Market
It’s a common problem in business: trying to market to everyone. We do it because we think everyone needs our services and we don’t want to limit potential sales by focusing on just one group of people.
In fact, the opposite is true. There so many other companies and organisations out there vying for our potential customers’ attention that they have learnt to shut out most of the commercial “noise”.
Therefore if you try to market your products/services to everyone, using a marketing message with broad appeal, you’ll probably connect with no one.
So, you must focus your sales and marketing efforts on one or two groups, or niches, within your target market. Here are four steps I use with clients when determining the ideal niche market (or markets) for their business, based on the acronym R.A.I.D.:
Once you have found your ideal niche, use the information that you collected about them to craft a message that will be make your business stand out from your competitors.
Message
The message that you communicate to potential customers is so crucial. In a crowded marketplace, the only way to get their attention and be able to charge the premium prices that we all want to earn is to differentiate your business from all of the competitors and alternatives out there.
You want to get your niche market interested in your product or service. For this, you need a Unique Selling Proposition. The term USP was coined by Rosser Reeves, who defined it as a proposition to potential customers that is unique and strong enough to encourage people to take action.
Your USP is what makes your product, service or business different from the alternatives available to your target market.
For example, you may have a unique formula, a special manufacturing process, or supreme customer service. You may have lower prices than your competition, or offer more benefits for the same price.
Note that it is important that your USP conveys a benefit to your target market. After all, there are lots of ways in which your business may be different to others, but consumers don’t care unless there is a direct benefit to them!
Here is a five-step process that you can use to help you create a compelling USP:
As you can see, the USP is totally focused on the niche market that you chose in the last lesson, because the main reason for choosing a niche is so that you can tailor your marketing to their needs and wants.
It may change your business. Or it may just provide a focus for your sales and marketing. Either way, it helps your customers — and you —to understand who you are and what you do.
Media
Once you know WHO your potential customers are, WHERE to find them and WHAT you want to say to them, it makes it much easier to decide HOW to reach them. How do you to choose between the myriad of advertising channels that are available and find the ones that will give you maximum return on investment?
Your first task is to develop a lead generation strategy and you do this by answering four questions:
1. WHO do you want to reach?
This is your niche market, of course, and using the R.A.I.D. formula, you will learn everything you need to know about your chosen niche, such as what they read, watch or listen to, where they hang out, the events or conferences they attend, etc. So you’ll choose lead generation tools that will enable you to deliver your message specifically to them.
2. WHAT message do you want to give to them?
Your USP will form the basis of your message, in that you need to communicate the benefits that they get from using your product or service, rather than a competitor’s.
3. WHAT do you want them to do?
Look, we’re not interested in advertising just to raise the profile of your brand – the aim here is to generate enquiries. So you want interested prospects to take some form of action: visit your website, come into the store, call this number, send in a form, etc. Whatever the next step is in your sales funnel. And you’re going to bribe them to do this. Which brings me to the final question.
4. WHY should they do this?
This is where the bribe comes in. It’s an ethical bribe, all above the table and fully transparent, but it’s a bribe nonetheless. It’s necessary because the days when people would willingly hand over personal details just to get a newsletter are long gone.
Plus, people are busy, so getting them to take action probably means not doing, or delaying doing something else. So you need an incentive, like a discount voucher or free gift. These are called Irresistible Offers and we’ll talk about them in more detail in the next chapter.
At the end of this chapter I’ve included a list of 99 Lead Generation tools, to give you some ideas and inspiration for what might work in your own business. The answers to these questions, as well as cost considerations, should help you to create a shortlist of potential advertising and marketing channels.
Don’t rely on just one or two tools for lead generation, as this is risky strategy. You don’t want the fate of your business to depend on the fortunes of one magazine, the whims of a Google algorithm or the Facebook advertising team.
When you develop multiple marketing channels, you not only increase the number of sales enquiries; you also make your business a bit more immune from things that are beyond your control.
Measure
The next time you’re reading the newspaper or watching TV, note how many advertisements offer some kind of discount or deal and require that you enter a specific discount code at checkout. If you looked for the same ad in another section of the press, the code would probably be different.
The reason why they do this is simple: they want to be able to track the responses they get from each ad and each media outlet they use.
Look, the sad fact is that lead generation – marketing – is not a science. It’s nearly impossible for me, or a marketing professional, to predict the results of any marketing campaign even if they’ve employed exactly the same strategy with a similar company.
There are so many factors involved, many of which are out of your control. Consumer behaviour and preferences are fickle and fluid; your competitors are changing their strategies, Google is always tweaking their search algorithms and Facebook is constantly changing what shows up in our news feeds, etc.
You can have a strategy that works fine for many months and then - just like that - the leads dry up, seemingly overnight.
Many of these factors are out of your control, which means that you need to work as hard as you can on the ones that you can control. Sometimes a small change to an ad that is underperforming can turn it into a success. More often than not, you have to work hard at it, but the potential gains are enormous. What if you increased the response rate from 3-5% to 15-20%... think about the impact that would have on revenue?
Once you start spending money on attracting prospects it is essential that you measure the results of each and every lead generation activity that you employ: so that you know which ones are working and hence where to target your resources.
Honestly, advertising without measuring is like playing Battleships without ever knowing which of your torpedoes sunk your opponent’s ships.
So how do you do it?
Most online advertising tools have effective ways to measure results, whether that’s impressions and clicks (nice, but they don’t put money into your pocket) or conversions, using cookies and pixels and such things.
Earlier I told you about a newspaper ad that asked the respondent to quote a particular code. Whether they do that online or over the phone, this data can be collected. Or if your prospects need to fill in a coupon and mail it back (old school, I know, but I cater for a wide range of business types!) then that’s a really accurate way of knowing whether that ad worked.
For general media campaigns, try looking for spikes in activity around the same time that your ad appears, or in the days and weeks after you launch a campaign. This method is a bit crude, but you may have no other choice.
Of course, if all else fails, just ask the customer how they found you! You’ll often see that as part of the checkout process online.
It’s not glamorous – in fact it’s bloody hard work – but testing your lead generation tools and measuring the results is the most effective way to increase the number of enquiries you receive.
Involve your whole staff, or as many as possible, in this process – especially the USP exercises, which require a fair degree of creative thinking in addition to fact. And don’t be afraid to test the final results on your customers, suppliers, partners and anyone else who will listen.
Finally, don’t forget that the results of all these exercises are just the start. Your marketplace is constantly changing and so should you. You should be periodically reviewing your niche markets, tweaking your USP, updating the overall strategy and changing lead generation tools based on the information you glean from testing and measuring.
Want further help in finding new customers for your business?
Module 2 of my online training course includes the detailed questions behind the RAID model, templates you need to implement the 5-step USP process and detailed videos to explain each step of the process.
Click here for more details.