Small Business Guide to Target Markets Posted on February 16, 2022October 28, 2022 by Jessica Lunk When you initially set out on your journey to market your brand, product, or service, you may be tempted to jump right in. However, going after everyone who is willing to listen or could even be remotely interested in what your business has to offer isn’t something we’d recommend. While getting your brand out there is essential to driving business, going too broad can water down your message. The result can be a lot of wasted time and resources on leads that will never benefit from what you have to offer. Your marketing strategy should be one that is focused on your target audience and market. This ensures you use your time and budget wisely and see the most return possible. In this guide, we’ll discuss everything small businesses need to know about target markets so they can get keep their strategy focused and successful. What is a Target Market? A target market is the core customer base you plan to sell your product or services. It’s different from a target audience in that it covers a broad or whole group of people most likely to buy your product or service. A target market can be broken into smaller yet specific segments, which constitute the target audience. In other words, a target audience is a segment within your target market. For example, if you are an email marketing software provider, you could say your target market is the digital marketing industry. However, within this industry lies your target audience of email marketers or people who send email newsletters. How Does Knowing Your Target Market Improve Marketing Efforts? Think of a forest as the digital world, the hunter as the marketer, and the arrows as the marketing message. A skillful hunter doesn’t go hurling arrows through the forest, hoping to make a kill. Rather, they identify a specific target, say a deer, and go to areas in the forest where they’re most likely to find them. Once they’re in position, they zero in on the target and shoot the arrow. Marketing your products works the same way. To hit your sales targets, you have to identify your target market. Defining your target markets is the first step towards knowing your target audience. Knowing your target audience is critical for a personalized marketing approach, which is essential for conversions. 60% of customers who get personalized experiences are more likely to become repeat buyers. Simply put, defining your target markets helps nail personalization, which in turn drives increased revenue and profitability. How to Identify Your Target Market Identifying your target market shouldn’t be difficult. If you’re wondering where to start, follow these steps: 1. Analyze Your Product or Service Let’s say you work for a marketing agency. You can identify your target market with a bit of reverse engineering. List your core digital marketing service offerings. Let’s say they are: Social media management Content creation Design and branding SEO strategy Dive in deep into the parameters of your core offerings. By defining the problems that each of your offerings solve, you’ll be able to get a clearer idea of who can benefit from them. You may find that your product or service can be tailored to fit many segments. However, it pays to put your stake in the ground and commit to one ideal buyer. 2. Define Your Target Customers Although you could potentially serve anyone in any industry, marketing to every industry would make your message quite generic: “Results-driven marketing for any entity.” Instead, your agency decides to get specific. You decide to commit your focus to higher education, narrowing your target marketing and focusing on one ideal buyer – John, the CMO of a university. You get even more specific and focus on what your agency does best – digital marketing. Now your message becomes: “Driving enrollment and increasing student ROI by helping universities get found online.” It hits home for your target audience – John the CMO – positioning your agency as the go-to when it comes to optimizing .edu websites for search. Save money and time by narrowing down the focus of your target audience enough to make your message resonate with a smaller group. Although your market is smaller, you have a better chance of attracting the right buyer. It also doesn’t hurt to take a look at your existing customers. Pinpoint some of your best customers, and figure out what makes them stand out from the crowd. Some of the details to uncover include: Age Gender Marital status Location Education level Income Occupation Don’t stop at that; research further to reveal the personal characteristics, buying habits, and interests. Are they decision-makers in their respective organizations? What made them