If Your Marketing Isn’t Buyer-Centric, You’ll Be Out-of-Business In 12 Months Or Less
Let’s start with basic, sound, fundamental business practices we can all agree on: Without your buyers — your clients and customers — you don’t have a business.
Peter Drucker himself, all Business MBA programs, and scores of prime business minds are all nodding their somber heads in agreement right now (you are too, I’m sure).
If you’ve ever tried selling a product that no one wants, you’ve quickly realized it’s the surest, straightest path to not just failing to put food on the table but you can’t even afford a table to begin with.
For years, frenzied and frenetic business owners and managers have shoveled piles of money into the hands of marketers, because “everyone else” is doing it, and “everyone else” is selling stuff.
“Get more customers, make more sales!” was and is the mantra everyone is repeating, at the altar of their business (still nodding your head?).
You spend money on marketing to get in front of people who just might be willing to open their wallets, pull out their crisp dollar bills, put them in your eager, begging hands, and thank you while you hand over Your Product.
So Understanding And Interacting With Those Buyers Should Be Your #1 Priority
Sure, you can amass an impressive spreadsheet of suspects, prospects, and anyone with 2 legs that’s still breathing and clutching a wallet.
Quite often, you are just corralling those people into an ambiguous group branded: “Anyone who could buy my product”, as you attempt to herd them towards Your Product.
You do some marketing, some advertising, and you make sure everyone in sales listen to those motivational tapes.
You manage to generate quite a buzz, chatter, and talk around what you’re selling, but there is that small voice in the back of your mind that just won’t shut up.
It’s asking you: “Do people actually want this? Are people consuming this content? Am I connecting with the right market?”
And you realize not everyone desires your product or are the right fit for it. In fact, very few do and very few are. But you don’t really know why, or how, you ended up where you are now.
Look: peddling your wares on street corners is not hard. But running a profitable business with that kind of marketing “strategy” is near impossible.
And There Are Enough Marketing Strategies And Tactics To Make Napoleon, Clausewitz, And Sun Tzu Cry
Spend an afternoon browsing the latest advice on marketing and sales, and you’ll be barraged by “10 quick tips to social media domination”, squeezing juice out of the fruits of your SEO labor, and being inundated by all these inbound leads from your blog post.
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, mobile advertising, web design, landing pages, content marketing, video, audio, SEO, links, PPC, inbound, outbound…
You can practically see yourself and “everyone else” compiling all this content into a PDF, labeled “Marketing 2.0”, and distribute it in the next meeting, as you decide the fate of your marketing strategy and budget.
Ah, Marketing 2.0 coupled with your product — the Holy Grail of your existence — shining from all the sweat poured into it, polished by your hands, and perfected over development cycles that stretch as far back as the dinosaurs (and that’s a sure way to go extinct, too).
But Not All Of It Has Anything Whatsoever To Do With Those Who Buy (What You Sell)
It’s disconnected — you feverishly blog about your product, but your Ideal Customer & Buyer couldn’t care less about your “content marketing”.
It’s an exercise in futility — all that social sharing, tweeting, facebook’ing, instagram’ing has no more effect than yelling into space.
It’s like trying to put out a fire by throwing money into it — you have no idea if you’re ranking for the right keywords, no idea about ROI on that new website.
Lest you rip your hair out and yell “hypocrite!”, I’ll just clarify and say that I’m a devotee of (most things) online marketing — I use it for my clients, myself, and see incredible results.
There’s a monumental difference between employing these tools and tactics because you’re supposed to — and doing what will have the most leverage and impact for your business, with the right Buyers.
I’d blog and tweet all day, every day, if it was yielding new sales, customers, clients, revenue and profit (and it can).
However, not all marketing tactics and tools are useful or make sense for every business.
Doesn’t It Make Sense For Your Marketing To Be Relevant To Whom Your Buyers Are?
Let’s get real: you can generate prospects, leads, opportunities, and sales without doing all the marketing activities there are.
The crux, the fulcrum, the point of leverage that will make sure your marketing works for you and pays for itself lies with your Buyers.
The key to unlocking a true marketing transformation, and consistent, sustainable growth is understanding your Buyers.
Your #1 unfair marketing advantage is interacting with your market — continuously.
Most Businesses And Marketing Agencies Are Doing This Wrong
It goes beyond the “Buyer Persona” and blends Lean Startup methodology, growth hacking, agile marketing, and results-driven efforts to grow your businesses in 3 ways:
- Increase the number of customers and clients (Attraction).
- Increase the conversion rates (Conversion).
- Increase the frequency of transactions (Retention).
It’s time for marketing activities to be done through the focal point of the Buyer — their behavior, decision-making, and values.
If you do this, I guarantee you’ll see a at least a 25% increase in new leads, sales, and lifetime customers and clients.