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Marketing – Demographics V Psychographics

Your Ideal Target Market
In our opinion its 10% about knowing the Demographic profile and 90% about the Psychographic but what’s the difference?

Demographic Profile
When you identify the physical characteristics, sometimes referred to as a demographic profile of your client, you must have a clear picture in your mind of what your target customer looks like from a physical standpoint. In the future, this information will help you to pinpoint your target customer once you begin marketing to them, making it easier to find them and position your marketing message in front of them. Examples include:

Psychographic Profile
This defines the emotional make-up of your target customer. This is typically the most important of these two categories to define since prospects buy based on emotion. They only use logic to justify their purchase. This is where you want to identify what we refer to as their “hot buttons.” Hot buttons are the problems, fears, frustrations and concerns most prospects experience when they buy what you sell. You fear pain when going to the dentist. You’re frustrated by the typically long wait time at the doctors. You’re concerned when you take something in for repair, concerned that the final price won’t match the estimate. If you can accurately identify your prospects hot button issues, and then innovate your business to solve them forever, you have just created a market dominating position. You should also consider additional psychographic areas such as their health, their hobbies and interests, sports, education, personal causes they may be involved in, both political and social, as well as leisure activities. Examples Include:

How to Strengthen Your Marketing Message?

Checkpoint:

• You know who your target market is, what their needs are, what their purchase behaviors are and how to reach them.
• You know how to use market research to find out more information about your market on a regular basis.

Let’s look at writing targeted messages for your target market.

The strength of your marketing message lies in its ability to speak to the specific wants and desires of your target market, and tap into their emotional reactions, or hot buttons.

When you push those hot buttons, you motivate your audience to take action. The more people you can motivate to take action, the more leads you’ll have in store and on the other end of the phone line.

A strong marketing message will make a huge difference in your lead generation strategies.

A marketing message is simply a statement or phrase that you use to communicate information about your business to others. A strong marketing message will do four things:

• Speak to the reader’s needs, wants or problems (hot buttons)
• Offer a solution, advantage or benefit
• Describe a point of difference
• Motivate the reader to take action

The key here is to motivate your target audience to do something after they read or hear the message. It needs to be strong enough to entice the audience to ask for more information, visit the website, pick up the phone or walk in the store.

You will put your marketing message on every piece of marketing material your business uses for lead generation, so it has to be powerful and consistent and speak to the group of people that you have identified as your ideal customers. Strengthening your marketing message has the potential to dramatically increase your lead generation before you even change your existing strategies.

Here are some examples of strong marketing messages that are used by successful businesses today.

Let’s get started with the process you can use to create a new marketing message for your business, or refine the marketing message you already have.

Work through the following questions to brainstorm and record the aspects of your business that you will communicate in your marketing message. Take your time, and be as detailed as possible.

1. Use all the information you gathered about your target market to figure out what your customer’s hot buttons are.

Write down who your customers are, and what their problems, desires and needs are.

Take some time to revisit the behavioral and psychographic information you gathered when researching your target market. This will give you an idea of what kind of emotional hot buttons you should focus on when creating your marketing message.

Hot buttons are emotional triggers that motivate your potential customers to take action. Some common hot buttons are: price, location, exclusivity, results, safety, timeliness, convenience and atmosphere.

2. Describe the value or benefit that your product or service offers your customers.

This is what your customers get when they spend money at your business – the answer to “what’s in it for me?” How do you solve their problems? How do you meet their needs, or fulfill their desires?

For example, maybe you’re a grocery store in the neighbourhood, and you offer the convenience of being just a short stroll away instead of a car ride.

When you’re thinking about this question, think about your product or service in the context of the benefits, results, or advantages customers receive, instead of the features you offer.

3. Think about the outcome of the value or solution that you provide.

Brainstorm what happens when your customers receive the value or benefit from your product or service, what happens? Are they thrilled? Relieved of worry? Do they have more time to spend with their families, or do they put dinner on the table faster?

This is kind of like the storytelling aspect of creating your marketing message. Paint a picture of how you will improve the lives of your customers, in one way or another.

4. What is your company’s point of difference? What makes you stand out from the competition?

Your point of difference – or uniqueness – is something you will want to strongly feature in your marketing message. It is the reason that the reader should choose your business instead of your competition.