buy your products? What other products do they purchase? How often do they purchase? How do they consume information online? With the demographic and psychographic details, it should be easy to build a specific customer profile and identify the market segment they perfectly fit into. 3. Research Competitors Competitor analysis is another great way to identify your target market, and it works for both new and existing businesses. Look around your niche and identify brands offering comparable products or services. Who are these brands targeting? Who are the top customers for these brands? Answering these questions may help you identify their target markets. You can go for the same target market your competitors zero in if your product has an irresistible, unique selling proposition. However, if it’s a small market dominated by well-established brands, it might be wise to target a segment of the market. 4. Refine Your Marketing Plan Now that you’ve chosen your path, it’s time to follow it to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. You’ve committed to your ideal buyer; now, you need to reinforce that commitment to your business and the marketplace. Put your ideal buyer at the center of everything you do: Refine your marketing message to speak to your ideal buyer. Think about how your content strategy can tap into the pain points of your ideal buyer and help them to solve a problem. Address the needs of your audience in your product/service. Build for your ideal buyer – and no one else – to create raving fans and loyal customers of your business. Create a customer experience that best fits your ideal buyer. For instance, if your ideal buyer is in the older demographic, they may prefer phone support to live chat or social media. John, the CMO, has a tough time managing his university’s social media presence because so many participants (students, faculty, departments) are involved. So you create a free social media brand guide for higher education. The guide helps generate leads within your target market. On the product and service side, you decide to create a custom social listening tool that your clients can leverage to stay connected to everything faculty, staff, students, and alumni are saying about their university brand. And, when it comes to client service, you know that your ideal buyer has to consistently prove the ROI of marketing programs to university stakeholders. So as part of your ongoing support, you email your clients a report on their top benchmarks every week. Putting John the CMO at the center of everything you do narrows your target market but also allows your agency to be infinitely more successful at driving leads, winning new clients, and making sure they stick with your agency for a long time. Once you’ve committed to your ideal buyer, follow through by integrating them into your business from product development to marketing to customer success. You’ll be rewarded with better leads, more customers, and increased customer lifetime value. 5. Encourage Your Evangelizers Now that you’ve committed to your ideal buyer and have aligned your business to them, you’re going to find yourself with some raving fans. Leverage your most enthusiastic customers to attract even more customers who are just like them. Run a referral campaign to ask your supporters to send new business your way. Reward them with incentives like discounts, perks, and even cash money. Ask for reviews. If your business is on Yelp, if you have a Google listing, or if your industry has specific review sites, it can really pay off to have your customer’s voices heard there, sharing their positive experience. Give thanks where thanks are due. When you go above and beyond for your biggest fans, they are sure to go the extra mile for you – whether it’s providing a testimonial, participating in a case study, or being a reference. Validate Your Decision and Start Marketing Before you can start launching your marketing campaigns, it’s prudent to validate your decision. Find answers to these questions: Are there enough people in the market to support steady growth? Will people find the need to use your product or services? Will people afford the product or service? How easy is it to reach out to them? If the target market ticks the right boxes, go ahead and create targeted campaigns to generate demand for your product or service. Market segmentation can feel like a big undertaking and can seem like a big risk since you limit your audience. However, narrowing your target market can actually give you a better chance to reach more people with a specific message. Put your stake in the ground and commit to an ideal buyer, align your business to their needs, and mobilize your evangelizers to penetrate and conquer your niche.
