Why Being Found by Customers Is More Important than Finding Them

Last time I checked, there was significantly more interest in developing new customers through direct sales and related marketing than any other topic in the print-media and general business markets. Let’s now jump forward beyond the customer onboarding trajectory and assume we have a stable new-business strategy to launch our program. Below are recommendations to ensure your company gets off to a strong start using strategic marketing and stays on the right path to success.

Offer What Your Customers Want

It is critical that you know what your customers need and want because that leads you to understand what to offer them. This single concept is a major reason some companies continuously attract and retain new customers while others never have enough. The knowledge of what your potential customers want to know more about, what they like, what they dislike, and what products they prefer will allow you to know what to offer them, as well as what not to offer them.

Establish Goals

Although this may sound like everyone would know this and do this, it is more uncommon than common to find a company that understands its one primary goal and drives everything through that lens. Kick off your program knowing what the preeminent goal is that you would like to achieve:

• Build higher traffic to your website.
• Achieve record downloads of your new product demo to lead to sales inquiries.
• Spread the word about your newest additional brand-line extension program using social media and related e-marketing resources.
• Create a powerful in-bound marketing program that you can launch new products from later in the year.
• Produce a specific type of customer following using a technical forum that allows for sharing concentrated technical information and data only this specialized target group will appreciate.

Be Selective in Goal Setting

The better and more narrowly you define your target goal, the better your results will be. We all know that including too many variant marketing messages is not a good practice, but this same principle applies to asking too much from your campaign or program. It’s simply impossible to achieve multiple objectives with a single campaign, and it’s equally ineffectual.

Track and Test Everything

This is a critical dimension to a successful marketing campaign. If you are running a search engine marketing (SEM) program that includes both organic and pay per click components, setup two offers so you can compare the results between the two over time. This will allow you to make much more informed buying decisions during the next time of evaluation. The campaign that clearly outperforms the other deserves the lion share of your marketing budget next time around.

Share Your Results

This one may get me some hate mail (I welcome your e-mails!), but share the results of your marketing campaign with your customers. Let them know that 65 percent of those you talked with like (fill in the blank) and 20 percent thought (this) and the balance wasn’t sure what they preferred. Then let them know, as a result, you are going to change your next marketing campaign to reflect these customer insights and request further responsiveness from them. This approach will create an interactive, two-way discussion that is healthy from many points of view. The primary one being you are now dialoging with your potential customer on a topic they are interested in and attracting business to your company. And isn’t that better than the traditional cold call?

Tom Wants to Hear Your Branding Issues:
If you are a printing company or product/services company serving the print-media market and would like to be considered for a feature in this blog, please contact Tom Marin for an interview.

Follow MarketCues on Twitter for branding and social media tips, as well as the latest trends. Tom also welcomes emails, new LinkedIn connections, calls to 407.330.7708 or visit www.marketcues.com. How can he help solve your branding issues?