Who should your customers be?
Your customer should be defined as an individual or group that is or has potential to be interested in services or products that your business provides or can be convinced to become a customer without dishonesty or misrepresentation. Identifying which demographics will have a positive interaction with your company is the first step to targeting an audience.
Often, businesses worried about the bottom line go after inappropriate audiences and will use any means necessary to obtain customers. This short sighted way of thinking doesn’t benefit businesses for long and results in high levels of customer dissatisfaction. Knowing not just your product or service, but its impact on those that use it, is a powerful start to any marketing campaign.
Bootstrap encourages both new and established businesses to periodically re-examine the products and services being offered and honestly evaluate which groups or individuals can genuinely benefit from what is being provided. The answer to this will identify your core customers that will make up the majority of your recurring business.
Non-customers can be converted. If the service or product that your company provides is beneficial to an audience that either isn’t aware of your business or doesn’t understand it, it is your job to provide the necessary information or education to bridge this gap. Bootstrap finds that business owners take pride in their products and understand why what they provide is valuable to them personally, but often overlook what the value is to a wider audience. Bootstrap advocates for the customer, exploring potentials you might not have considered, and expanding your audience through education and better communication.
Are you reaching your audience?
Often, businesses are vague in their communications with the public, not realizing that marketing materials that are seen by a specific audience are not the same as marketing materials that target that audience specifically. In order to successfully target an audience, a business must have an understanding of the needs, desires, behaviors, budgets, and obstacles a demographic possesses. Businesses must know the unique preferences of their audience or they risk being ignored, resulting in lost time and money spent on advertising that ultimately was unsuccessful.
Is your audience motivated to listen?
In order to get the attention of the public on a subject that they are unfamiliar with or uneducated on, businesses must provide some kind of motivating factor. Almost every business ultimately can be stripped down to be viewed as a “solution” to some kind of existing “problem” or “answer” to someone’s “need”. Pointing out “the problem” to the correct audience is reliably motivating enough to cause an audience to react. This is a tactic that is so successful that some businesses sink to creating non existent issues to scare the public into listening.
Using the knowledge that fear can be a motivator is a slimy tactic when used to deceive or manipulate an audience to motivate them into spending money for unnecessary or undesired items or services. It is always our responsibility as marketers and business owners to never use marketing knowledge and tactics to misrepresent ourselves or our products. Much like scientific advances, marketing walks a fine line defined by positive and negative intentions.