Marketing - It's Not All About You!

Marketing – It’s Not All About you!

...It’s also not all about driving lots of visitors to your website. It’s not even all about getting lots of leads. So what is it about?

I think that marketing is about identifying your target audience. Find out who your customers are, or if you don’t have any, who they are most likely to be. Identify what they like and how they go about making purchases like the one you want them to make with you..

  You don’t have to stick with just one type, you can create several. Jim from Viper Marketing explained what he does to me the other day: he has Nicole, an imaginary lady who has a degree in the right field, works within 75 miles of his office and is environmentally conscious. He goes on to flesh this ideal prospect out with much more details right down to the films they she likes.

Identifying who we want to communicate with is key before we start to send messages. If we don’t do this first step our messages will not get home to the most important people.  If we know who were are talking to then we can identify where they are and how they like to be engaged.

Then we can target content directly to them in a way they will appreciate and engage with. Analytics and data allows us to do a lot of this. This enables us to choose colours for our websites and layouts too. It means that we can see what pages people engage with and get rid of the rest. We can follow people’s journey and see when they left or took action.

It’s easy to sit around in a creative meeting and come up with great catchphrases and slogans that make us look clever. But sometimes it’s better to get out of the building – see more on using big data here.

I used to have a restaurant and catering business and I continually had to remind myself that I had to cater for the customers and not just fill the menu with the things that I like to eat. Too many restaurateurs fall in to this trap. And too many marketers also do this by marketing to themselves and their opinions.

A lot of the time in marketing we are selling products that we would not buy ourselves. So we have to get out of the idea it’s about what we like and get in to the heads of our prospects.

Big data and analytics allow us to drill down to the core of what is happening. One application I really like allows telephone conversations that come as a result of pay per click (PPC) to be tracked and recorded. So if the aim of your campaign is to get the phone ringing you can then hear what happened next.

This is amazing and allows us to see which search term initiated the call and then which of these lead to a purchase and how. It also allows us to train out sales staff better and discover gaps and problems more easily.

Stay focused On The target

As marketers we must stay focused on the target. Go where they are, engage with them and learn from them. Then we can build our offer around this information and when they discover our product it will seem like a perfect match for their needs.

For some simple help with identifying your target I suggest using Facebook advertising tools. You can even get counts of the numbers of people like the one you have identified. In this way you can tell if this is a viable market to go after.

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