Plant Email Seeds This Spring For Customer Growth Posted on April 18, 2016May 27, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Email still rules when it comes to the most profitable marketing channels for small businesses. And no wonder. Next year it’s estimated the number of adult email users in the U.S. will exceed 203 million. That’s all the more reason to do some springtime seeding of your email list with the goals of harvesting new customers. The best way to grow a garden is to group the same types of fruits and vegetables together, so you can give each group what it needs to be successful, whether that’s more sun or more shade, special food, physical space, fertilizers. Similarly, segmenting your email list into groups allows you to give your leads what they need to turn into high-quality customers. Why segment? You can answer that question with a quick peek into your own email inbox. It’s crowded in there, and every one of those emails is vying for your attention. Segmenting your email list gives you a better shot at overcoming the fierce competition happening in your subscriber’s inbox. There’s also data. According to eMarketer 39% of marketers that practice list segmentation see better open rates and 28% see lower opt-out and unsubscribe rates. Nearly a quarter see better email deliverability, increased sales leads and higher revenue. When it comes to segmenting your email list, the criteria that can be used is seemingly endless—demographics, psychographics, behavior, preferences, and more. But no matter how you divide things up the goal, ultimately, is to make a better match between your email campaigns and your subscribers. Of course even if you have the most sophisticated segmentation, execution is just as critical; all that targeting won’t make a difference if the message isn’t right, so make sure the emails you send are both sharply written and fit the targeted group. One group might be at a certain place in your sales cycle and the right email can nudge them to make a purchase, but an email to a different segment might be nurturing, appealing to their future wants and needs. Keeping in mind that not every plant in your garden needs the same thing, here are some of the most useful segmentation categories: Demographics Whatever demographic information you can collect could serve as a segment, whether that’s gender, age, education level, income, marital status, occupation, religion and more. Any measurable characteristic of a population is a demographic and depending on your objective, using one or several together can be very effective. For instance, if you sell a product for families with young children, it may make sense to focus on the under-40 set, or the under-40 female set. On the other hand, with a different message you could focus on the over 65 set—grandparents wanting to buy something for their new grandchild. If you sell high-end accessories for sports cars, however, it probably makes sense to segment using several criteria, for example gender, income and age. Psychographics Here’s the part where you get inside your target customer’s head. Psychographics look at characteristics that are harder to measure, like lifestyle and personality, and includes a person’s attitudes, aspirations, interests and opinions. If demographics explain who your customers is, then psychographics explain why. This is helpful when targeting potential customers based on how they see themselves and how they want others to see them. If, for instance, you sell an all-natural, low-sugar granola and are targeting parents, you can parse those that shop at organic food stores or recently bought an electric car, as they likely see themselves as the kinds of parents that would feed their children all-natural, organic, low-sugar snacks like your granola. Geography This is important if you’re a brick-and-mortar business, because you don’t want to send in-store offers to those living outside the area. And if your business has several locations in different areas, segmenting by zip code ensures you’re not incentivizing customers to visit locations that are further from them, and that they are less likely to patronize. Job Title and Industry This is especially important if your sales are B2B. If your potential customer has a long sales cycle and a large, bureaucratic organization, you’ll need to target them differently than, say, a solopreneur who makes the purchasing decisions. Managers have very different perspectives than senior executives and each has their own concerns that need addressing. Segmenting by job title or function will help you gear emails to the right person at the right time in the sales process. Shopping Cart Abandoners Market research has shown that at least half of shopping carts are abandoned before a purchase is made. That means a potential buyer was very interested and then suddenly—not. You can target this group with incentives like discounts and special sales. Good Customers Customers that purchase regularly or refer others to your business should be nurtured and appreciated. They are your best brand advocates. Target them with referral discounts, exclusive offers, loyalty programs and make them part of a select group you tap into for opinions about new products or services you want to roll out. Spring is the perfect time to take a look at your email list and refresh its segmentation. Targeting that way is one of the most effective strategies for boosting the effectiveness of your email marketing. You’re planting and fertilizing email seeds that will grow into customers and keep your small business growing too.
