It is Friday. It's nearly 11 o'clock in the UK and I've just been watching a film called Wicked Little Letters, it's got Olivia Coleman in (if you've seen Peep Show, you know who I'm talking about).
Weirdly enough, I've had a sudden flutter inspiration to do a blog on marketing. So I'm marketing by marketing, you know? And because I have no life.
So I needed to get this out of our system. I've done 41 projects for 41 different founders. One of the most popular questions is...
'Where & how do I market?'
signed, 1000s of founders
Not just a list of places to find the customers and messages to send them - but really knowing where exactly to target them in the first place. There's a few steps involved.
- Let's start with an example target audience:
Greg and Jordan.
Greg is starting out just at university. Maybe early 20s.
He wants to provide local cleaning services. He has a Henry the Hoover and a rug.
We'll assume he's younger. He might use things like TikTok and Instagram, 4 square 4 business and friends.
Here are some of the activities he might do on these platforms:
- Starting up
- Content marketing
- Online bookings
- Getting word of mouth referrals
- Lead gen
Then there's Jordan.
He is a house builder. He's been around a bit longer. He's been running a B2B business, and is really embedded in the local community after a few years. Jordan wants to scale.
He hasn't yet but he's planning on doing that by moving or building new branches and/or building out the team.
Both of their channels are what they could both potentially use:
- YouTube
- TripAdvisor
- Local in-person meetups
- Google Business Profiles
- Bing for Business
- Local Community Centres
Here's what Jordan may only use based on his career status:
- LinkedIn: they might have a more established company presence and profile
- Facebook Business Pages
- Yellow Pages
They will also be looking at doing things like:
- Upselling & cross selling
- In-person selling
- Online selling via booking systems and eCommerce stores
They potentially want to move to not move scale product lines, new customer types. Stuff like that.
How do we engage them? At this point it's important not to focus too much on the quality. We'll do prioritization in another article.
So we could:
- Build our email list to email market
- Attend local meetups
- Sponsor local meetups or community centres
- Partner with trade industries or our audiences competitors
- Google, LinkedIn, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok ads
- SEO optimize our landing page on local keyword search
- Attend or host webinars in social media forums
This is just 1 step in the journey of identifying and engaging customers.
The next blog will focus on the next stage: picking 2-3 high impact channels based on a few key metrics and your audience, and tailored outreach.
Here's a video I did on how to identify where to market, too.
