- Do you offer something that fills a want or need your customers will have?
- Is your brand viable?
- Do you know about your audience for the product or service?
- Where is your audience and how can you best reach them?
- What are you willing to give to get what you want?
Are you filling a want or need?
People need food, shelter, clothing, and in most cases transportation. Everything else can be classed as a want.
Although you can create a need where none exists, as long as you are willing to spend a lot to do it, this isn’t the best approach. Having a product or service certain members of society need or want is the best approach to business. Understanding whether it is a want or need is important as well.
Have you done market research?
Knowing your audience is an important part of setting up any marketing campaign. When you know their touch points it is much simpler to set up a marketing campaign. What most people want goes beyond just your product or service. Your brand design, tone, voice, and what you do for society set the stage for this. This should touch upon what you are doing to help the environment for now and future generations as well.
Where does your audience hang out?
Part of knowing your customer is understanding how to reach them. Every business has an ideal customer. Knowing where to find this customer is key in your business’s survival. Keywords play a major role in this. What social media you use does as well.
Stand out
Every business either has competitors or will have them. Those competitors are from whom you need to stand out. The best way to do this is find something they are lacking (that is of interest to your ideal customer) and give to that want.
Ways to stand out
- Customer service
- Added service
- Small gifts for doing business with you
- Service after they buy
Customer service
This is number one on this list for a reason. Repeat business quite often depends upon it. Without repeat and referral business most small companies do not remain in business long
Added service
This is figuring out what your ideal customer wants beyond what is offered by your competitors. Then of course you tailor your marketing to point out what you are offering that your competitors are not.
Small gifts
This again is done to best your competitors. What can your ideal customer use that has value to them? Choosing the right small gift can make a world of difference.
Service after they buy
This one is missed by many businesses. Keeping your customer happy quite often comes down to….
- How do they start using what they bought?
- Asking are the instructions simple enough, and what can be done to improve them?
- Are you there to make their life simpler?
This is of course dependent upon whether you can reach your customers after they have bought. Do you have a system in place to do this? If so, does this system do what you want it to do?
If you do and it is not working as well as you would like, or if you don’t you might want to watch the short video mentioned below.