For this step, do some research on your competition and see what kinds of marketing messages they are using. How strong are those messages? What benefits and results do they promise?

If you are having trouble figuring out what sets you apart from your competition, think about including an irresistible offer, or a strong guarantee to give yourself an edge. (See our previous blog on risk reversal strategies here)

5. What is the perception you would like others to have about your business?

How you wish your customers to perceive you will impact how you describe your offering in your marketing message, and the kind of language you will use. Revisit the vision you created, and write down some ideas about the image you want your business to project to the outside world.

For example, if your business is completely transforming its operations to become more environmentally sustainable, you will need to use different language and emphasize different features and benefits than you did before.

6. Based on the notes you wrote in response to the above questions, summarize the information into a paragraph of 4 to 5 sentences.

If you’ve got pages of notes, this may be a challenging part of the process, but that’s okay because it means you have a lot to work with. Take your time, and wade through your notes bit by bit.

You may want to start by writing 10 to 15 sentences, and then narrow those down to 4 to 5 sentences when you have a better idea of what specifically you want to focus on. Or, you could try writing three sentences for each question, and then working to synthesize from that point.

Keep in mind that the most effective marketing messages use strong, descriptive language that triggers emotional responses. Think about how you would describe your point of difference, or value-added service to a close friend, and write with that in mind.

7. Using descriptive language, synthesize your paragraph into a single sentence of 15 words or less.

This sentence will become your unique marketing message!

I know how challenging this part of the process can be, so to make it easier, I usually write a few different sentences that emphasize different things to give myself choices. For example, if you don’t know whether to feature your company’s commitment to unbelievable prices, or its guarantee of customer satisfaction, write one sentence each and compare which is stronger.

Aim to have two or three sentences that you’re happy with, and then test them out to see which is the most effective.

The only way to find out the strength of your marketing message is to test it. Don’t be afraid of making some mistakes – you need to get feedback!

Test your three draft marketing messages internally first.

Before you go out to the public with your drafts, test them on your friends, family, staff and colleagues first. Use their feedback constructively, but don’t be afraid to stand up for elements that you believe are effective or important.

Once you have gathered enough feedback, rework your draft messages and incorporate the suggestions you believe are valuable.

Incorporate feedback, and then test a few draft messages externally.

When you have refined your draft messages and incorporated staff and colleague feedback, you can start to test the messages out on your audience.

This doesn’t have to be complicated, or cost a lot of money. Simple tests using small-scale distributions will give you the information you need to choose which message is the most effective.

For example, place two or three ads in the local newspaper – one a week with a different message each time – and compare the number of leads each ad generates. Or, send out a small direct mail campaign, with the materials split into three groups – one for each message.

The message that generates the most leads is the strongest, and will be the one you choose to be your business’ unique marketing message.

Now that you’ve got a killer message, use it consistently on all of your marketing materials and in all of your campaigns.

Consistency and repetition are powerful persuasive tools to use to reinforce your message over time. Ensuring your marketing message appears on all documents related to your business will build your brand image and your company’s reputation.

Make a list of all marketing materials, stationery, signage and internal and external documentation that your customers and clients come in contact with. Then, incorporate your marketing message onto each of them.

Here’s a suggested list of materials to include:

• Website
• Advertisements
• Direct Mail
• Listings
• Phone Messages
• Email Signature
• Business Cards
• Letterhead

Now that you know what you’re going to say, and who you’re going to say it to, next is to dive into some lead generation strategies.

To Your Success

4 Questions To Identify Your Ideal Clients

For most businesses, they treat every single customer with unquestionable service, regardless of how the customer treats them. Anything they want, they get it. After all, without them you’d be out of business, right?

But what about when customers push our buttons, and stretch us to the limit? What if they waste our time and start to cost us money instead of making us money? Do we have to put up with it?

Absolutely not! A business full of unprofitable customers is an unprofitable business. The key to customer service lies in the ability to identify the gems and the rocks, and deal with each effectively. Your customers don’t have to hold you hostage.

Applying the 80:20 rule there are probably 20% of your customers giving you 80% of your revenue – a business has got to focus on these customers and expand on them.

