Marketing To Ideal Customers: What Every Small Business Should Know

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Small Business Owners need to recognize that not all customers are ideal customers. When targeting future customers it is import that they fit the profile of an ideal customer. Reality: you have customers that are costing you time and money. Strategic Marketing ignores those kinds of customers and targets ideal customers. You have limited marketing dollars to spend, so make sure you are targeting potentially ideal, profitable customers.

This is an investment. So make the smartest investment and look to attract customers who value your products, services and expertise. These are the customers who do repeat business with you. These are the customers who readily refer your business.

If you try to be all things to all people, when you talk about your business, it will be in such generic terms that it won’t capture the imagination of anyone. You’ll get a lot of “what is it that you do again?” if they even bother to ask at all. You won’t convince the right people that you can deliver what they need.

Most business owners fear that if they don’t cast the net wide, they may not haul in anything. Sadly, I’ve seen business owners invest in large campaigns (nets cast wide) only the haul in nothing – or worse, unqualified prospects, where you spend time explaining why you can’t help them.

You will have better results over time if you market to 100 people 10 times rather than 1,000 people once.

In order to close business, you must first establish credibility with your qualified prospect. Developing credibility takes time and multiple marketing touches. The expense of multiple, frequent touches with a large, diverse list is cost prohibitive. A smaller, more targeted list allows for frequency and more powerful messaging that establishes credibility more quickly than “all things to all people” marketing. Focus on the strategic ideal prospect is the quickest path to establishing credibility and ultimately closing the business.

What are the characteristics of your ideal customer? First and foremost they value you. They are not making life miserable for you or your staff. They do repeat business and they refer business to you. Make a list of those customers. Are there characteristics that they share? It might be traditional demographics: zip code, income, SIC code, number of employees, years in business, etc.

Look for more subtle characteristics as well. To give you an example: I was responsible for marketing a software solution for nonprofits. The universe of nonprofits in the United States was 1.5 million. I didn’t have a multi-million dollar budget. So I pared that list to about 80,000 just based on their annual budget. Then, based on interviews with my best customers, I was able to identify some subtle differentiators. My ideal customers were organizations who had more than 5 funding sources and had a professionally trained accountant/finance director on staff (someone who would not have sticker shock when seeing the price of the software because they would understand the ROI). Those two characteristics dropped my list down to 50,000. I further segmented the list into like organizations resulting in much smaller lists of between 500 and 3,000 contacts.

I tested a small segment of each type of list. Both the small targeted lists and larger diverse list received monthly mailings. The smaller targeted lists had response rates of 12 – 30%. The larger lists had response rates in the single digits, with much lower conversion rates.

The reason the smaller lists campaigns performed so much better was that the message was specific to the recipient – it was all about them and the challenges they faced every day. By writing about them in the language of their niche, I more quickly gained credibility with the recipient. I did not have the same ability with the larger list. I had to use more generic language, more generalized business scenarios.

Starting small and targeted is the best use of your limited marketing dollars. It will allow you to be more memorable, valuable and frequent in your outreach to ideal future customers. Once you have identified the ideal future customer, it is a much easier exercise to take your marketing to the next level, which is “Where do I find more people like this?

Want to find out more about strategic marketing , then visit Dawn Westerberg’s site on small business marketing consulting for your needs.

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