End Scattergun Marketing Forever

When I start working with a new client, one of the first questions I ask is, "Who is your ideal customer?"

And the most common answer I get is "anyone!"

Sometimes people are more specific and say, "Women" or perhaps even more specific and say "Small business owners". There are nearly 6 million small businesses in the U.K. so maybe that's specific enough. 

The reason I ask this question is because the purpose of marketing is is to make it really easy for people to buy from you. If you have great marketing, then sales becomes easy.  

The people who are going to be easiest to sell to are the ones who:

• Need what you offer and will get lots of value from it
• Have budget
• Be profitable for your business
• Will be energising for you to work with

People who tick all these boxes will be easy to sell to because they're a perfect match for your business and will get loads of value from what you deliver. These are the people you want to attract to your business so these are the people you want to focus your marketing towards. 

The temptation is often to widen your marketing to include people who tick some of the boxes but not all, and this leads to a wasteful, scattergun approach. 

If you focus your marketing specifically on your ideal customer, the person who is a perfect fit for your business, then you'll attract other similar people too. Your marketing messages will resonate powerfully with those people and you'll be able to ask for referrals effectively because you'll know exactly who you want to be introduced to. By deeply understanding your ideal customer you will also find it much easier to create useful content for them (blogs, videos, social media posts etc) and you'll know what features of your product or service to include and what to leave out. 

If you don't have one already, create a customer persona or avatar. Write down all the things that are important to that person and their attitude to your industry and your product or service category. Put as much detail as you can to create a rich persona that you can understand and speak to. 

I use a checklist with my clients that I email out to everyone who subscribes to receive my monthly newsletters. If you'd find it useful, get it here: https://www.rosconkie.com/audience-profile-checklist.html

If you need help creating your ideal customer persona, come along to my workshop on 11 March at Penny Brohn where we'll create a customer persona and use it to create powerful marketing messages that'll resonate with your audience.