Marketing: Clone Wars you Can Win
by Michael Noel, MBA | April 4, 2018
Once upon a time in a galaxy right outside your door, is a time of intense competition for the attention of your customer, and a battle rages on.
It feels like that sometimes. So much noise from so many sources across so many different media that it may cause your message to be lost in the fray.
So how can your message stand out?
- Ask your customer. Your best customer is a prototype that you need to clone. Take this person for coffee or create your own focus group of best customers and find out what they have in common.
- Do they: read the newspaper (which one); listen to radio (what station/when); television; social media (which one!!); shop online; have spouses, kids, grandkids; pets (what kind, how many)?
- How did they come to be your customer: drive by; referral (by who); online search (which one, what did they type in); yellow pages, ads?
- What do you offer that brings them to you? If you have multiple items/services your inventory/sales reports could tell you what sells-but that may not be what brought them in originally. Perhaps they came to buy your product because of the service you offer delivering the product.
- Why do they come back? If you offer something in a competitive market knowing the “why” is critical! The “what,” “how,” “when” and “where” are behavioral What you need to understand is the “why”? This speaks to motivation. Once you understand the emotional reason, then you can craft your message based on the internal switch that separates you from your competition in your customers’ heart.
- Analyze the results of your research. Draw columns down a page and give a tick mark for each response you get for each question you ask and look for a pattern. This will help you identify the common threads for your ideal customer, including their demographics, the media channels you should use, and the message they want to hear. The results you get can also be used to draw information from robust databases that can assist in this process.
- Create your service delivery model, marketing and sales campaigns. Your service delivery model is the duplicable process that ensures that your customer experience is consistent and your own unique way of doing things happens, which reinforces the “why” for your customer. Then translate this experience into a brief message that conveys the experience clearly. Finally, distribute that message into the channels that you learned that your clone army of customers is tapped into so you can win the clone war against your competition.
So now you are ready to clone your army of loyal customers! Once you have identified the channels, you can set your budget for your ongoing marketing effort. Often businesses make the mistake of just spending whatever is left after everything else is paid on their marketing effort. Make marketing a budget line item based on what your research tells you that you should spend; otherwise, your clone army will be incomplete and made of leftover parts. Now go, market, and may the force be with you!
