I recently recorded a video on ‘Knowing what to do’. Take a look at the video and also my Business Growth YouTube channel, where there are many more videos are like this.

Transcript for Business Growth : Know what to do

Hi there, slightly different video today. I’m following up on a networking meeting that I went to this morning, I was asked to go and speak on the topic of how do digital channels fit together?

The people around the table are talking about receiving phone calls offering digital solutions, and they were wondering what my advice would be on terms of websites and other marketing tactics like SEO or social media etc. so I did a 10-minute presentation and I thought what I would do would summarise that again for people that were already there and also for people who weren’t there we can talk about what the right thing to do is all about.

Now marketing, there are two elements to marketing if you like, strategic considerations and marketing tactics. I suppose there are also marketing communications on top of that once you’ve decided what tactics to do, but what I said to the group this morning and just to reiterate that, is that there are strategic questions you need to answer before you can make a valued decision about which tactics that everyone is ringing you up about is the one to choose. So what are those questions you need to answer before you know which tactic is the right one for your business.

Now they’re two core questions. The first one is what does a good customer look like? I could speak for 20 minutes on this topic and I’ll probably do another video on this alone on what does a good customer look like , but most businesses that I meet haven’t really defined on what a good customer looks like, not tightly enough and I use an example which I use in another video about 2 ladies who are different ages and you average them together and the dangers of taking an average and trying to target everybody with a single communication, through a single channel with a single proposition.

You need to identify distinct groups and define exactly what a good customer looks like. Because if you talk to the wrong people then you’re going to have lots of trouble with your marketing communications or your sales effort. Remember the first question is what does a good customer look like, or what do the groups of people who can and will buy from us look like?

The second question is then why should they buy? What are the right things to say to these people? In the example where I use the two ladies, they buy the exact same product but are buying for completely different reasons.

So, you need to understand for both groups the reasons and motivations, why they choose your product as supposed to a competitors product and people buy because why your product or service is different and what the benefit of that difference is. So everything else you’re very very comparable, there may be a slight difference in your product like a different feature or you might differentiate in some way and you need to understand why you are different and the benefit this brings to your customers. Because its that you need to highlight.

So, in simple terms I boil that down to, making sure you’re talking to the right people and making sure you’re saying the right things, surely, you’ve got to agree that if you’re talking to the wrong people and saying the wrong things then its no wonder your marketing doesn’t work. So very specific groups with very specific messages. Imagine trying to sell fishing rods to someone who doesn’t fish. Yes, there’s a chance they could know someone who does fish and they could buy one on their behalf but you can’t go about trying to do marketing on the off chance that someone will buy. You need to be much more structed and strategic, and targeted. Instead of the off chance that someone might buy because that’s the road to spending a lot of money and not getting lots of results for it. So say the right things to the right people.

When you understand what a good customer looks like and understand what the right message is then when somebody rings you up about search engine optimisation or email marketing or using social media or advertising on the back of a bus or on the back of a toilet door, whatever it might be. The information you need to give them is this is my target market and this is my message, how will your channel help me to get that message in front of that audience.

Now if they can’t answer that, they’re probably people that don’t really understand a lot about what marketing is about and don’t really understand how their tactic fits into the bigger picture. Now you understand what a good customer looks like and now you understand what a great message and differentiated message is all about, now you’re in a position where you can say right I’m going to work with people that are aligned with my strategic goals of putting my message in front of my people.

So these are the core things you need to consider when assessing marketing tactics and marketing tactics in the main are to drive traffic to a website or a social media property like a Facebook page but mainly its for driving numbers to website, when you get them to the website the role of website needs to be established. What do we want it to do? How do we convert someone from a point of interest into I want to speak to someone in the business or your business?

How do we convert someone who is mildly interested into someone that is going to register or download a lead magnet, because once you’ve captured their details we can drop them into email marketing programmes and into a CRM database that is automated, which is all done lights out and without your manual intervention every day. But a system of campaigns that converts non-buyers into buyers or at least convert non-buyers into people that would enquire or might ask for an appointment. Then you have an onboarding system where they come onboard and you can start to give them a good customer experience.

Through a nursery programme they then become loyal customers. Home shopping and mail order businesses understand this process. Once they’ve taken people through this conversion into nursery and then established them as a loyal customer they drop them into retention communications and monitor them to make sure they are not lapsing or dormant because they then will have to pick them up again and reactivate them and get them going again.

All those communications are about driving people back to the website or getting them to order again and building what we call lifetime value. Lifetime value is a measure of how much they buy and how frequently they buy, we call that weight and frequency of purchase remember. So we have this model of driving traffic to a website or Facebook page, converting them to divulge their data and then using a range of systems to convert people that are interested into loyal customers.