Marketing success through clarity. Knowing your clients.

How well do you know your clients? I’m not talking about interests in golf or karaoke. I’m talking about really knowing your ideal client.

This isn’t just a customer persona you put together with assumptions and a bit of data, this comes from a dedicated research campaign where you spend time on the phone with existing and potential clients and dig deep into some more meaningful questions.

Questions like:

• What part of your business keeps you up at night?
• What do you want to be famous for?
• What are some of your biggest barriers?
• What part of our service do you appreciate the most?
• What would a competitor have to do to realistically poach you as a client?

and try & finish each question with ‘why is that important

Because this is the whole objective of this exercise. Find out what’s important to them.

Because once you’ve got that knowledge, well it all just becomes a lot easier, you are going to be able to lean on these findings to make critical decisions about a whole lot of things in your business.

Considerations such as:

• Does your messaging really speak to your audience?
• How should I adjust my pricing and service offering?
• Is too much effort going into a redundant service?
• Does your branding effectively match your target clients?
• What content are you creating? Should you change direction and format?
• Should you be charging more or less?

Just taking the time to have a frank and honest conversations with real people down the phone helps you take off the blinders and face some harsh realities or learn new things about what the client really wants.

This is something we’ve been recently trialing with a new service offering we want to offer, a marketing package for smaller agencies.

The challenge we faced was there’s a ton of avenues to take in marketing for a business, from email to personal branding. But it was Important to us to discuss with those owners and ideal customers to find out what the perfect solution would look for them.

This helped us figure out where to trim the fat on the service and understand what they feel they would reasonably pay for the service (more than we though, go figure).

And, as a by-product it’s been a fantastic solutions for some good business development, we’ve started conversations that I know we would have not had with a hard sell.

Listen at the end of the day this stuff isn’t rocket science, I’m sure it all makes perfect sense. But it’s more about carving a little bit of time out in your diary to book in some calls and conduct some research, something I know we don’t do enough of.