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Marketing Your Business - Get Inside Your Clients' Heads

Written by Dan McGraw

Sometimes small businesses try to make marketing too complicated. When you boil it all down, it can be fairly simple. Get inside your customers heads, and figure out what they want, and how they want to get it. It may sound cliché, but knowing where your customers are coming from can mean success for any business. What are their demographics and income ranges? Do they live in particular locations? What is it about their makeup that is prompting them to choose you over someone else?

How to do this is the complicated part. Technology has made it much easier to figure out exactly who you have as clients and how to retain them, but some technical marketing plans can be very costly and time-consuming. And there are times when high-tech methods cause businesses to lose the one very basic business plan that has remained unchanged over time: the personal relationship between the business owner and their customers. When customers are first introduced to you, they are buying into a relationship with you, not just buying a product or service. Nurturing the relationship keeps them coming back. Very simply, customers are tired of dealing with today’s cold, impersonal business world. They want to be treated like family.

So, how do you use marketing techniques to keep that relationship going? First, you need to know how customers react to your quality and price, service and delivery, image and brand — everything, in short, that influences their purchasing decision. This can be done with surveys, e-mail newsletters, and small focus groups. But gathering customer information must be an ongoing effort. Delegate one person in your business to be responsible for keeping up with customer information.

Other marketing plans can be equally effective and at a good cost. Use the free publicity of the media if you can, either through holding charitable functions or thinking of ways your company makes a difference in the community. Create joint ventures with other related businesses, anyone that deals with the same target market that you do. If you are involved in heating and air conditioning, ask local builders to consider your company when installing heating and cooling units.

Once again, the key issue is to build on the customers you already have. Rather than always seeking new clients, make sure the ones you have are always coming back and telling their friends. You can keep track of them through many means — direct mail (even something as small as a postcard), e-mails, or through a company Web site. But maybe the first thing to think about is talking to them personally. Because customers need that personal relationship, and all the rules of good marketing stem from that very old-fashioned and simple approach.

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