How to create a persona that will deliver sales

How to create a persona that will deliver sales

Jul 6, 2016 | Branding, Customers, Marketing

Three key questions all marketers (should) ask themselves at some early point in marketing program development, and obviously have a great answer, are:

Who are we talking to?

Why should they listen to us?

What do we want them to do now?

These are the exact questions that  a well-crafted persona can help answer.

It will help you make good decisions about the content you create, and the channels you use to communicate to those who are most important to your success.

A persona is a composite picture of someone who incorporates  of all the behavioural and personal characteristics of your ideal customer. You can take it to the extent of being ‘hyper-personal’ and in some circumstances such as the sale of a very expensive, luxury car, that may be an effort well worth making, but in others, it may exclude many who may have minor variations, inconsequential to the purchase decision.

I have used the ‘Who, What, Where, Why’ model extensively to define the ideal customer with my clients. It is an iterative process, deceptively demanding, as it requires decisions about who is not an ideal customer, and therefore excluded from primary consideration.

Most small and medium businesses really struggle with this exclusion. It does not mean you do not sell to them if they walk in with money in their hand, but it does mean that you do not expend limited marketing resources trying to convert them, as there are better returns for your marketing dollar elsewhere.

Who: is the demographics they may exhibit. Where they live, age, sex, education, job, and all the other quantitative characteristics that are available. These parameters are all that was available until digital tools came along.

How to create a customer persona

Customer persona

What: are their behaviours. Do they go to the opera or rock concerts, perhaps both, do they travel overseas for holidays, what sort of causes, if any, do they support, are they likely to demonstrate their beliefs publicly, or are they just internal. All the sorts of things that offer a picture of how they think, feel, and behave in all sorts of situations.

Where: will you  find them digitally, as well as in the analogue (perhaps real) world, and what means can you use to make a connection. Are they likely to be avid users of Facebook, Linkedin or other social platforms, are they comfortable buying on line, do they ‘showroom’ digitally then visit the physical retailer, do they get their news from facebook and Reddit, or more focussed news sites, or even, surprise, surprise, newspapers.

Why: should they respond to your entreaties, to do whatever it is you are asking of them. Normally it will be something that will alter or manage their behaviour in some way. In every commercial case, this will end up being persuading them to buy from you, and certainly from you in preference to an alternative.  Interim steps may be to get some sort of conversion on the way to a sale, download a brochure, visit a location, whatever it is you are asking them to do.

Having built something of a picture, from the Who What Where Why method, it often leaves you well short of a complete picture that will determine the sort of material required, and the best means to communicate it. In any event, the process is iterative, and every step helps, and every misstep teaches you something.

An essential adjunct to the creation of a persona is to create a customer journey map. This is the process that your ideal customer will go through from the initial itch, to awareness, consideration, preference, then to the transaction. This will enable you to use the persona to inject yourself into the decision making and buying process a customer is going through to optimise your chances of success.

Identify. A potential customer only comes into the market when they see a need to be addressed, or a problem to be solved. In some way, the first stirrings that lead to them recognising that there is a need to do something, which may involve a purchase at some point, will start the process that leads to the transaction.

how customers arrive at a decision

Customer journey

Research. These days almost everyone goes to Mr Google as a first step in research for anything beyond the most mundane and regular purchase. Often the purchase decision is made before potential suppliers know a buyer is in the market, but it is in this research phase that canny marketers who understand the profile of their ideal customers have the opportunity to seed the sort of information that will get them onto the buyers short list, at least.

Evaluate. Emerging customers will evaluate the alternatives on all sorts of parameters important to them. Performance, delivery, style, price, after sales service, brand reputation, what their neighbours might think, and many others. It is this point where the parameters of the problem to be solved  becomes increasingly important as the customer removes options from the ‘possibles’ list to come up with a choice. It is also this point where the purchase decision still often moves off line. Not many people buy a new car on line without going to a dealer to drive it, or a shop to try on the new evening wear.

