Target Market
(Psychological and Physical Descriptions)
The first item that I like to address in a simple marketing
plan is the psychological characteristics of your target market. The
psychological characteristics tend to center on the thoughts, needs, mindset,
and feelings of the chief decision maker at your target client. If the chief
decision maker feels overwhelmed with running a business, they may need someone
to help them with a business plan and time management. If the chief decision
maker fears a risk related to their business, they may need someone to help
them mitigate or eliminate the risk. If the chief decision maker wants to
rapidly grow their business, they may need someone to help them with sales,
marketing, and business development. In each case, the thoughts, needs,
mindset, and feelings of the chief decision maker are driving the purchasing
habits of the business. To establish a psychological profile for your target
market, it is generally best to solicit advice and input from your current
clients on why they work with you. If your business is new, you will have to
perform market research to your establish why your target decision makers will
want to work with you. This is also sometimes referred to in the sales genre as
your target market’s problems or pain points. If you understand what ails your
typical client, you can align your messaging as a solution to their problems or
pain points. This will be discussed in fuller detail below.
The second item that I like to address in a simple marketing
plan is the tangible characteristics of your target market. The tangible
characteristics include the level of sales, the number of employees, the lines
of revenue, and the ownership structure. The tangible characteristics of your
target market help define your target market in a way that allows you to target
your marketing efforts more efficiently. If you work with businesses with less
than 5M in revenue and less than twenty employees, you are not going to waste
any of your marketing energies on multi-national corporations. If you work with
multi-national corporations, you are not going to waste your marketing energies
on closely held businesses. In each case, the physical characteristics of your
ideal client help define the pool of prospects that should be targeted with
marketing resources.
Messaging
The third item that I like to address in a simple marketing
plan is the messaging that I am going to convey to existing customers, new
prospects, and strategic partners. To build a compelling marketing message, it
is generally best to tie the messaging to your methodology for meeting the
chief decision makers’ psychological needs. If the chief decision maker wants to
rapidly grow their business to build a more affluent lifestyle, it is best to
focus on how your product or service will help increase revenues or reduce
costs and achieve the stated goal of a more affluence. If the chief decision
maker wants to protect the value of their business, it is best to focus on how
your product or service will help mitigate or eliminate the risk to protect the
value. With respect to most consulting businesses, the goal will generally be
to increase sales, reduce costs, or reduce risk to achieve a demonstrated rate
of return on the decision makers’ investment with respect to the value of the
business. For example, more sales, if serviced or produced efficiently, will
generally result in more profit and more business value.
Channels
The fourth item that I like to address in a simple marketing
plan is the channels that are going to be used to convey your message. Your
choices include, but are not limited to, direct contact with prospects in your
target market, networking with strategic partners that work in the same target
market as you, writing articles that directly speak to the pains and problems
of your target market, and public speaking to members of your target market or
your pool of strategic partners. Writing and communication with your target may
also take the form of blogs that directly speak to your target audience and
strategic partners or social media posts that speak to your target audience and
strategic partners. If you want the messaging within each channel to be
persuasive, you should seek to provide value with each communication. Value
will often take the form of providing the target prospect with information that
they can apply to their business to create immediate value. In terms of the
hierarchy of the various channels, direct contact is generally the most
effective method because it allows you to directly communicate with the target
prospect without any middle person. Networking is generally the next most
effective method because the act of the referral can help build the know, like,
and trust factor before any initial communications commence. Writing and
speaking are generally next in the hierarchy and each will be more successful
if you are directly communicating with decision makers.
Metrics
The fifth item that I like to address in a simple marketing
plan is the establishment of metrics. This is just a fancy way of saying that
you should track where your prospects, clients, and referrals come from so that
you can focus more time on the most effective resources. If you find that
direct contact with clients is the most successful channel for you, you want to
analyze how you compiled your prospect list, how you successfully moved the
prospect down the value funnel, and how you ultimately closed the sale. If you
find that 90% of your business comes from referrals (there is a heavy need to
establish know, like, and trust up front), you want to analyze who is referring
business to you, how you can find more of your ideal strategic partners, and
how you can continue to provide value to your best referral partners.
Conclusion
The primary goal of this post is to help business owners
develop a simple marketing plan that they can implement in their business in a
short period of time. As the business becomes more complex, there may be
additional items that need to be considered. But, this outline provides you
with the basic elements of an effective marketing structure. If you would like
to discuss how you can incorporate these principles into your business, please
email me at bkerrigan@whcpa.com
or call me at 774-306-6135.
Brian Kerrigan