Marketing to Millennials Posted on September 12, 2014June 3, 2016 by Jessica Lunk This past weekend, a few of us from Hatchbuck attended a local music festival, Loufest, filled with great music, local beer, delectable food, perfect weather, and a swarm of millennials. Festivals are sensory overload and an experience that lives on with the attendee. I’ll never forget the colors and friendly warmth of Coachella, the torrential down pour that always occurs during Lollapalooza, or 3 days on the beach. However, when you really get down to it, how is one festival any different than the next on the business end? If anyone tells you that the music industry is dead, they aren’t paying attention to these festivals popping up all over the country. Here are a few things that I believe small business can learn from these millennial playgrounds: Great Visual Content Millennials love pretty pictures. Instagram and Tumblr are for millennials which are both the social channels designed for visual content. Check out the full Millennials and Social Media infographic from Marketing Strategies. Instagram is an excellent channel to start with because users aren’t as guarded as they are on Facebook and it’s easier to create a successful strategy. Your visual content strategy will lead to your success on this social channel. Use Instagram to showcase and tell the story of your brand. Here are a couple examples of a few brands I follow on Instagram: Coca-Cola Coca-Cola is a great example because they are clever and creative while making it looks so easy. Not much else needs to be said since Coca-Cola is one of the most loved brands worldwide. Coolfire Studios Instagram is also great for B2B! Coolfire is a design agency in the St. Louis area so naturally they’re bursting at the seams with creativity. They use Instagram to highlight their company culture beautifully. Madewell This one is used for a lifestyle branding technique. Madewell uses their buyer personas to drill down to figure out how those girls live their daily lives from what the’re eating, reading, or doing; they have it figured out. If you’re feeling really up to the challenge, I would suggest checking out Vine. This channel is, in my opinion, where the pulse of millennial trends spur from. However, they don’t typically make it to Facebook unless in a Buzzfeed article. User Generated Content (UGC) You might as well call us millennial smart-phone-hands… and instead of griping about it, capitalize on it! Loufest did a great job encouraging attendees to submit their images to their hashtag which they then pull onto their website. They also used an Instagram campaign to build excitement in the days leading up to the festival. With the rise of easy photo editing and Instagram, anyone can become a photographer with professional looking images. By setting up a UGC component to your visual content strategy, you can increase your volume and share of voice without paying an arm and a leg with a professional photographer. Running social contests is your best bet for collecting UGC. Set up a relevant hashtag for your brand that can live on past the contest. If you have a brick and mortar, post that baby all over the place and encourage your customers to use it! There are so many social tools to track social hashtags and even plug-ins for your website to pull those images directly to your page. I’m a huge advocate for UGC because it takes much of the burden of creating visual content off of your shoulders. Plus, you create a legion of advocates without much work to maintain it and it’s an easy way to boost employee engagement and morale. Go Straight to the Source… If it’s appropriate for your small business, becoming a vendor at a local festival could be an awesome opportunity. Millennials get a lot of criticism but one thing they do surprisingly well is supporting small business. Corporate sponsors are very clearly there but on the grounds of a festival, local business and restaurants have so many opportunities to connecting with the festival audience. At Loufest alone, 19 restaurants made up the “Noshpit” and 15 small business “from the St. Louis creative community and beyond” in the Market Square. Festivals aren’t a new idea; every generation has had their fair share of outdoor music festivals. Shout outs to the Boomers… there’s a great visual content strategy there by putting a modern spin to your nostalgia; you guys knew what was up!
Cultivating Ripe Sales Leads: Lead Nurturing Strategies for Small Business Posted on July 31, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Maybe you’ve over-watered a perfectly good tomato plant and watched it shrivel up and drown. Or maybe an overdose of fertilizer has burnt up your yard. Whether it’s water or plant food, too much of a good thing can be, well, bad. See, in nature (and in sales), there’s a fine line between nurturing and smothering. A little TLC can create a flourishing environment, while too much fuss can stifle growth. Not all of your sales leads are ripe enough to convert to customers right now – but someday, a lot of them will be ready to be harvested (according to Gleanster Research, that number is around 50%) Will your business be poised to reap the benefits? With a balanced lead nurturing strategy, you can. Lead nurturing engages contacts with relevant, personalized content over a period of time until they are ready to buy. By sending digestible nuggets of information that strike a chord with their needs, you’ll build credibility over time. But just like too much fertilizer will burn up a plant, dumping too much knowledge on your contacts can cause information overload, spurring potential leads to pull the plug on your relationship. The Old School Sales Process – A Lead Landfill In a lot of businesses, marketing acquires leads from sources like list