Buy. The transaction, now a tiny part of the whole customer journey, but still where the cash to pay the bills is generated.

Use. For many purchases, the transaction is only the beginning of a following process that seeks to ensure that the product meets or better, exceeds the expectation that led to its purchase, thus creating loyalty. Loyalty can be expresses as a willingness to recommend your product to others, the strongest marketing tool there is. When the product delivers less than the expectation, the purchase process is re-started the next time, and even worse, the poor experience is spread.

There is nothing routine or easy about all this, it is a journey for both the buyer and the seller. The sellers job is to find the ways to get into the buyers head as early as possible in the process, and better yet, assist the buyer to define the parameters against which the alternatives will be evaluated. This in not always possible in B2C markets, but in B2B marketing, being able to influence at an early stage is a crucial competitive tool.

The combination of a clear persona and therefore a definable market niche to which you are able to deliver a differentiated and valuable product is the foundation of commercial success.

 

Is the net killing marketing creativity?

Is the net killing marketing creativity?

Jul 1, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

There is just so much stuff around on the net, everything and anything you ever wanted to know, or could think of to ask, is there somewhere.

The availability is removing the necessity to think, to capture the essence of a problem, and then develop creative  solutions and the means to communicate.

Too often the list driven, by the digital book solution, is the only strategy considered.

This blog is no different, when I do a list post with an attractive hook in the headline, views spike. It is a seductive outcome to write a post and double the average number of views.

Marketing has always been about people, with all the vagaries that apply when  you deal with people and their idiosyncrasies.

The people who did marketing well were those able to connect the dots in some way that added value to others. It is essentially a creative skill. Not in the sense of being able to create a drawing, but much broader than that, being able to see things that others cannot.

Then along came the web, and the ‘quick fix’ world we live in, a world of instant gratification, where lists rate very highly, because they meet the need.

But what about the thought process, the creativity??

What about strategy that connects people with unique solutions to their problems?

What about the stories that make things memorable and repeatable?

As I get older, it becomes increasingly obvious that the foundations of marketing, the delivery of value to someone who is prepared to pay for it more than it costs for you to deliver it, are unchanged.

I suspect they are unchanged since Babylon was being built.

How do we come back at this?

How do we ensure that marketing has the depth of thought necessary to truly make a difference?

These days I joke that to get a marketing degree you just need to have a pulse. This is proving to be unfortunately true the more I see the quality of those degree qualified automatons around now, inhabiting businesses and being supposedly in charge of a businesses greatest asset, its brand.

Why was Mad Men was a great TV series?

Not just because it was entertaining, and told stories, but because it was able, for some of us, to tweak a nerve so deep in our psyches that almost hurts. Don Drapers pitch to Kodak, the throwing out of a brief that spoke about the technology, and replacing it with one that spoke to peoples hearts is a classic.

Would that have been possible if Don was following a list?? Beware the siren song of marketing by lists, they can lead you onto the rocks.

The 2 faces of a brand

The 2 faces of a brand

Jun 15, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Strategy

Marketing and management generally, regularly find themselves actively promoting their branding credentials.

Often they would appear to have no idea beyond the mouthing of clichés why they are bothering.

The costs of building, maintaining and updating a brand is often a major item on the  P&L, and there is much written about the techniques and strategies that deliver a return. However, the core question of ‘Why bother” rarely gets a mention.

Until now.

A brand has two faces:

  1. For the brand owner, a successful brand delivers to its owner a stream of revenue and margin. There is no other reason for the investment necessary for building and maintaining a brand to be made.
  2.  To the customer, a brand offers some level of assurance about the performance, integrity, longevity,  and many other characteristics which to them are important. In other words, the value delivered by the brand, weather that be one defined by the physical performance and characteristics, or the emotional  dimensions of the brand.

“Branding” seems pretty simple, and in principal it is, but the optimisation of the investments made over the long term is the tricky part. This requires expertise and experence pretty hard to find in these days of instant digital gratification.

