Building an Effective Business Strategy
For example, you will make a critical mistake if you don’t define your audience; in other words, you don’t identify the “right” audience. If you start creating your strategy of acquiring customers and your target is “the world,” you’ll end up losing time and money. So the more careful you are to define the “right” audience, the more your results will show success.
Another mistake saying the same thing to your audiences. Niche marketing should kick in and you should realize you can’t say the same thing to everyone because their needs are different. The most obvious example is if you talk price to an architect, what you say will fall on mostly dear ears as architects don’t buy anything. However, if you SHAPE your pricing message so that the architect and show his clients the benefits of your pricing, then you’re talking!
Not building in a feedback mechanism is another mistake often made, but even worse is not listening to that feedback. People rely a lot on “reviews” and what you may not be aware of is that you are being reviewed ALL THE TIME – even when you don’t know it. Not only is your website being reviewed by customers and prospects (unless you have reverse IP lookup on your site you simply are in the dark), but your audiences talk to each other about you. Sometimes, it’s necessary to hire an outside research firm to listen on your behalf.
The Secret Shopper concept is actually important. Here, you’ll hire someone or a firm to go “undercover” to get the truth. For example, visiting a showroom that carries your product not as you, but as an anonymous consumer, will reveal a lot! One of our bankers once told me, “Why don’t you want people to know you own a business?” I said, “Because then they wouldn’t treat me like a regular person.” He said, “I want everyone to know I own the bank.” I said, “And that’s why you’ll never know the truth about what’s really going on.”
We are great friends to this day.
I gave another friend an example of how I stand in a regular line at a bank when I make a deposit and listen to transactions – how tellers treat customers, what customers are doing. Sometimes I wait a long time in the line because the line is not only long, but the transactions of the consumer take up “extra” time (not just a deposit). He added two tellers after that experience. Bankers, like all of us, depend on the “customer experience.”
I remember during 9/11 the lines in airports – do you? I saw a coffee vendor bemoaning his fate. His head in his hands, he looked up and down the long line and almost cried because no one would break out of the line to buy coffee. I wanted to run up to him and say, “Then bring the coffee to the line,” but I didn’t want to lose my own place in line. 😊
Keep reading our series on How to Target and Hit the Right Customers: Deep Dive Insights.