rentals, pay-per-click campaigns, tradeshows and other sources, then tosses them right over the fence to sales. Sales picks out the choice leads to try to close. Though many leads will be well qualified to buy, a good portion of them might not be educated about the product or service, or the timing may not be right. Sales will be able to close some of these leads, but for the rest, it’s like scorching a delicate begonia in the sun – it’s too much of a pitch too soon in the buying journey. The leads that don’t close just become waste, and marketing starts from scratch to deliver a fresh batch of leads again. It’s an inefficient cycle that uses a lot of unnecessary energy: Leads that aren’t ready to buy get tossed Marketing is always starting from zero to generate the next batch of leads Sales experiences volatility as they churn up leads Modern Sales and Marketing – A Greener Approach In lead nurturing, marketing consistently cultivates new sales-ready leads, turning sales volatility into systematic, predictable revenue. Instead of tossing every lead over fence to sales, marketing acquires leads, then nurtures them with a series of touchpoints until the leads indicate that they are ready to make a purchase. There are lots of advantages to this evergreen approach: Forming Relationships: By connecting with leads over time, they get to know you. You earn their trust along the way and when it’s time to buy, your business is already on their short list. Optimizing the Sales Cycle: As you keep in touch with your contacts, you can educate them along the way. Instead of waiting for leads to discover their pain-points and search for your solution, you have the power to inform them, shortening the sales cycle. Reduces Waste: With lead nurturing, you aren’t burning up your lead list every month. Hot prospects are handed off to sales while marketing cultivates the next batch into sales ready leads. Encourages Growth: As you nurture contacts through email and social touchpoints, your list actually grows organically through peer-to-peer referrals and brand awareness. Lead Nurturing Strategies Leads need the right mix of attention and education to grow into hot prospects. Lead Scoring: The purpose of each touch point with a lead is to move them closer to the sale. As you email your contacts, make sure they can take an action to indicate their level of interest. Actions such as visiting a link, watching a video, or filling out a form impact lead score so that marketing can systematically determine when a lead is ripe to send to the sales team. Timing: How often you should connect with contacts depends on the length of your sales cycle and their level of interest in your brand. If your sales cycle is 6 months, it’s probably more appropriate to send an email every two weeks, rather than twice a week. Also, contacts who engage with your emails are telling you, “we want more!” and can be communicated to more often. Segmentation: Create unique nurturing campaigns that deliver content based on your leads’ unique interests to maximize your yield of sales-ready leads. Lead nurturing is all about showing your leads the proper care and attention they need to become ripe for sales.
Lead Nurturing Starts with Segmentation Posted on July 21, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Even though it’s July, I can’t help but have the winter holidays on my mind. It’s not that I’m itching to sing Christmas carols, or can’t wait to shovel snow. It’s that I’d like a relaxing holiday that doesn’t involve navigating icy mall parking lots at the last minute, or ringing up staggering rush shipping charges. You see, it takes time to find the perfect gift for each special someone on your list. It would be much simpler if you could just buy 25 pairs of lipstick red Isotoners in a ladies size small and call it a day. But imagine the holiday woes. Your teenage nephew would scoff, and your kids would probably cry. Even your aunt might be hurt that you didn’t remember that her favorite color is lilac, not red. Let’s face it, most of your fuzzy glove gifts will find their way to the Goodwill bin or the trash. In gift-giving, and in marketing, there’s no one-size-fits all solution. Just like an ill-received gift, a generic email blast is going to end up in the trash. That’s where segmentation comes in. Organizing your prospects by their unique preferences helps you tailor your message to their needs. It’s kind of like getting your aunt the right size slippers in her favorite shade of purple. It shows you care, and shows you can be trusted. For prospects, sending messaging that fits them like a glove keeps them engaged with you until they are ready to buy. So how can you start segmenting your contacts? First, think about organizing contacts by status. This designates their place in the sales funnel, from a fresh new lead, to a promising prospect, to a hot opportunity, to a new customer who hopefully buys from you again. Then, to get even more targeted, segment your contacts into two or three buckets using their unique characteristics and interests. At Hatchbuck, we refer to these unique buckets as personas, a realistic portrayal of your ideal type of customer. But wait…what if you don’t really know what your contacts are interested in, or which of your solutions might fit them best? This is where marketing automation really shines. With marketing automation, you can dynamically tag contacts using forms, link actions, and webpage tracking. So instead of manually updating your contacts, their online actions automatically sort them into the right bucket, based on the pages they visit, the forms they fill out, and the links they click. With your contacts segmented by their status and interests, and tagged in your database, it’s easy to determine the type of messages that will fit like a glove.
