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If you have been in business for a while, you’ve likely made discoveries about your industry, customers, and market. Hopefully, you’ve uncovered new opportunities and have a strong understanding of how to prosper and grow. Naturally, marketing plays a role in any growth plan. What follows are tools, especially market segmentation, you can begin using right away to make the most of your promotional efforts. A fundamental technique expert marketers use is to segment your market into groups based on interests and shared motivators. Broad segments like industry, income, and location are obvious. You can imagine how the messaging would be different for each of these, however, depending on the goal, these are too broad. The key is to address motivators of individuals that comprise each segment. The more specific the better. Before getting into specific examples, let’s explore another concept; positioning.
PositioningPositioning is the sales and marketing process/technique of matching interests, activities, lifestyle, personal goals, location, income and other attributes to the products and services individual consumers care about. Get started by asking questions. Business books teach you to ask, “who cares?” Let’s take that up a level by listing everything you sell, then asking the following for each product or service you offer. Who cares about this product or service? Why do they care? How much do they care? What problem does this product or service solve? Is this product or service the best solution on the market? Why? How much does the consumer care about this product or service? Why? What is the most important reason consumers want this product or service? What is the most important reason consumers would not want this product or service? How does this product or service make your consumer’s life better? Come up with as many questions as you can and answer them thoughtfully and completely. Try to build a profile and mental picture of individuals that share common motivators. The idea is to match the right consumer with whatever you sell. It can be tricky, but the ones that do care probably care a lot.
Imagine a leaky pipe. It is natural to assume someone with a leaky pipe needs a plumber. However, a different consumer might resolve the problem with a trip to the hardware store and fix the leak himself. It’s a problem with two very different solutions, which is why positioning is critical. If you are a plumber, it is important to position your service for the “call a plumber” group. Likewise, if you own a hardware store, it is pointless to market plumbing supplies to those that have no interest in fixing their own leaky pipes. As suggested, segmentation is the process of organizing consumers into similarly motivated groups. This allows you to position your products or services to the groups that are most likely to be interested, by matching your messaging with their goals. You can to this several ways. The most rudimentary would be to simply list them. Somewhat more advanced would be to use a spreadsheet. One challenge with these and similar solutions is they require manual action to keep up to date. A bigger problem is they make it difficult to work with more than one attribute at a time. Segments are typically built from several attributes (income, interests, special needs, etc.) that add up to form a complete consumer profile. The best tool for this is CRM (client relationship management) software.
You’re probably familiar with client relationship management (CRM). You might even use a CRM in your business. If not, CRM provides a means for storing customer/client information including simple stuff like contact information and purchase history, along with anything else you find relevant. However, storing information is just the beginning. Most CRMs provide tools to manage your sales pipeline, contact clients and colleagues, send emails and even automate tasks. CRM is a dream for managing customer/client segments. Usually, this is accomplished by creating groups by filtering attributes that are stored as fields. For example, you might know from experience that customers that purchase product X, frequently also purchase product Y. With a few keystrokes, your CRM will provide a list of customers that purchased product X, but did not purchase product Y. Now you have a segment for a future campaign to market product Y. Segmenting this way makes it possible to focus your message on those who will be most likely to make a purchase.
Once you have developed consumer segments, create personas to represent individuals in each segment. Personas serve as real people that have a reason to be interested in your services. They help you develop a relatable, personalized understanding of what motivates individual consumers to make buying decisions. This will be especially useful when deciding on the marketing mix and to develop messaging. Personas will help you avoid talking about yourself by focusing on the needs of individuals rather than you and what you sell. Imagine a friend coming to you for advice. The first thing you’re likely to do is listen and make sure you understand the problem or need. You’ll ask clarifying questions and think about similar experiences of your own or others before offering ideas.
Personas not only make your market segments human, they make you human. No one wants to be sold, but we all want to learn from someone we trust. Try to imagine how you will earn the role of trusted advisor to each of your personas. As mentioned, each persona represents a larger group of similarly motivated individuals, but be careful not to simply give your market segments names. Give them context, challenges, goals and even objections. Here is an example persona for a real company that arranges educational group travel for students. These support an effort to increase bookings for performance tours, like band festivals, parades, and other playing opportunities.
Bob the High School Band Director Bob is a 30-something band director in his 5th year teaching 9th through 12th grades. His predecessor had grown complacent in the years leading up to retirement and the band program was suffering. Bob’s first struggle was to reignite student interest in music. A decade of attrition and neglect had taken a toll on the program. He’s worked very hard to build an excellent program and wishes to reward students with opportunities to perform and compete outside their hometown. He has minimal support from school administrators but has successfully grown a network of active parents. He has never traveled with a band but would like to and is being approached by competing tour companies.
