Who Are Your Customers?

Who Are Your Customers? 

You need to know who your customers are in order to grow a business. We start every project with an exercise to help us create “avatars” (also known as Personas or Customer Profiles) that represent our customers. Picking out a few of the major types of customers for your business and thinking through their wants and needs allows you to better engage these customers. But also you need to understand their levels of awareness. Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz does a great job of breaking this down; but the book is several hundred dollars. So here is a bit of a summary. First, we break customers down into four groups:

• Customers who don’t know your product or that they need your product
• Customers who don’t know your product but know that a need for your product exists
• Customers who are aware of your product and they have a need
• Customers who are ready to buy your product but have not yet.

You need to treat each of these customer awareness groups separately. An ad for converting group 4 while they are in your store will work less effectively on someone in group 1. You can read more about this in Chapter 1. Map these stages out and let them influence when and where you communicate. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

Previous Section
Next Section (Coming Soon!)

Messaging and Terminology

Messaging and Terminology

The way we talk about things can be important to convey what they mean to us. Calling someone who works in your organization a team member rather than an employee may seem trivial, but it can send a different message. When we work with a company, it is important for us to understand why they use certain terminology. Additionally, they might never have outlined for the organization which words to use and why. In some cases, it can make a huge difference. When beginning the marketing process, it’s important to talk through what words we use for which things. Defining the words and terms that are important to your brand can even be part of your branding process with an agency. If you want your “team” to use the word “customers” instead of “patients” then you have to weave those terms into the fabric of your business. Another example would be a personnel company who refers to its staffers as “associates” instead of “temps.” It has a different ring to it and can help direct the parts of your company to treat those people differently.

It is also important to share those terms and meanings with your marketing partners. Using those words internally is one thing, but making sure that the use of those words is consistent externally is also important. The words you use paint a picture of your company to the world. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

Previous Section
Next Section

Stark Raving Fans

Stark Raving Fans

“Stark Raving Fans” is a term that I came across in Seth Godin’s work. Stark Raving Fans means you go beyond just customer service to seeing every interaction with a customer as a chance to turn them into a marketing channel. If you are so good that your customers love doing business with you, they will tell others. If you make Stark Raving Fans of your business, they will help you grow. How do you create them? By doing business the right way. Under promise and over deliver. Deliver on time. And if something does go wrong, make it right (even if it costs you financially). When we stop seeing customers as a transaction and start seeing them as people and investments in our future, we create Stark Raving Fans.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

Previous Section
Next Section

Do You Deliver Well?

Do You Deliver Well?

If you spend $10,000 on advertising and your customer service or product is horrible, what will the result be? You’ll have wasted that $10k and then some. Why? First impressions matter more to a person than just about anything else. If you fail to deliver on your products and your customer service is horrible, people will tell other people. In the social media age, that is even more true. Even the best brands have naysayers online because it costs so little to leave a bad review. It costs almost nothing socially and it is free to run your name through the mud or sing your praises online. You also lose out on the potential of repeat business which is the lifeblood of most businesses.

You need to ensure your product is ready for the stage before you put a spotlight on it. Customer service is an investment worth making. Have you stress tested your product, your delivery method, and your customer service? What would happen to your business if 10 more customers than usual called tomorrow? What about 50 more? What if 3 more had a bad experience? Considering these things and planning for them is crucial to success in marketing.

One of my favorite books on customer service is: Customers for Life by Carl Sewell. I was on a trip to Texas with my wife when our Subaru started acting funny. We stopped in the local Subaru dealer on a Friday afternoon and desperately asked for help so that we could return home that night. This local dealer was a Sewell dealer and they went above and beyond from every level, so I left them a good review online. While looking them up, I found the owner’s book and it did not disappoint.

Investing in customer service is investing in your customers. It will help grow repeat business which is more affordable than investing in new customers. 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

Previous Section
Next Section

Price/Position/Product/Place

Price/Position/Product/Place

Now that we have covered who you are, we can start to get a better understanding of where you sit in the marketplace. The classic reason for doing this is building out what is often referred to as the “Four P’s.” They are: product, price, place, and promotion. They are important to evaluate as you start investing in marketing. There are entire books written on this topic alone, but we are going to take a quick look at each of these:

    1. Product- What is it that you are selling? Is it good? How good is it? What makes it special? 
    2. Price- How much is your product? Is it expensive for the market? Is it cheap for the market? Do you use coupons or would that hurt your brand? (Also, you are probably not charging enough.)
    3. Place- How are customers getting access to this product? I imagine this answer was much simpler when the concept of the Four P’s was created. 
    4. Promotion – How are you going to communicate it? Are competitors communicating in certain ways? Are there any no-no’s for your industry? What have you already tried and was it successful?

