In business school you learn that the 4 p’s of marketing are:
Product, Price, Promotion, Place but today I will share with you the another P that energizes and activates the other P’s of the marketing process and that is PEOPLE
- Your entire marketing perspective becomes more effective when you start with the customers first.
I used to ask business owners who is your target customer?
Some will say: Everybody and anybody. That is simply not true. Example: Even if you are selling bottles of water, everyone is not your customer.
Not every one will pay for water. Some will prefer soda, tea, or coffee to water. Not every one has the money to buy.
A better question to determine your customer is to ask yourself – Who is the most likely person to buy your product/ or use this service?
- This is a fundamental principle of marketing and you should not proceed any further in your marketing until you answer this essential question.
Fact is: Many small business owners can not clearly identify who their ideal or target customer is if asked. If you have not identified a who is you customer. Where will you find them? What will you say to them? What should you really sell them? How much should you charge them?
In this episode we will talk about the ways to identify your ideal customers
- Geographic: Segment your customers by physical location – Regions, counties, states, countries, zip codes)
- Demographics: Based on quantifiable data in a population. Age, sex, race, religion, education, marital status, income, household size, Employees, annual sales.
- Psychographics: lifestyle, behavioral and purchasing patterns, belief, values, attitudes about themselves, families, society.
- Combinations of the three. Cluster markets
To find out who your market is start by looking at your current customers
- Literally observe you current customers – What type of cars (Income, Pyschographics), do they arrive in groups (Social Skills), in your business where do a lot of people stop or pause? Do they walk in carrying a cup from a near deli – (Joint Venture opportunities)
- Look at correspondence. Shipping labels for potentials location clues. Look at caller ID for area codes than look at the demographics of that area.
- Look to see where you website visitors are coming from. Become a detective in your business.
- Survey your customers. you can use online services, like surveymonkey.com, freeonlinesurveys.com, or you can use pin and paper surveys to gather more information about your customers.
- Sometime you will want to bring in professional research firms, ad agencies, marketing firms, and PR companies offer services such as questionnaires, in-phone surveys, and focus groups to help businesses gather this information.
In building your business you need to know who your customers are. Once you know the Who you can fill in the other marketing P’s Product, Promotion, Place, Price.
Because getting clear on who you are marketing too, I have created a Customer Profile Template that can help you create your customer profile check in the Resources Tab for the customer profile link to get started.