If you plan your marketing, you can add more customers to your mix, and that means a better bottom line. Here’s how to plan your marketing with some steps to add more customers to your business.
First, you must understand your strengths as a business. To do this, you need to ask yourself some questions. Why do your customers buy from you? What does your business really do for your customers? What advantage do you have over your competition? Do you have any skills or advantages over others? The answers to these questions will give you your competitive advantages. These things make you stand out over your competition. They could be related to your prices, location, professional skills, attitude or even responsiveness or your own personality.
People purchase your goods or services because you provide them something that no one else can do. If you can figure this out, you take the first step to better marketing.
Find your target market. You need to find the people who value your products and services. Your strengths, those competitive advantages that you found in the first step of this exercise, can help you find those people. For example, if you found that your location is one of your strengths, then the customers who come into your store will reflect your location. If you found that high quality is one of your strengths, then your customers should reflect that.
Look at your current customers to get an idea of your target market. Or, take a look at your profit margins to get an idea of what customers to focus on. You could have several target markets because you have more than one product or service, and you’ll find you have a variety of strengths to focus on. Be sure to focus on customers who can put a high value on what you can do for them, because these are the type of customers who will value you the most and will turn out to be your most loyal and profitable customers.
Finally, you need to create a meaningful message with your marketing. Create a message that tells your target market why they need to do business with you. Then, get that message out as often as you budget will let you. You message should reflect your strengths, because those are the things you do best, and it should be in the terms that your target market is interested in. Your message should come right from your strengths and your target market, and you can have more than one message. Just remember to deliver that message as often as you can, and you’ll see your bottom line start to grow.