 

7 thoughts on FMCG brand building by small suppliers

7 thoughts on FMCG brand building by small suppliers

May 13, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, retail

Competing in FMCG against the duopoly, rapidly becoming the ‘Triopoly’ as Aldi makes share inroads is not easy, never was. However, the optimist in me sees opportunities that few are leveraging, so set in ‘process concrete’ is the status quo.

The driver of the great change can be summed up in one word:

Digital.

It is the enabler of all the changes that are occurring before our eyes if we choose to see them, and the change has just started. Following is a list of the things I see evolving

Two way conversations with consumers.

Brands can now have a direct and two way dialogue with consumers. Digital technology is the enabler of a personalised dialogue across a variety of platforms and subjects. This new found ability has the promise of breaking the iron grip the retailers have over packaged goods sales. The flip side is that there are so many people and brands competing for the limited attention of consumers that it is increasingly hard to break through, and we marketers are kidding ourselves if we believe that consumers are as engaged, indeed, passionate about our brands as we are. The reality is FMCG brands are more a comfortable habit that removes another decision from our lives than something that consumers are waiting to hear from. Pewdiepie has well over 43.3 million Youtube subscribers, the largest number, and few over 35 have heard of them, a couple of blokes who make cheap satirical videos of gaming. Coca Cola, one of the leviathan of branded packaged goods, spends hundreds of $millions around the world on  digital content creation and distribution, has been one of the biggest brand advertisers for the last 50 years, and currently has (as of today April 15 2016) has 759,411 subscribers. If Coke cannot do it, why should you think you can? Are you the new Pewdiepie?

Engagement and awareness is earned.

In the ‘old days’ awareness was paid for by media advertising, the bloke with the fattest wallet won. Those days are well and truly over. As noted, Coke spends a fortune, but the level of engagement is not in the ballpark of someone who earns it by being relevant and interesting to a niche market, albeit now  being a niche that is more like a crevasse.

Availability of behavioural data.

Scan data that all grocery retailers now collect offers a huge depth and variety of data related to purchasing behaviour. Time of day, makeup of the basket, price sensitivity and elasticity,  competitive impacts, and much more. When combined with the loyalty card data giving demographic and individual behavioural data, this is a deep and rich marketing resource. Increasingly this data will be combined with so called ‘big data’ scraped’ from social platforms, and real time geo location data, we will be deluged with offers exquisitely tailored to us.

Consumer feedback feeds NPD & C.

Market research has always been a vital component of product development and commercialisation, irrespective if the development is an evolution of a pack design or a category creating innovation. The research was flimsy at best, and the investments needed to bring new products to market where the failure rate has always been closer to 99% than 90%, significant. That also has changed. We are now able to test new products in newly available digital channels and collect data almost in real time, using it to inform ongoing development.

Point of sale.

Point of sale has always been important. I am old enough to remember excitement around a sales meeting induced by a fancy new shelf wobbler! The opportunities at POS for things as diverse as MVS code driven interaction, interactive video, as well as the more usual promotional stunts are considerable.

Be a publisher.

The supermarket business  model is under considerable stress,  and the number of suppliers has become way smaller, and they seem to be starting to realise you cannot buy a brand, you have to earn it. In the old days, if you  had enough money, you could almost buy a brand, as there were just a few TV & radio stations, and a few newspapers and magazines, all owned by a few people. Nobody else had the means to communicate beyond one to one.

Then along came the big bad internet and blew it all away. Now anyone can publish, and if they are good enough, reach and interact with their consumers.

Focus on your strategy, not theirs.

If your strategy centres on building a brand, do not waste your time and resources working with a retailer that does not have proprietary branding as part of their strategy. A former client took on a contract to pack for Aldi. The margin was very slim, but the volumes significant , so the contract appeared to be a good way of covering overheads to enable brand building activity elsewhere. As it evolved, the management and operational demands of meeting the Aldi orders overwhelmed the operational capacity of my client, consuming all their resources, and preventing any of the proprietary development it was supposed to enable. This comment applies equally to the two gorillas as it does to Aldi. Allowing your strategic implementation to be driven by the volume power of a single or even small number of customers will have a sticky end.

