In a recent conversation with a prospective client, she told me that her marketing wasn’t working anymore.
She has done everything the experts told her to do. Email marketing, blogging, SEO, retargeting and all the other tricks of the trade. Afer reviewing her laundry list of tactics, she told me, “I’m not sure I know who my target audience is any more”.
I could understand her reluctance and frustration as we pulled apart the tangles in her marketing shoelaces and she shared more and more information. After an extensive review and marketing audit, we uncovered an essential truth.
She was trying to reach a target that WAS her customer five years ago but is no longer the right target.
She didn’t realize it, but her audience has aged out of her product category.
The people she is marketing to today are now older and no longer need what she sells.
Younger consumers didn’t replace them because they no longer wanted the same thing. And, she was still talking to prospects who didn’t need what she was selling. And, she didn’t have a strategy to replace them with people who she could be serving.
The owner realized that her marketing efforts were suited to a different time and place and she needed to rethink who her product helped. As Gary V likes to say, are you marketing in the year you are living in?
Like darkness at dusk, change is slow. Suddenly you are in the dark.
You don’t need me to tell you that markets are changing, businesses are consolidating, and disruption is everywhere.
We expect delivery in an instant. Cars are now available as a monthly subscription. You can buy wellness cleanse beverages via text. The fastest growth in search is now through voice, not text. More than 15% of the population cut the cable cord in the last few years and young consumers in their twenties aren’t watching traditional cable tv. Shopping at a retail store is, quaint. Car rental companies are suffering because who rents on a trip when you can more easily Uber or Lyft your way around.
So where to begin?
“The best place to begin is always the beginning,” said the King in Alice in Wonderland. Start at the beginning was my advice to my client.
Start by knowing why someone buys from you today.
Don’t assume you know. Engage with good current customers. Listen to them. Hear beyond the apparent statements they make. Find out everything you can about what their motive is to buy from you. Know what job your product or service plays in their life. In the case of this client, you aren’t going to sell after school services to people whose kids have aged out of your category. So your mailing list gets stale quickly and like milk, has a shelf life.
Go deep. Take a few good clients out for dinner or go bowling together. Get to know them. Connect. Listen. Become reengaged. See the patterns around age, lifestyle, home situation, clubs they belong to, etc.
Don’t begin by deploying an arsenal of marketing tactics, start by finding who you want to serve. First, understand them. Build a picture, what marketers call a persona they represent who they are and how they live their lives.
Then learn how they want you to stay connected with them.
Your marketing tactics may be spot on.
You are just not reaching the right audience anymore.
You can set up a time to chat using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free and we can explore if working together makes sense. Try my new chat feature on my site if you have a quick question.
Photo: chintermeyer https://www.flickr.com/photos/twentysevenphotos/