The reason this persona works is it provides context. Even though his persona is fictional, scores of high school band directors share the same motivators and challenges. Using Bob as the model, we can build a market segment that includes band directors that share similar attributes. This allows us to focus the marketing mix and messaging on the things these specific individuals care about. In Bob’s case, he also has an active group of supportive parents. It makes sense to build personas, messaging and a marketing mix aimed at garnering their support. Their motivators are related but their frame of reference (context) is not. To reach them, we need to address the needs and goals of parents, not band directors.
Market segmentation is not a new concept. Same with buyer personas. The challenge for most small business owners is limited time and budget constraints. However, taking time to define and address groups of customers as individuals can mean the difference between thriving and merely surviving. The good news is your competitors probably won’t put in the effort. Advantage: You.
CRM lead generation involves using a CRM (customer relationship manager) to nurture relationships between you and your leads (potential customers) and existing customers. With a CRM you can manage client or customer information for any size business with greater efficiency and autonomy. Using a CRM for lead generation means closing more deals, increasing sales, and improving real-time decision making and long-term forecasting.
Business owners who utilize CRM lead generation forever alter the effectiveness of their business. Did you know that sales staff only spend about 36.6% of their time actually selling? What if you could institute an intuitive and convenient system that would allow you or your salesperson to spend more time building relationships and closing deals? As a business, your most important asset is your customer or client. Without a CRM, the details regarding these individuals are spread amongst you, your marketing team, your sales force, your accountant etc. - in their brains, inboxes, and stacks of invoices. Centralizing, sorting, and filtering all customer and sales information is what a CRM does best. Proper CRMs like those from Hubspot allow you to manage relationships and sales funnels without fighting overly complicated spreadsheets and hours of data entry. Organization is effortless with a CRM - you can manage your sales funnel with total visibility. You can also see all of the details related to a lead in one place including notes, interactions, and touch points. This allows you to visualize and make sales forecasts.
A proper CRM centralizes and brings all of your customer information together in one place. This is the first step toward increasing the efficiency of your business. Instead of employees using multiple spreadsheets, binders or databases, they'll have all of the relevant information for any given customer right at their fingertips and in one place. A CRM does require you to enter customer data at some point, but there are ways that you can automate this process and how the information makes it into your CRM. Website contact forms are a prime example. Instead of manually recording interaction with an email every time a customer contacts you, you can feed their entries through a contact form to your CRM. The conversation then gets recorded and the sales process begins. From this point, anyone could go back, reference that conversation and seamlessly pick up the sales process.
If you're storing customer information in hard-copy books or binders you stand to lose that information or misrecord entries. One of the biggest benefits of a CRM is having the ability to organize, sort, segment, filter and apply conditions to all of this information. Not only is customer info stored and backed up within a CRM, but you now also have more advanced ways of interpreting it. CRMs really derive their power from these advanced filters and conditions. These allow you or any other user the ability to group contacts and customers into any type of segment. When you group customers into segments, you can then specialize the interactions or messaging to suit that grouping. Before a lead becomes a customer there's often a lot of nurturing that takes place. You want to make sure that your sales staff knows who's ready to buy. They also need to know and what type of messaging they need to deliver to close the deal.
You need a CRM if multiple employees interact with a contact or lead before the sale or deal actually occurs. If there are multiple points of contact, each person needs to know what communication the lead last received. Keeping track of multiple conversations in multiple places at multiple times increases your chances of closing more deals. Because a CRM provides a single access point for all customer details. You'll always know exactly where a lead is at in their journey to becoming a buyer. Everyone on your team will know which leads need more nurturing, communication or information and which leads are ready to buy.
You need a CRM if you want to automate some of the repetitive interactions that take place between you and your customer. By automating the more repetitive and mundane aspects of your business, you stand to save time and money and reduce overall labor. Here are just a few things you can automate with a CRM:
Analyzing trends is critical to your business's future growth and development. The problem is having the right information displayed to you in the right way. Without this, you can't see the trends. With a CRM all of your information for customers and sales is in one, highly filtered and organizable space. With all of this customer and sales info, you can now apply filters to make interpretations and predictions. For instance, knowing a customers lifetime value (LTV) is crucial. This allows you to understand how their repeated business factors into your bottom line and total ROI. Using a CRM means that you have a historical view of all existing and future customers.
If you're still not convinced that CRM lead generation is right for your business, you may be right. A CRM is not perfect for everyone. It's intended for those who are interested in scaling up their business by managing information, spotting trends and making decisions that benefit their future. Talk to us if you're unsure about a CRM and how it can help you. We can assess your needs and steer you in the right direction. As part of our commitment to our clients, we provide each with a CRM regardless.