An Easy Guide to Creating Customer Personas Posted on April 16, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Customer personas are the foundation of personalized marketing that converts. Armed with airtight personas, you can address your prospects’ pain-points and tap into the motivation behind their decision to buy. Customer Persona: A fictional person, rooted in research, that represents the needs and interests of your audience. Hint: Learn why personas are an important building block for marketing in our Simple Introduction to Customer Personas. Personas are fictional people, but to understand their motivations and challenges, you want them to feel as real as possible. To build an effective persona for each segment of your audience: Create an identity. Understand their day-to-day challenges. Uncover the problems that your business can help solve. Bonus: Grab our Persona Workbook to start building your own personas. Craft an Identity Find out who your persona is and give them a backstory. Ask: What is their name? What generation are they from? What is their home life like? What is their level of education? Joe the single twenty-something is going to have different motivations than Mary the 40-something divorcée with 2.5 kids. Construct a Day-in-the-Life Think about the routines and processes your persona embarks upon every day. Ask questions like: Where do they go every day? Do they wake up and head to the office each day? Are they the jet-setting type? How do they communicate? Do they pick up the phone and dial? Do they send out a Tweet? What is their role? Do they wear many hats each day? Are they in a stringent position? How do they work? Are they managing a team? Do they work independently? What is the best way to reach them? Are they tech-savvy? Are they technically challenged? What personality characteristics do they possess? Are they goal oriented? Do they tend to be complacent? What is their environment like? Are they suburbanites? City folk? Use insights about the daily achievements, struggles, and processes of your personas uncover what motivates them to take action. Uncover Pain-Points Hypothesize, then validate through research (more on that below), the biggest challenges your persona might face. What problems does your persona have? Where do their obstacles intersect with your expertise? What specific challenges can you help them overcome? Once you’ve tapped into your customers’ challenges you can: Develop value-added content that solves a problem for your customers, keeping your business top-of-mind. Position your products and services in a way that addresses their challenges. Create new programs, products, and service offerings that meet their needs. Persona Research Personas are imaginary, but they are rooted in real life. One of the advantages of being a small business owner is that you connect with your customers every day. Likely, you’re more in touch with your customers than say the CEO or VP of Marketing at a large corporation. The first versions of your personas might be built on educated guesses and hypothesis. That’s a great start, since you innately know things about your customer base. But don’t assume anything. Reach out to your customers and prospects in your target market to continue to learn about their identity, motivations and challenges. Continue to revisit your personas and let them evolve as you discover more about their real-life counterparts. Do this by meeting with customers in person, creating places for feedback at your brick and mortar location, or sending out quarterly surveys with tools like Surveygizmo or Survey Monkey. When you try to be everything to everyone, you spread yourself too thin and end up being nothing to no one. Instead, develop personas based on the 2 or 3 main types of customers you have. Use your personas to create messaging and content that feels like it’s meant for a single person, and everyone will feel like you’re reaching out to them individually. Ready to get started building your personas? Grab our handy Persona Workbook and start building personas for the 2 to 3 main types of customers that you sell to.