To identify these go through your database of customers and make a list of the customers that make you answer yes to the following questions:

1. Has the customer purchased from you on several occasions?
2. Is the customer profitable?
3. Is the customer strategically important to your business?
4. Has the customer spent a significant amount of money in your business?

While you do this, you may also wish to make a list of customers who made you answer no to one or several of those questions. Those customers could potentially be unprofitable, or undesirable ones that you need to think about avoiding.

Optimizing your customer base allows you to;

a. serve happy, pleasant customers
b. see more repeat business
c. have happier staff
d. make more money

When you are trying to establish how profitable a customer is, think about how much they spend, how often they spend, and what they buy. Do they buy high-margin or low-margin items? Have they referred other customers to you? Do they pay on time? Do they buy products or services at full price? Each business will have a different set of criteria to evaluate this, but use those questions as guidelines.

Your ideal customers are those that are highly profitable, and a dream to deal with. You’re more than happy to accommodate their requests, and go above and beyond their expectations. These are the customers you will want to cultivate more of in your business.

Your ideal customers are the ones that:

• Ask you for the products and services that fall within your expertise or specialty.
• Value your products and services, as well as you and your staff.
• Pay a fair market price.
• Challenge you to be better at what you do.
• Support your continued business and professional growth.
• Help you move in new strategic directions.

To Your Success.

Jan NL – Quinlan & Co

Innovative Thinking

We continuously meet with businesses and business owners who are making a real difference within the SME sector. Through the Lucan South Dublin Chamber we’ve gotten to know Eilis and have been extremely impressed by her and her team’s foresight in bringing a new app (Quinlan & Co) to the marketplace. This app contains an abundance of high quality information that will assist business owners daily, monthly and annually by providing detailed financial information and systems to maintain your records (Mileage Tracker is a personal favourite!)

Congrats to Eilis and the team on a job well done and the innovative thinking!

Click here to find out more about Quinlan & Co. or

Download the App for FREE from Google Play or the App Store.

Changing Mindset = New Results

Most business owners start their own business based on their passion for what it is they do. Unfortunately, it takes much more than passion to build a successful business. You must have a specific vision for what it is you want your business to accomplish and the direction you want to take to produce the results you expect your business to achieve.

Thought is the most powerful force in the universe. Our thoughts are the controlling factor in what we manifest and create in our lives. Use your thoughts to create a specific vision for your business and then apply the right strategies and tactics to grow and develop that business.

What you need to know…

Creating a successful mindset requires action on your part. You must create a mindset that’s focused on performing your highest impact and highest income-producing activities on a daily basis.

If you’re not happy with your business’s current results, then ask yourself a question and be brutally honest as you answer it. WHY are you getting such poor results? WHY are you failing to attract clients? WHY are you attracting the wrong clients? WHY are you failing to generate the revenue and profits you expect from your business?

One of the things that has been widely explored over the years is that people who are broke, struggling or just getting by – don’t think the same way as people who are financially abundant. They don’t believe the same things as financially challenged people do, and therefore they don’t behave the same way. In short, they take different actions.

Why you need to know this…

Small business owners have been mentally conditioned to behave a certain way. They have specific beliefs… such as “in order to make more money, I have to work harder.” “Money is the root of all evil.” “No pain, no gain.” “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” “If I don’t do it myself, it will never get done.”

These beliefs lead to specific actions such as working more hours and putting forth more effort in a vain attempt to increase revenue and profits. That leads to specific results such as feelings of overwhelm, anxiety and frustration… and a deep-seated belief that more and more effort is required, even though results seldom if ever appear.

Do you know what your current beliefs may be costing your business today? For example…

• Do you succumb to mental barriers that may be sabotaging your success?
• Are you laser-focused on your highest income-producing activities?
• Are you hiring, assigning, delegating or bartering all of your non income-producing and less productive tasks?
• Do you know the specific steps you can take to immediately create a “millionaires mindset?”
• Would you like to know how you can learn to develop these critical skills?

It’s our pleasure to partner with business owners who are open to change and constantly challenging the way they think about their business…and do so in such a way that it creates a dramatic increase in effectiveness and profits. Sometimes the changes aren’t all that radical they just need a little mindset shift and BELIEF.

To your success,