The supermarkets have huge amounts of capital invested in their existing business model, physical assets, efficient supply chains, and high volumes delivering dollar margins. It has made them  really successful, so the tendency is naturally to do more of the same, just try and do it a bit better. Even Coles in its worst days before the Westfarmers purchase was doing OK by world retailing standards, and Woollies was killing it.

 

The world had changed, the retailer model has not changed as much.

Now supermarkets are open 7 days, often 24 hours, and with a bit of organisation  shopping is slowly evolving back into a partially social event, replacing the mass convenience. Just look at the number of farmers markets now open! Mass market is no longer the panacea of the masses, they want more. Value is  no longer measured purely by price and availability, the brand is about to make a comeback.

Never has the opportunity been greater for agile and committed medium sized businesses to engage with the group of potential customers who care about what they do, and build a brand that delivers longevity.

Is the supermarket model being disrupted, and nobody is noticing?

Is the supermarket model being disrupted, and nobody is noticing?

May 11, 2016 | Branding, Governance, Leadership, retail, Small business

Business models are being disrupted all over the place.

The new centre of business models has become the customer, and the way they perceive and receive value. It was supposed to be this way in the pre-digital days, but really  was not, because the sellers held all the cards. Now however, the power has really reverted to where it should be, to those who drive the value chain by their purchase choices.

AirBnB has become the biggest single retailer of short term lodging on the planet, and they do not own a room, Uber is the biggest taxi service on the planet, and does not own a car, newspapers have been replaced as sources of news. There are many examples, and all are of business models that have arrived in the last few years with a common theme.

They have replaced the linear, sequential business models of the past, where there was always a choke point dependent on physical infrastructure that exerted control, with a model where the physical  infrastructure is simply a logistical resource to be deployed to deliver a service, the real product is information.

Information on availability, product provenance, performance, and many other factors of value to customers, including, you guessed it, price.

It is a two sided model, enabled by technology that is making the logistical control of the infrastructure redundant in the face of consumers having information at their fingertips. The competitive advantage has moved from the physical infrastructure to between the ears of employees and consumers equally.

Employees create and deliver the information that enables consumers to make decisions, which then dictate the physical logistics driven by those decisions.

Meanwhile,  the supermarket  retailer model has not changed  much.

They have huge amounts of capital invested in real estate and physical assets, it has made them  really successful, so the tendency is naturally to do more of the same, just try and do it a bit better.

They have chased, very successfully, productivity of  the assets, a financial measure of success not a sustainable measure of success with customers. As a result they are losing their customers to discounters, specialist retailers, and various direct models that offer an alternative value proposition.

It seems to me that Woolies have walked away from, or simply not understood this evolution of their business model.

Their Everyday rewards loyalty card was gathering momentum, building a picture of their customer base and their individual behaviour, critical information that would over time deliver a capacity to engage on a highly individualised basis. However, it was clearly costing a bit, so they took the short term route, and reduced the cost to them, and therefore value to their customers, gave it a new name and sat back thinking consumers would not notice.

They did, and nobody came.

Woolworths took a short term financial decision that has apparently bitten them in the bum. A bit like the ones they took that killed off Thomas Dux, and led them to misunderstand the market when they bet the back paddock on Masters. Pretty clearly someone in the top floor of the majestic head office out in the hills, can read a spreadsheet, but probably does not know what goes on inside customers heads when they are contemplating a purchase, and making a choice about the manner in which that purchase will be made.

Perhaps new CEO Brad Banducci will claw back some of the customer centric culture that gave Woolworths the wood on Coles for so long, but he better move quickly, as the momentum has shifted against them, and it will be hard to regain.

 

How to build a brand with little money

How to build a brand with little money

May 3, 2016 | Branding, Marketing, Small business

Following is an edited version of a presentation given to a group of owners of small businesses struggling with the challenges of building a brand on very limited budgets in competitive markets. This is a challenge most of my readers can relate to. It is not easy, but it can be done.

