New Jersey Enterpreneur - Small Business, Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital

Sometimes, marketeers like me say what seems to be overtly obvious: You need to know your buyer before you can effectively advertise your business.

The thinking is simple. If you don’t know who your ideal target customer is … how can you sell your product to that person? The cyclical question starts to sound like Pink Floyd asking "If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have your pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?"

The short answer is that you can’t. You can’t effectively market your product or service if you don’t know your customer.

I’m talking about really knowing and understanding the person you’re trying to reach with an advertising campaign. The knee-jerk reaction is to get defensive. Of course you know your customer. You wouldn’t have gotten where you are without that knowledge. Yet in a world where many entrepreneurs take on the role of chief marketing officer as well as CFO, CIO and CEO, it gets tougher and tougher to spend the time to truly know who would want your product or service, let alone why.

Experience shows you can improve the effectiveness of your promotions and marketing strategy when you spend time to really know the buyer. Get to know your customer on a deeper level than lumping buyers into categories such as males, aged 40 to 50 with children. Invest your time to really know them. The insight you gain will make your marketing efforts easier and more strategic.

Knowledge Changes Your View

You work smarter with deep insight. Once you know more about your customers, you can adjust your creative approach. You may revise the copy and design to reflect any number of buyer traits. You may bring in different images and focus on alternate benefits.

Here’s an example. According to a Good Housekeeping and J.D. Power and Associates survey, women influence 59 percent of all car purchases, yet "very few manufacturers are specifically targeting female customers." Last year, one manufacturer aggressively reached those decision makers and developed a campaign that helped get soccer moms out of minivans and into SUVs. By focusing on the real buyer, the marketing team developed a campaign for its SUV and a feature that included a retractable running board step. The engineering was simple. A small step extended when the door opened and retracted when it closed. It mattered to the real buyers because women – especially those in skirts and dressers – had an easier time getting into a large SUV.

Here’s the point. If the ad had been developed simply to reach families, this distinguishing benefit would not have been a unique selling point. Instead, it separated this SUV from the pack.

The challenge is to ask deep, penetrating questions about the target buyer. You want to know who this person is. Why would she buy the product? Ask what is her age, ethnicity, income level, educational experience, family status, comfort with technology and dozens of other questions that truly define the person you want to relate to. Each question leads to answers that impact your creative decisions and the effectiveness of your ads.

How Do You Know?

Getting to know your customer is not that hard. All you have to do is ask. After all, people love to talk about themselves. Some ways to gather customer intelligence include:

1. Survey customers and include demographic options
2. Observe how people shop in your store and use your products and services
3. Create a feedback section on your Web site
4. Encourage two-way dialogues with your customers
5. Interview customers

The bottom line is what matters most in your business. So here’s the bottom line of knowing your customer better. You’ll find more customers. It makes it easier to target new customers when you know what the existing ones look like. What they prefer. What they dislike. How they think and live. What they read, watch and surf. What else they may want. What problems they see with your product or service. All these factors come together to help you understand thoroughly what you want in your next customer.

With a clear profile of your best customers, your advertising can be more specific, more targeted and more effective.

Know your best customer and your ideal prospects will better know you.

Roger A. Shapiro is the president/creative director of Mitchell Rose, LLC. He founded the full-service creative consultancy in 1997 to help clients improve the results they get from their marketing budgets. During the ensuing decade, Mitchell Rose has helped many clients achieve business goals through the strategic use of concepts, copy and design. In addition, Roger has authored a book on copywriting, "Write Right, 26 Tips to Improve Your Writing. Dramatically," and speaks often on marketing strategy and creative approaches that achieve results. To learn more about Mitchell Rose’s results-based creative, please contact Roger by e-mail at RogerShapiro@MitchellRose.net or by phone at 609-434-0030.