Build a Solid Marketing Foundation

If you follow me or have worked with the Indispensable Marketing team, we will often talk about having a marketing foundation based on diagnosis before prescription. In fact, small business marketing needs to start with a simple and effective diagnosis. But the problem is there are so many ways to access customers now that it's easy to get lost down the "prescription before diagnosis" hole.

Prescriptions like SEO, Linkedin, Google ads, clubhouse, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, programmatic ads, TV, radio, Google My Business, and Tik Tok have a place in effective marketing but only when they have been determined by a very clear diagnosis.

So the question has come up: how do you build your marketing foundation? What does that look like?

Component #1: Building a Solid Marketing Foundation

For us, the first thing you have to understand is who makes an ideal client or makes up the multiple segments of ideal clients for your business.

From my experience, you can’t spend enough time narrowing, refining, and understanding that. Even to the point of identifying what they care about, what they value, how they want to be served and what makes them tick. Spend a lot of time on this.

Understanding Your Ideal Client Is The Ultimate Growth Hack

It’s the owner's and CEO’s job to deeply understand the ideal client they want to attract, serve, and support. And gaining that understanding takes time and effort. ( I would say a process)

You can hire marketing consultants and firms to aid in the discovery of your ideal client but they will never be as close to your market as you. Sadly, too many small businesses forget that.

How to Define Your Ideal Customer in 4 Questions

In any marketing conversation (or one that you hope to be effective) it’s common to hear that you must know your target market. What bothers me most about this simple target market approach is that it still allows small businesses to chase anyone who has a business card.

Answering these customer profile questions from the beginning and during the growth of your business will save you tons of time going in circles trying to be all things to all people.

1. What do they look like? Defining your ideal customer starts with things like: Demographics, Psychographics, and Challenges or Problems.
2. What are their problems? No matter what you sell — a product, a service, a subscription, etc. — you’re selling a solution to a problem … and people are looking to get their problems solved.
3. How do they want to be served? What I’m really asking you here is to understand the demands and expectations an ideal customer has first and then discover ways to address those through the interactions they have with your business.
4. What do they think value is? “Value is in eyes of the beholder,” so to speak. The difficult part of this question is remembering the beholder is not you. It is your ideal customer. You must come to understand how ideal customers think and determine what value is.

Component #2: Building a Solid Marketing Foundation

And the second part – particularly for existing businesses – is to really fully understand what it is you do that is wanted and valued by this ideal client. Avoid what you think it is, and focus on what your clients say.

Understand What Is Valued and Wanted

My message to owners and CEOs of small businesses has been quite clear: You cannot create a business that is unique to every client.

The key to any good marketing strategy is to market to the ideal client within your target market that wants and values what it is you do that is both remarkable and unique.

And a lot of times, what your ideal client wants and values is not the core service bookkeeping, consulting, remodeling, training, etc. you provide.⠀

How to Define What is Valued and Wanted By Ideal Customers

For example, we work with a local commercial cleaning firm that feels like what their ideal clients want and value is clean common areas, counters being wiped down, toilet bowls being scrubbed, mirrors being clean, trash bins being emptied, etc.
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Well, when we conducted client research through speaking with some of their commercial cleaning clients, we kept hearing over and over again that what their clients want and value is the high priority our client places on showing up when they say they will and fixing issues when they arise.
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I know that sounds kind of simple and basic, but that’s what our client's client communicated that they want and value and that is both a remarkable and unique aspect of their service delivery.

No other commercial cleaning firm in their world was doing that.

Component #3: Building a Solid Marketing Foundation

The third part is turning that into a core marketing message where you make the customer the hero of the story and you’re simply the guide.

Understand What Attracts Ideal Customers

Online reviews, testimonials, unsolicited feedback or any 3rd party proof must be a important part of creating your marketing message strategy these days. The insight gain from any 3rd party proof provides you with a direction for creating a powerful marketing message strategy.

What’s often overlooked by small business owners in the gathering process of 3rd party proof is the actual words and phrases used by a client. In my experience a good review, testimonial, case study, blurb, or positive unsolicited feedback often implies that this is an ideal customer for your business. They had the right problem, you solved it with the right approach, and they had a great experience.

Here’s the point – if you want to attract more ideal clients like the ones giving you great feedback then you should pay very close attention to how they talk about your service – in particular, the words and phrases that show up repeatedly.

There’s money making and revenue generating insights in those words and phrases as your best customers are telling you what it is that you do that solves the real problem they have.

How to Create a Message That Attracts Ideal Customers

Let’s say you own a tree service business. Your potential customers will automatically assume that you know how to take down trees. But that doesn’t really address the problem the potential customer has.

For most homeowners, their biggest problem associated with a home service contractor is about something beyond the basic service the business provides. Homeowners hate having to wait around for their service window. When they hire someone to handle their tree removal, the team leaves tread or wheel marks and stump grindings in the yard.

These are the real problems your clients have. So your marketing message is not, “We know how to remove trees” — of course you do! Instead, it’s “We never damage your yard and always clean up when we’re done.”

Contact Your Marketing Consultant at Indispensable Marketing

If you’re a small service based business that needs help with developing a powerful marketing message and showing up on the first page of search results on Google, Bing or Yahoo at Indispensable Marketing we can help. We offer marketing strategy consulting, marketing audits, monthly marketing packages, consultations, exploratory calls or monthly local SEO services. Contact us for more information.