Let me know what you think.

 

brand building30 years ago I found myself marketing manager of a newly formed division of Dairy Farmers, the By-Products division, which we quickly renamed General Products, for obvious reasons. It manufactured all the products that used milk as the ingredient, but was unregulated, unlike the stuff you put on your corn flakes in the morning which was highly regulated.

It was a commercial disaster, an absolute financial basket case, and as a young bloke who had come off a pretty good run over the previous 10 years, I truly wondered what I had got myself into.

It was a nasty surprise.

The second nasty surprise was Ski yoghurt, one of the ‘gems’ of the business, and a key part of the marketing role I had taken.

Sales data, such as it was showed considerable growth for several years, However, when I looked at the market data, market share had gone from 30% or thereabouts to single figures.

Yoplait had launched into the market. New packaging format, great launch offer, 2 for 1, good advertising, and the market had exploded, leaving Ski sinking in its wake, and few at Dairy Farmers had woken up.

I started some market research to find a way through, although the Advertising budgets had been slashed when I pointed out just how bad the financial situation was. (Nobody had ever done a trading Profit & Loss on the division before. Unbelievable)

Something happened in one of the groups that caused the light bulb to go off, and I truly understood for the first time what a brand  really was.

The researcher asked the respondents in a group while I was behind the one way glass, to imagine Yoplait as a person, and that person was walking through the door: describe the person.

This question is now almost always asked, but 30 years ago, it was a relatively new idea.

Yoplait was young, hip, female, successful, educated, world at her feet. A picture most in the room could aspire to.

Ski was a 55 year old male farmer in wellies. Trustworthy, serious, reliable, but oh so boring.

My marketing problem with Ski was clear.

 

What is a brand.

 

what is a brandAt its core, a brand is something that someone cares about, and relates to, it has human dimensions.

It will never be something that everyone cares about, no brand can be all things to all people, so you have to identify those  few who will care. Then appeal to their hearts more than their minds, add value to them in some way, be very personal.

 

Coca Cola, around for 125 years, is instantly recognisable, sold everywhere, billions and billions have been spent over a long period to build the brand. There are lots of brand value list created, and Coke is almost always in the top 5 brands in the world.

Forbes Magazine in 2015 values Coke at $56 billion, (US) on revenue of $23.1 billion, and advertising of $3.5 billion.

It is a huge brand, whose primary aim in their strategic plan is to “engage with consumers in their lives”

 

 

what is a brand 2But what about this second one??

Has anyone here heard of Felix Kjellberg? Or his business Pewdipie?

A Swedish gaming satirical commentary site, hardly even a product. If you have sons under 25 who play games online, ask them!

 

If we are too measure the success of a brand by the manner in which consumers engage, then it is reasonable to look at the number of YouTube subscriptions that brand has attracted. By definition, a subscriber is someone who has specifically signed up to be sent updates by the brand because they are engaged with the brand in some way.

April 21 2016, about midday when I looked, Coca Cola had 763,133 YouTube subscribers. Not bad I thought, till I looked at Pewdipie, who had 43,421,440 subscribers, roughly 57 times Coke. An astonishing difference when Coke has been spending billions over many years with a specific objective of ‘engaging consumers’ and Pewdipie has spent a few bob on dodgy youtube videos taken with their phones.

How did Felix do it??

Well, I do not know Felix, but I can make some pretty educated guesses, and that is what the rest of this will be about.

 

a brand isFor a supplier, a brand is a commercial vehicle, a way to deliver leverage by way of price, distribution, many other factors that may be of interest to customers.

For the customer it is a way of making the decision easier, offering reassurance of performance, certainty, it is a trusted friend, and there is some level of emotional investment, even if it is just a comfortable habit.

It is really easy for marketers to go off the rails here, to see a picture of an emotional attachment that simply does not exist, They see it through their eyes, not those of the consumer. The truth is that consumers see brands as things that solve problems for them, they have preferences, sometimes very strong and exclusive ones, but in the end, in the case of consumers products like yoghurt, it is just yoghurt, not a cure for cancer, and it is not going to change the world.

