Show Me You Know Me

There’s a new ART to the understanding of Crowd Behavior and it’s not just getting people to follow, connect or read your blog posts.

In today’s fast-paced 140 Character, highly-limited bandwidth of your audience, you must know your audience and how to alter their behaviors with the vast tools available to your Marketing Strategy. Just being there (Online) isn’t nearly enough. When Senior Leaders at your organization begin to see how your Online Strategy is affecting your overall Marketing efforts, only then can true adoption by the organization take place.

This is not easy. Make no mistake – this (again) is not easy. It takes a solid 6 months of planning, mapping, and research to begin to put this into action. Marketing leaders must know their audience first, by segment and persona’s, to fully know who and more importantly why, you will be talking to them – or you lose their attention faster than ever. Let’s start with Analysis of your audience:

If your salesforce is out there calling on whomever they want, you are already in trouble… This not only leads to problems for Revenue, Sales Cycle and Margin creep but over time, leads to RISK within your customer base (let me know if you need help on this one). dean@deanholmes.me Every organization has a core group of customers that make up 80% of their profits, however, the risk you will face in focusing on this segment only could be big. Let’s say that you are focused on four key industries, and the future “PEG” or Price to Earnings Growth for these industries are below 5%, you may face risk in revenue, profit and pricing pressures due to the cost-cutting measures the customer is forced to implement due to long-term growth. Another issue you will face is market share. By looking at industries that are outside the comfort zone for marketing and sales, you could be missing out on potential growth opportunities that working with industries that are growing over the long term.

Bottom line here: If you are not segmenting out your customers, and know who they are and more importantly, that you know them – get to this quickly. I have seen this with many organizations both in sales and marketing, that developed a strategy around problem audiences from the beginning only to ask themselves “why did we do that again”?

First Step: Perform Analytics of your current customers
Second Step: Profile the Risks within your customers industries
Third Step: Know where your best customers are on and off-line
Fourth Step: Talk to them, engage with them, in the manner they want, not what you think – but what you now “Know”

Take a look at Chris Brogan’s article here , or Jason Burby here and Tom Now here – and of course download the many help documents here. Also have a look at a good friend and colleague’s awesome tool to help you visualize where your customers are here – this tool works for sales and marketers for easy to use analytics.

Do you know who your customers really are? What issues do you face?

Talk to me by leaving comments or reaching out for help in knowing your audience.

Tagged as: Business, Chris Brogan, Customer base, Market segment, Market share, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Marketing strategy