Marketing

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11 Ways to Attract and Retain Your Ideal Customer

If your attempts to grow your business have met with sluggish results even though you have got the other result areas that are presented in this Business Growth Series in place – it’s almost certainly your MARKETING TACTICS that are holding you back and restricting you to lackluster results.

Let’s look at some of these tactics now.

Quite simply we can separate marketing tactics into two camps; “Front-End“ and “Back-End”.

You can think of “Front-End” as the first sale; the pipeline that brings new customers into the business. The “Back-End” is the product (or hopefully the series of products and services) that you sell to your customers after they have purchased your initial offering.

The question to ask now is what tactics you should use in each area? And here they are:

Clearly front-end marketing is vital for your long term business success. This is why it’s so important to inject the power of marketing into your business so that you can increase the number of customers that come to your business as a continuous flow…

I said previously that people buy for emotional needs and those emotional needs are never fulfilled. Your role as a marketer or as the business owner is to continue to exploit those needs because it’s the emotional void that creates the desire to buy that never gets fulfilled by the purchase of the product or service. Therefore, in order to do your job right, you need to have multiple products and premium offers on offer throughout the length of your pipeline – or at the back-end.

You’ll always make more money from back-end offers than from front-end ones. They offer a much higher conversion rate, they usually sell for more money and you can make a bigger percentage on the profits on them too. And it’s always easier to sell to a customer than a prospect.

But remember the long term; you must have customers coming into the business. You can’t just rely on your loyal customers. By the way, if you have competition then you can bet that most are competing at the front-end and trying to attack your front-end offers with their own so as to eventually weaken and erode the strength of your own USPs and offers.

The question I have for you is this; are you doing any type of marketing whatsoever, and if you are where is the focus of your efforts?

Every week new companies emerge selling their products and services, whatever the type of business. And there are also many successful companies out there looking to expand their businesses. Competition, both good and bad is rife!

So how can marketing help? Can you answer that one?

Simply stated the first rule of marketing is causing the market to desire your product. Peter Drucker puts it another way when he said that;

“… the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

In short both definitions add up to the same thing; marketing that attracts customers may be described as power marketing.

People have got tired of leaflets, flyers and sales letters. The reason why some product launches are successful is that the people managing them actually marketed them. Business owners that know about marketing try to find out the emotion that makes people want to buy – they realise that people just don’t buy products or services they buy solutions or benefits that will help them achieve a gain or reduce a problem.

So an early imperative is to find the market first by finding out what people want, and then…to let them buy what they’ve told you they want!

A ‘HUNGRY CROWD’ is an interesting and relevant concept in the context of finding a niche within a market…

At the end of the day a ‘HUNGRY CROWD’ – is a group of people, increasing in number, that really, really want what you have to offer – badly. It’s this that is going to guarantee the success of your business!

The point of all this is to urge you to start to concentrate on spotting your ‘HUNGRY CROWD’. Listen to what people ask for, dream or complain about. It’s not enough for you to sell to people who CAN benefit from what you sell; you need to market to people who WANT to benefit from the SOLUTION you offer. In fact you’ve got to find people who will CLAMOUR for your product, so that sales and marketing becomes a lot easier…

A related point is this. Once people have tried and accepted the benefit you offer, they will come back to you again and again seeking further products and services from you that meet and satisfy their emotionional needs – the fundamental reason for buying from you in the first place.