The sweet spot is in the overlap between the commercial and consumer view of a brand, the  Value Proposition of the brand.

 

 

3 word summaryThese 3 words,  Leverage, Niche, and Persona are the guts of how you build a brand on a little money.

They are mutually dependent, mutually reinforcing,  and 2 out of 3 is not good enough.

 

This has always been the case in marketing, we have always talked about and tried to execute on a ‘target market’ but the tools until a very few years ago were crude, too crude to be anything other than marginally useful on a small budget.

This has changed.

We can now target with great precision using digital tools, with the resulting huge increase in the productivity of  the effort.

 

LeverageFirstly, Leverage.

Leverage is simply doing more with less.

As small business people we all know about those challenges.

We all know that face to face is the best advertising by far, when someone you know and trust recommends a brand, you are way more likely to take notice than if you hear or see an ad.

On one hand that personal recommendation delivers a lot of credibility, and leverage, but it is also very time and resource intensive, one on one costs a lot, but as noted, there are now a box full of tools to make the process possible.

When a brand is ‘remarkable’ it gets leverage from both dimensions, and a lot can be done with a little.

The tools of digital have made it easier, but the space is absolutely crowded, and people are very adept at filtering out stuff of no interest.

It does not matter how well you use the tools, if the product is not remarkable, the tools will not do you much good.

The reverse is also true, if the product is remarkable, but you do not use the tools, or use them poorly, or the wrong ones, progress will at best be slow.

In the old days, you could just stick it on the box and with enough money, buy awareness, and a sale, but that model is dead, dead, dead, which is why TV stations are all losing money.

 

remarkableRemarkable.

20 years ago a marketing thinker named Seth Godin coined the term ‘purple cow’, and it has become one of those universal phrases.

What makes your brand remarkable?

 

Remarkable has two roots:

It is different

It is something worth spreading.

Seth’s story. Driving along a country road, you see cows, lots of them, they are all the same, so you barely notice them, but if one cow was purple, you would notice, and remark, “look at that purple cow”!!

But if all cows were purple it would no longer be remarkable.

When you have seen a purple cow, and when you get to your destination, you would be telling everyone else about the purple cow you saw. An idea worth spreading.

Ask yourself, What is it about you and your product that is remarkable, and to whom is it remarkable.

Figure that out, and you have the opportunity to get the idea to spread,

 

martech toolsTools

This is a list of all the digital tools done earlier this year by Scott Brinker at chiefmartec.com.

Thousands of them, many more than  the same time last year.

Newspapers, TV, radio,  magazines, all the old media are also tools that deliver leverage.

Always did, still do.

Question is are there better ways?, and the answer for most small businesses is clearly yes!.

Small businesses do not have the resources for mass media leverage, but the digital revolution has levelled the playing field somewhat.

But the problem is deciding which ones to invest in, because it is not free!!

My advice, Stick to the simple ones, the ones that give you the most leverage. Find what works for you and double down while experimenting and learning.

 

websiteYour website

It is yours, you are the owner, the publisher, you make the rules, just like living in your own home

It is the marketing cornerstone for most small businesses.

 

 

facebookFacebook for B2C

Facebook has become an amazing monster.

Tame it, and it can be wonderful, but it lives to take your money, and is very good at it.

In effect, you can pay them to get reach, the fast way, or you can do it organically, the slow way.

The tools inside Facebook are amazing, and seductive in the extreme.

 

linkedinLinkedIn for B2B

LinkedIn is for professionals, Business to Business.

414 million users worldwide, 3.6 million in Australia (as of June 2015, so probably north of 4 mill by now) all professionals, no cat photos or Aunt fanny’s famous cake recipe.

 

4 million… Do you think there might be a few in that with whom you would like, and be able, to do some business?

how do you find the ones you need/want to speak to??

