Targeting Potential Customers for Better Marketing Results

by Patrick Zuluaga, PMZ Marketing [Download Article]

As a business owner or manager you are always on the lookout for ways to improve your business performance. A powerful and leveraged approach to achieving Better Marketing Results is available from working smarter and making your marketing work harder for you and not the other way around.

We will explore two areas of marketing that can bring you better results.

1. Marketing above the prospecting funnel to generated qualified sales opportunities and new orders for the business.
2. Marketing below the prospecting funnel to generate repeat business opportunities and additional orders for your business.

Marketing above the Prospecting Funnel:

Let us first look at generating qualified business opportunities and new sales orders by properly targeting potential customers with the appropriate marketing messages.

Throw away any shot-gun approaches to advertising and use your smarts to achieve Better Marketing Results.  Get started by developing your ideal customer profile (read the 1st step in my Effective Marketing is Business Development article).

Make sure your ideal customer profile includes the attributes and the buying criteria that your ideal customer will use in selecting the product or service.  This is a very crucial point, it is not the criteria that you consider important – it is what your potential customers considers important.

Find out what is involved in their buying cycle, what risks if any are perceived in their buying cycle and where your potential customers go to research and engage within their buying cycle.

Next formulate a direct marketing message that is relevant and supported with a compelling ‘call to action for your ideal customer.  Ensure that the ‘call to action’ is appropriate for any perceived risks in their buying cycle.

Last, but not least is utilise the marketing medium that your potential customers prefer to use and not what you are comfortable to use.

You now have eliminated the waste that goes with broad-based shot gun approaches into highly targeted and focused campaigns that will achieve Better Marketing Results in securing prospects that you want to have as your customers.

Marketing below the Prospecting Funnel:

Yes, we all need a marketing approach below the funnel that will be targeting our customers too!

Your conversion and success rates to generate repeat and additional orders from your own customers will be very much higher since they will have had the positive experience in purchasing from you previously.

Not all your customers are priority marketing opportunities. You must also formulate a targeting strategy that will achieve Better Marketing Results.

You can use the Pareto Principle [define] to target the top 20% of your customers that bring in 80% of the business or you could utilise the Recency-Frequency-Monetary method, see marketing tip number two at my 3 Strategic Tips to Keeping on Top article.

The RFM method is a direct marketing approach that uses the following segmentation approach:

• Recency is the number of days since a purchase was made by a customer.
• Frequency is the number of purchase transactions made by a customer.
• Monetary is the total dollar value of purchases made by a customer.

Using this technique will help you sort out your customer potential based on the most recent transactions, the most purchase transactions and the highest total value of purchases made.  These customers will be the most receptive to take action on your marketing offers.

Next research and develop marketing messages that will resonate with these extremely valuable existing customers.  Your research must cover purchasing history to determine what likely offers will be relevant and beneficial for these customers.

You will need to implement both the above and below the funnel marketing to better target your potential customers to achieve the business results you desire.