Are you sick of pitching non-responsive prospects? Are you tired of people going to your site and leaving two seconds later? Maybe your marketing message needs a drastic makeover. This is the approach I use to come up with effective marketing tactics for my clients.
Step 1: Who Is Your Ideal Client?
This is a very important question because you can’t sell to someone you don’t know. Some questions you might want to ask yourself:
- Is my client a man or a woman?
- What’s her age?
- How much does she make?
- What are the most important things in life to her?
- Does she have kids?
- What about a husband? What is their relationship like?
- What does my client look like? Is she healthy? What does she eat? Does she exercise?
- Does she have free time? What does she do in her free time?
- What is her average day like? (Describe it in as much detail as you can from beginning to end.)
Step 2: Understanding the Decision-Making Process
There are four roles in a purchasing decision. All four can be performed by the same person or by different people.
- Researcher. Who researches the different options available?
- Decision Maker. Who makes the final decision?
- Influencer. Who influences in the decision?
- User. Who will use the product?
Step 3: Finding the Hot Buttons
Let’s suppose that you sell a piece of software for lawyers and after doing step two of this process you discovered that the lawyer is the researcher and the decision maker, but his assistant is the influencer and the user. You have to sell your software to lawyers AND their assistants. They’re different people and have different motivations.
This is why the lawyers want your software:
- Because it sends automated emails to their clients, they get to bill more hours (make money).
- Because all their contacts are organized, they can waste less time searching for phone numbers (save time).
- It saves their assistants time, so they can pay them less (save money).
This is why the assistants want your software:
- It saves them time and that way they get to spend some time on Facebook (have fun, relax).
- Automatizes many of the tasks they do (ease of use).
Because you’re selling to both the lawyers and their assistants, you need to include benefits for both in your marketing message. How about this headline?:
“How Lawyers Can Increase their Income, Work Less and Make their Assistants Happy”
Step 4: Reaching Your Audience
You know that you need to reach 35-50-year old lawyers who own their own firms and their assistants, who are law school students (both male and female) between the ages of 20 and 26. How can you reach them? These are some questions you might want to ask yourself:
- What magazines do they read?
- What websites do they spend time on?
- Who do they look up to?
- What radio shows do they listen to?
- How do they make most of their decisions? By recommendation? If so, who do they get recommendations from? How can you reach those people?
Step 5: Do It!
By now you know who your ideal client is, how he makes his decisions, who else is involved in the decision making process, what motivates those people to take action and how to reach them. Now all you have to do is DO IT!
Measure everything you do, find out what works and what doesn’t and do more of what works!