The advanced search function in LinkedIn, even in the free version offers many  ways to find a person or a business with whom you might want to start a conversation. It is amongst many tools that Linkedin provides to automate the lead generation process.

 

youtubeYouTube.

You can try and do a Pewdipie, although getting such a result again is unlikely, but you can learn from modelling what they have done. .

This is a screenshot of their current landing page on YouTube. Nothing too fancy there, but it works, really works!

 

emailEmail.

Last of the vital tools, but not least in any way is email.

Email is a digital metaphor for that chat over the back fence. It carries great potential for credibility.

To get email right, there are some tools you need, but the fundamental skill is a very old fashioned one:

Copywriting.

Go into your local newsagent, and look at the magazines on the rack, they are still surviving.

They have very specific target markets,

The front cover headlines entice you to open to page 6 to read the story, and the first thing you see is a second headline, that drags you into the story a little deeper, leading you to the checkout.

If you happen to be thinking about how to write a headline, and you got this in an email, would you open it????

Of course you would.

The challenge is to get it to you as you are thinking about copywriting

You don’t have their email??

There are a million ways to get an email address, including several free tools that do work, and the key task is to build a list of those who are willing to receive your communications.

Then there are a few ‘must haves’ to maximise the opening rate and actions taken as a result of your email.

It must be personal. Specifically targeted at them in some way

It does not sell  but does offer advice and assistance

It does have a call to action, something you want them to do as a result of reading the email.

 

 

nicheSecondly, Identify your niche.

We are no longer constrained by geography,

We no longer need to rely on snail mail and having someone’s telephone number.

 

My point is that if you can find a narrow, but deep niche, to whom you add great value, those at the bottom of the niche will love you, and it will be too dark and scary for the big guys to attack, and defensible if they do.

I bet if you wanted to form a group of left handed Lesbian lumberjacks, you could find enough of them to form a ‘community’ in fact, they are probably desperate to find some others who understand them, and would join such a community in a flash.

A couple of examples of small businesses carving out a niche.

http://au.whogivesacrap.org/ revolutionising bog paper

www. au.dollarshaveclub.com revolutionising the purchase of shavers

Both are niches that are deep and narrow, and they have first mover advantages that will make them very hard to move.

 

personaThirdly, the persona of your ideal customer.

Developing a persona of your ideal customer requires that you make choices.

It is as much about what you will not do, as it is about what you will do.

 

It is usually very hard for an SME not to chase every so called opportunity as it emerges, but when you are small, focus is essential.

Let me just make 2 more points quickly before I finish.

 

creativityWe are all familiar with the term “Guerrilla Marketing”.

It is a way of building leverage, but requires creativity, and an ability to see beyond the normal, be prepared to take a punt.

You do not need money to be creative, and when you are, it is a key component of remarkable

 

 

customer journeyYour customers journey. For every purchase, no matter how small and insignificant, Something triggers the research seeking a solution to a problem, to fill a need, even if that is something as simple as which yoghurt to buy today..

Each journey starts with an evaluation, sometimes with a few  brands or suppliers in mind. During the evaluation, new brands may come under consideration, some drop out, for a host of reasons, and understanding these reasons is a great way of being able too present information that addresses them for an ideal customer, deep down in a niche.

You have the opportunity at this point, before the decision is made, to shift and influence their thinking.

Customer journeys all have a flow, understand them

As a visual metaphor, look at your google analytics flow from your website, see how the customers go from pages to page, how long they stay, what they do.

If you apply this idea to the whole customer journey, not just on your website, you will see points that you can engage, intervene, make it easier to present them with information and  opportunities.

The task is to understand the journey, then you can engage at various points, and find ways to shape the journey. As the world has changed, so too have the customer journeys.

Technology has changed forever the journey as customers now do their own research before you know they are in the market. Unlike in the past, when the seller had the information the customers needed to make a decision, and therefore the power, the customer is absolutely now in charge.

As a final word, building a brand on a little money can be done.

It is not easy, if it was, everybody would be doing it,  but it can be done.