 

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

Previous Section
Next Section

Who Are You? Mission/Vision Purpose

Who are you? Mission/Vision Purpose

One of my favorite jokes from the TV show Scrubs involves a character described as “Johnny the tackling Alzheimer’s patient.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kx7tgkJbjo) Johnny yells, “Who am I?!?” as he tackles the protagonist, JD. Many businesses act the same way. They have done enough to start making sales, or tackling, but they are not sure who they are, which makes it difficult to grow beyond their base. When you do not understand who you are, you will waste time chasing ideas that do not fit with you rather than investing in the things that will make your company great. 

When you consider who you are as businesses, you need to get beyond the desire to make money and get into why you do what you do. Some businesses only want to make money, but they need to develop a self identity beyond that goal to build relationships with customers. 

At Adelsberger Marketing, we like to request the mission or vision statements from our clients. The clients who have one shows they are thinking about both the big picture and how to become the best organization that they can. 

A good mission statement states what the end goal of the organization is. A good mission statement contains four key elements:

  1. Concise – A good mission statement is not a paragraph long. It’s one – maybe two – sentences. The more concise you can make it, the more effective it will be. Concentrate on your core purpose, not a strategy or a set of tactics. Strategy is a level of planning that affects things like where you place your ads. Tactics are more granular such as using certain dimensions on video exports to maximize value for each social channel. In World War II, the Allies’ mission was to defeat the Axis powers. The strategy was to invade Europe from North and South and the tactics involved things like storming the beaches of Normandy. Mission statements must stay above the frame of strategy and tactics. 
  2.  Memorable- Memorability is important because it allows the mission to sink into the language of the team and affect their judgement. A good, memorable mission statement, consistently preached by leadership can help infect a team with that mission. 
  3. Timeless- Occasionally you will come across a mission statement that mentions specific methods for completing your mission. This is a common error. Look at the World War II example again: strategies and tactics change over time. (The obvious exception of this would be a mission statement that was for an organization that was time sensitive or limited in scope like an election campaign.) Methods, strategies, and tactics change. If your organization survives for any period of time, you do not want to rebuild your mission statement every few years.
  4. Focusing- Organizations are presented with a variety of opportunities. It can be difficult to sort these choices out. A solid mission statement can help an organization evaluate and find all the good ideas that come to it. When considering new opportunities or plans, look back to the mission statement and ask: “Does this opportunity fit with the mission statement? Does it prevent us from doing the things that are already helping us accomplish this mission?”

These are a few mission statements that I have helped write. I feel like they satisfy the above qualities:

-Our Jackson Home: To tell the stories of the people and the city that we all love. 

-STAR Center: To help any person, with any disability, to realize their potential. 

-Adelsberger Marketing:  To make creative work that grows our clients’ businesses, in a culture that values our team and community. 

Vision statements are slightly different. Vision statements look ahead to what the world would look like if the organization is able to complete its mission. These are generally less important to an organization than a mission statement. It doesn’t hurt to have both, but if you only have time for one, go with the mission statement. We recently helped write this visit statement for Madison County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates):

-We provide a volunteer voice for all abused and neglected children in the West Tennessee Juvenile Court System.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

Previous Section
Next Section

Introduction

Marketing begins with the old saying, “know thyself.” 

In Chapter 1, we talked about “what is marketing?” In this chapter, we will turn the focus to where the process should begin – with you. If you do business with a good marketing agency, almost all of them will start with some sort of discovery process. Some may call it a brainstorm or Strategy Workshop (like our Friends at Sodium Halogen). Regardless of name, the agency uses this activity to learn about your business so they know how to best communicate with your market. If they’re really good, they’ll focus on  value for the customer, not just what you want to talk about.
In our experience, the best clients are usually the ones who have spent time thinking about the “know thyself” components before they come to the table with us. If they haven’t, we think it through with them. Knowing thyself allows you to communicate clearly. Whether that communication is internally to staff and stakeholders or externally to potential and current customers, without a clear picture of yourself, it is difficult to communicate effectively.

This blog post is a portion of Attention and Action. The book walks you through the marketing process that Adelsberger Marketing follows with its clients. You can read this book for free as a blog on the Adelsberger Marketing website or purchase on Amazon.com.

Previous Chapter
Next Section