INNERGISE!

In my previous buisiness, we had three types of customer – Miranda, Emma & Joanne.

In the retail trade, determining the profile of your customer is about the most powerful marketing trick to learn. For a while now I have been reviewing the performance of a wide range of businesses outside the retail sector, and it has struck me that there is a lot for them to learn from retail.

When I started my retail business, we had no idea who our customer was, so we had to find out. We had a rough idea who they were so we rented a database of names and sent out 15,000 catalogues. Some of them bought from us. The lessons we learnt from that activity we used to adapt our strategy and we fine tuned the next mailing plan. And so it went on until 6 years later we became the market leader in our sector and the predominant brand to beat.

Since then, I have recruited my replacement and left my partners to it and joined Innergy. I now work with a wide variety of clients from lawyers to engineers, from accountants to high tech businesses. In every case, there seems to be a lack of clarity in defining who their client is.

As we developed our marketing strategy in my retail business, we got to the stage of profiling our clients in detail and even giving them names:

• Miranda was the investment bankers wife, with more money than sense, and bought the whole lot.
• Emma was privately schooled, drove around in a beaten up Volvo with 3 kids and cared about quality without worrying about brand.
• Joanne lived in a 3 or 4 bedroom executive home in Reading with twin BMW’s in the drive way, read the Daily Mail and loved telling everyone about her latest purchase. And by the way, her husband worked in IT.

We knew what they read, how they spent their time and more importantly why they spent their money.

Many of the clients I work with now are in the business of selling to businesses. But without fail, the single most common factor is that they cannot define clearly enough who their customer is. This means that a huge amount of money is wasted in marketing activity directed at the wrong people.

The latest technology is beginning to help to some extent in this respect with pay per click (PPC) advertising on Google, and internet search engine optimisation (SEO) meaning that businesses can direct customers who are specifically asking for their services. But still not enough businesses learn who their customer is from their existing customer base.

The problem with this is not just a matter of misspent marketing but also a failure to capitalise on repeat purchases to the existing customers. Typically, generating new customers costs 5 times more than selling to existing ones. So why do businesses spend so much time and money on unproven marketing campaigns?

The answer to improved return on your marketing spend lies in your existing customer base. If you can understand who they are, what drives them , how they spend their time, what their influences are and who else they purchase from, then I guarantee you will improve your bottom line.

You might even think about giving them a name!