Targeting Your Prospects
Is everybody out there a potential prospect for your products or services? Probably not, unless you're a major retail chain or grocery store. How, then, do you go about targeting the prospects you wish to reach? How do we find the people who have an interest in the things you have to sell?
In a previous article, we talked about your current list of customers and how they are the best source of business and referrals. Sometimes, though, we need to reach out and find new business, and we need to know where those customers are going to come from. We need a targeted way of finding those new customers, so we don't waste a bunch of money and effort going off in the wrong direction.
So how do we make a targeted list of potential new customers? Again, this is an excellent time to draw upon your list of current customers. Look at that list and draw some conclusions as to the makeup of that list. Are your current customers mostly male or female? What is their income? Are they married or single? What neighborhoods do they live in? Do they have jobs/kids/dogs/credit cards/luxury autos/boats/etc.? How many different traits can you identify that are similar in your customer base? How many things can you identify about your current customers that are alike?
After you find the similarities, then think about things that would eliminate prospects from your list. Do you sell home improvement services? Then renters are not your prospect. No kids? Then don't send them your brochure for after-school care. Income less than $30,000? They're probably not interested in buying a BMW.
By identifying similar traits in your current customers, and eliminating undesirable traits in prospects, you should be able to put together a very targeted list of prospects that you can market to.
On a related note, let's talk about the sales process for a moment. There are 5 distinct steps in the sales process: awareness, research, evaluation, decision, purchase. Your marketing should target the place where your prospects are in the sales process. New prospects for your business, as described in the process above, will most likely be in the awareness stage, so you're not actually trying to sell them at this stage. All you want them to do is to raise their hands and tell you that they want to be marketed to, and then you can lead them through the rest of the sales process.
By the way, it takes an average of seven contacts to turn a prospect into a customer. Once you have your targeted list, contact them often, and you'll convert a lot of them into loyal customers!
Phillip Baker, CAS, is a 29 year veteran of advertising and marketing and is an expert in promotional products, integrated marketing and advertising consulting. He can be reached at 850 995 9557. Visit http://www.bakercreativeadvertising.com to enter to win $1,000 in promotional products or subscribe to the free Marketing Magik newsletter and podcast.
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