Billboard Advertising in San Antonio

Everyone has heard the marketing mantra, “You are not the customer,” but what does that really mean?  On the most basic level, it means that you are not necessarily representative of the market you are trying to reach.  That means that when it comes to marketing materials, sorry, but your personal opinion doesn’t really matter.  Sure, it is up to you to ensure you get your company’s message across, but when it comes to what is important to your customers - the features and values you offer, what tag lines and copy points will really catch your customers’ eyes - you need to learn to think like your customers do.

So how do you do that?  The easiest way is to send a survey to your existing customer base.  This can be done via email or snail mail.  Give your customers some incentive to fill it out, too.  A discount off their next service or product purchase will greatly increase your return rate.  Remember to ask them what is important.  Ask them why they purchased from you in the first place and what would make them likely to purchase again.  Ask them if they would recommend your products or services to a friend, and make sure you also ask them why they feel that way.

Another method you can use to get inside the minds of your customers is to pay attention to who they are.  Take a good hard look at your customer database.  (And if you haven’t started a customer database, now is a good time to start.)  Are your primary purchasers women or men?  Do they have kids, are they teenagers, or are they empty nesters?  Are they –upper-, middle- or lower-income wage earners?  You should start to see trends in your data.  Sure, not every customer is alike, but you should still see groupings of customers that share similar characteristics. 

Another method you can use to find out who your customers are is to put together a focus group.  Your focus group participants should be fairly representative of your customers.  For example, if 60% of your customers seem to be middle-income, two-parent, dual-income families with two children, where the female is the primary decision-maker in the purchase, then 60% of your focus group participants should be made up of this group, too.  It is best when setting up a focus group to hire an outside moderator.  There are many independent moderators around and they are worth the investment.  Moderators are trained to assess the psychology of a group and to ask probing questions, minimize those who may try to monopolize the discussion and draw out those who may be more shy.  They can also help you craft appropriate questions for your group so that you get the maximum amount of information your investment.

So is all of this really necessary?  Yes!  There are many companies out there who try to compete for the same pool of customer dollars.  Customers are much more likely to purchase from a company who truly understands their needs and can speak to those needs than one who hasn’t taken the time to do the homework. 

By way of example, say you sell dry cleaning services.  Your company cleans mostly business suits, so you assume that your customers are primarily men.  In order to increase your sales, you send out a postcard to your customer base featuring a cute cheerleader.  On closer inspection, however, you later find out that although you primarily clean business suits, it’s the wives that drop the clothes off at your store.  How do you think that cheerleader would appeal to those busy moms as opposed to a picture of another busy mom who also used your services?  If you had taken the time to find out in advance who your customers really were, you wouldn’t have wasted time sending a postcard featuring a cheerleader when you would be more likely to get a better response from a postcard featuring someone your customers can really relate to.

-Janet Peavy