Small Business Marketers Are Losing to Dirty Data Posted on February 28, 2014July 22, 2016 by Jessica Lunk Small business marketers have more ways to capture and analyze data than ever before. Even with a small business budget, we can capture lead data with free tools and affordable SaaS solutions geared toward SMBs. We are constantly measuring and being measured. So the more data points, the better, right? Well, maybe. The Ugly Truth About Data It’s like buying a new car. As soon as you drive it off the lot, it begins to depreciate. As soon as you capture a contact’s information, they’ve changed their identity or changed their minds. A top decision-maker may have just broken up with her company. A self-declared lager-lover may have just cracked open a life-changing IPA. Preferences and statuses change, and marketers can’t wait around for a data cleanse to keep up. Nothing Gold Can Stay When we talk about data, segmentation, and targeting at Hatchbuck, it’s all really about one overarching goal: Uncover your prospects’ needs so that you can educate and add value. The issue is that needs evolve, and you can’t effectively segment with stale data. With Hatchbuck, and other marketing automation software, you can use forms to capture highly relevant data about your contacts. But it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of text fields and drop downs that end up capturing a lot of data that doesn’t really make you a more effective marketer. That’s why dynamic segmentation – not data collection- is the better way to tap into data to identify the biggest pain points of your prospects. Scrub-A-Dub-Data More data is good, but when you consider that data decays at an estimated rate of 35% per year, that’s just more data to scrub down the road. Even the most basic of fields, like name and email address, can change and need to be updated. So instead of manually appending new data, let your leads do the work for you. With the right sales and marketing software, marketers only need to ask for the most basic information on landing page forms, and drop a cookie to gather more information down the road. Asking for less from your leads can help decrease form drop-off because visitors to your site won’t feel like they’re giving away the rights to their first born just to download a resource. In addition, the less fields there are for contacts to enter false or bad data, the less data you’ll have to clean up later. Actions Speak Louder Once you capture the most basic of information on your form, let your lead be your guide. They’ll tell you how to segment them by: The webpages they’ve visited The links they’ve clicked The resources they’ve downloaded Their tag score For instance, don’t ask leads if they’re interested in Life, Home or Auto insurance. Tag their interests by the links they click in your email, or the pages they visit on your site. Segment accordingly. It’s easy to feel like you’re fighting a losing battle with dirty data. It’s time to work smarter (not harder) to gather insights from your data. Dynamic segmentation provides a more accurate, real time picture of what your leads are up to, and what their hot-button issues are. Simple sales and marketing tools can help your customers be your guide to their needs. In turn, you can guide them down the path to conversion.
How Small Business Can Give Customers What They Want Posted on January 15, 2014June 1, 2016 by Jessica Lunk I hate shows with laugh-tracks. It feels condescending to be told when to laugh and what degree of laughter is appropriate. If something’s funny, trust me, I’ll know it. And if I don’t think something is amusing or entertaining, not only can I change the channel, but I can change the medium altogether. Goodbye cable TV, hello Netflix and Hulu. I’m pretty savvy I guess, and you better believe that small business customers are savvy, too. They see right through spray & pray messaging, and if your business, product, or message isn’t relevant, they have no problem tuning you out. It’s 2014, and the audience decides what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. Today’s landscape is ideal for consumers, who have lots of choices on what to buy, how to buy it, and how to share feedback. And, though it sounds a bit scary, it can be great for small business marketers, too. We have access to an unprecedented plethora of mediums and channels. With a more diverse landscape comes accessible, sophisticated insights that allow us to deliver the resources customers need before, during and after they buy. So how do you meet your customers at the intersection of what, when and how? What They Want Segment your database by interest so you can target your messaging. Send dog lovers the chew toy of the week, and cat lovers the best pick in kitty litter. Deliver a relevant message so that when the time comes to buy, your small business is top of mind. When They Want It Identify where your customers fall in the sales funnel. A new facebook like might just be a fan, while a blog visitor reading up on “the best hamster for your home” is in research-mode, and someone browsing the fishbowls section of your site is ready to buy. Feed your social media fans cute pet pics, email the researchers tips they can use, and offer your expertise to assist product browsers in making their purchase. How They Want It A social savvy customer may give you a shout out on Twitter to ask about water bowl pricing, while a more traditional customer may prefer speaking to someone over the phone about an accessory for their potbelly pig. Be available on the channels that your customers use naturally to provide a seamless customer experience. Just as we have conditioned ourselves to tune out the laugh-track, consumers are tuning out irrelevant jabs for their attention. Meeting customers at the intersection of the right message at the right time has never been more important. That’s why we are so passionate about helping SMBs to deliver their message into their customers’ hands at the perfect moment. We believe that marketing and sales automation that is simple for the user and seamless for the customer catalyzes growth. Check out our video to learn more!