Know your target – Effective Marketing Strategy

Creating an effective marketing strategy during a recession is tough. when you’re faced with budget cuts to your marketing spend or trying to figure out what you can do with no budget then you need a plan. The second step to this plan is to know your target.

Picture your ideal potential customer

In any business you need to market to three types of customers. The potentials who don’t know about you, your existing customers and your lapsed customers.

So far my strategy guide has looked at your market - and creating a top-down business case (ie the population of London is 8 million, the number of Twitter users in London is 2 million).

Now its time to be granular and define your customers.

Customers Needs are many and varied

Assuming you are online business with no store front, then you have 1 channel (online) to meet your customers needs. This is great for potential customers.

Thanks to the power of online .. you can now offer your potential customers a number of tools to help convince them to buy from you – demos, FAQ’s, brouchures, videos, live chat, Twitter service, Facebook fan pages … and so on.

So picture your ideal customer (by age, by internet usage, by location) and then choose the best sales tools – don’t just create a Facebook Fan page if you are going after offline customers!

If you have a retail presence then you’ll want to think about the online marketing tools and the instore tools that customers want - maybe a few are the same like using a working demo or watching videos.

Map your Customer Needs

There is something powerful about a good wireframe or business model - try to draw your customer needs so that anyone can understand your business.

Meet the author

Damien Saunders
An experienced management consultant and business leader interested in digital transformation, product centred design and scaled agile. If I'm not writing about living with UCTD (an autoimmune disease), I'm probably listening to music, reading a book or learning more about wine.
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