2014 has been my first year on the Frozen Fire team but since day one, Brad (CEO and Owner of Frozen Fire) has reinforced the importance of understanding your customer. Brad frequently talks about the delivery business, Business Courier Service (BCS) he owned and operated in the 90’s, a very successful one I may add. BCS covered four states, and had over 250 employees and contract drivers. Brad used to tell his people that the number one reason someone wasn’t a customer of BCS was because they didn’t know they existed or didn’t know how great of a company they really were. Think about that for a minute. That’s a very confident statement but Brad knew he had a great business, great service and great people. All he needed was to get in front of the prospect and target the right customer. The tools we have today did not exist during Brad’s ownership of BCS but imagine if they had. Imagine if BCS would have been able to be found on a Google search 24/7 or he had social media networks to engage directly with his customer. Imagine if all the online tools that are available today to engage and nurture relationships were available then.
This brings me to my first point that you, today’s business owner, can relate to. Even if BCS would have had the tools, would they have known how to properly use them to get the message to the right prospect and target the right customer? There are so many tools at our fingertips, making many business owners feel very overwhelmed. What tools should they use? What social networks should they have a presence on? Should they tweet? Should they use videos and newsletters?
Most business owners know who their customer is and they have a great message to get out there but struggle on determining how to target that message to the right people in the right places.
Why is it important to target the RIGHT customer?
We’ve already established you know who your customer is but once you learn how to target the right customer, that’s when you’ll see some ROI. Let me give you an example of something we see all the time when we start working with a business owner. Said business owner has spent time, money and resources to build an impressive social media following and at first glance looks like they hit a home run. But why then are they still not increasing hits to their website? I’ll tell you why; they are talking to the wrong people. Who cares if you have 100,000 twitter followers if they are not the RIGHT followers? You can be the best company with the best service but if you are talking to the wrong people, none of it matters. We’ve become so consumed with the ease of pushing our messaging out as much as possible and to as many people who will listen, we forgot to make sure we were talking to the right people.
I like to remind myself of the old saying, “quality over quantity” specifically when it comes to nurturing relationships.
Know WHERE your customer “hangs out” online?
Knowing the right place to find your customer is equally important when trying to target the right customer and especially with all the “spots” someone can hang out online. Let’s go back to the twitter example and pretend for a minute you own a local Dermatology practice with multiple offices in the Dallas, Texas area. You have over 10,000 twitter followers but as you start to look at the location of your followers you notice they are all over the United States and many of them are even out of the country. How are these people going to increase your number of appointments? Sure, a few of them may make sense for networking purposes but it’s extremely unlikely that many will ever result in a new customer and this results in a poor use of time and resources.
Social media has made it very easy to connect with people and get your message in front of them but that doesn’t mean you are finding the right people in the right places.
Take a look at this funny video and see for yourself why it is so important to target the right customer in the right places. Even though you already know who your customer is, you may not be targeting them and chances are if you’re not, it’s possibly because you don’t know how to find them.
Let Frozen Fire help your business sell to the RIGHT people in the RIGHT places.
Frozen Fire is a Dallas internet marketing and video production company that helps companies harness the most powerful aspect of modern marketing—the internet—to engage customers in memorable and meaningful ways. Ways that ignite sales and business growth. Contact us to learn how we can help your business.
