Know, Like, Trust: Know

One of the most basic concepts of marketing is getting people to know, like, and trust you. Over the next few weeks we will be looking at each step in this process.

Know.

To get people to know you, you have to make people aware of you. This looks wildly different depending on what your business sells. If you are a business to business company you have the advantage of having a very narrow group of people to speak to. If you are a business to consumer brand you have the challenge of having a much larger customer base to speak to.

If you are an online business, you have a huge population to reach out too, but you get the advantage of being able to use extremely trackable marketing. If you are a local business you have to a put a lot more legwork in.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when working on the Know portion:

1. Who is my audience? Work through narrowing your group down to as small of a group of potential customers as possible. This will allow you to focus your time and money on that smaller group of people. Why talk to everyone when you need to talk to males 25-35 in 20 miles of your location.
2. What is the most affordable way to communicate with that target audience? I default to social media. But for my business, which is business to business, it is largely through word of mouth. So the follow-up question is, who do you build word of mouth? Become valuable to people. This will quickly lead you through becoming liked and trusted.
3. How many times do you need to reach these people to make them familiar with your name? Old school marketers have suggests 7 times. This can be completed through very technical means of retargeting to make sure that your digital visitors have an opportunity to remember you! If you need to have boots on the ground commit to going to a set of networking events for a long period of time. This will help you get known.

Getting know is probably the most expensive portion of this process. Loading people into the funnel is intensive but you can’t create new business without loading the funnel. Next week we will look at getting people to “like” you!