could lose the most if they do not address the problems soon? Work out some example costings and ROI figures that demonstrate that the cost of NOT taking action is greater than the cost of what you are recommending. Make it easy for the customer to say "yes"!

Don’t forget, the benefits of your product or service will also have an impact by removing stress, improving staff morale, increases in efficiency and so on. The cost-benefit is not just measured financially.

4. Take a look at yourself or your company & staff. There is no point in targeting a geographic area that it is not financially viable. If you have a small sales force sending them up and down the country is a waste of resource.

Also, look at your strengths – these are areas you should be focussing your marketing on. Capitalise on what you are already good at. Do you have experience of a particular industry type?

5. Compare the Market

Do your research. Who can offer solutions to the same problems? You may have very little competition or lots. Find a difference, a reason why YOU should be the one solving the problems for the customers in your target area. Focus on this.

Then what? You should also review your marketing plan periodically. What worked? What didn’t work? Is the same information still relevant or has the business changed in some way which would benefit from different details being recorded? You can then refocus by changing the targeting where necessary.
How does CRM come into this?

Your CRM database should be configured to allow you to record the information that is important to your business, to help you keep your existing customers as well as gaining new ones, and provide you with the means to easily see key information, take action on it and measure the results.

First, think about how you want to segment your contacts.

• Relationship type – are they customers or prospects?
• Geography – do you want to invite local contacts to an event?
• Size – and this doesn’t have to be just on a number of employees or turnover. If you work with schools you may need to know the number of teachers or pupils, if your target is hospitals you may need to know the number of wards or beds.
• What have they purchased in the past?
• What haven’t they purchased before?
• When was their last order?

Once you know how you want to be able to segment your contacts, you will need to have a system in place to ensure that the information is gathered and recorded in an easily usable format.

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