Your questions answered (1 of 4)

by Mark Nagurski, July 29th, 2008

A few weeks ago I asked readers to forward on their marketing questions to be answered free of charge. From the responses I’ve chosen a couple of good general examples and thought I’d share them with you here. Of course, if you have a question you’d like to see answered here, feel free to get in touch.

Stefan writes: “I am looking to create a lifestyle management company that will offer services to those that are time short… So with this type of business (my target market is young professionals) how do you think it is best to appeal to them?

It’s a good question, and one that just about every single business has to go through at some point; how, exactly, will I attract customers? Unfortunately, there is no magic formula, but there are a few basic guidelines that’ll point you in the right direction.

By and large, a simple marketing plan should answer three questions; who is my market and what do they want, what should I say to my market and finally, what methods should I use to get one to the other?

Those three questions form a basic structure of market, message and method – which we can use to look at your business idea.

Identify and Learn About Your Market

In your question you mention that your market is ‘young professionals’ but you also mentioned in your note that you’ll be happy to offer any number of services, “as long as they are legal and moral and can be done remotely”.

Are young professionals the people most likely to benefit from those services? If you’re selling ‘time’ are they the people most in need? This could be a costly assumption so you need to check it first with some research.

Additionally, ‘young professionals’ is far too big and poorly defined a market to go after – you need to get specific. What age? Male or female? What kind of job? What level of income? Kids or no kids?

Create Customer Personas

With those questions in mind, your first task is to create a detailed persona based on your most likely customer.

With a persona, you’re trying to create a model customer, to put a name and character traits to them and make it easier for you to get a feel for and anticipate their needs, wants and reactions. As your services are not yet set in stone you can do this first and then create services for this market. This would be a better bet than assuming ‘young professionals’ or trying to match set services to a market.

Once you’ve created your persona, mentally run through a ‘day in the life’ scenario and find the ‘pain points’ that you can help address. Creating this type of persona can also help answer questions about where you might like to advertise or the tone of voice your marketing should use.

If more than one type of person is likely to use your services, feel free to create multiple personas but ensure that there is a clear hierarchy – your most likely customer comes first and will be the basis of most of your marketing decisions.

With decisions made about the kind of customer that you’ll be targeting – and a decent understanding of the kinds of problems they have (and how you can solve them) the next step is to start crafting a message that speaks to that customer persona, and explains how you can solve their problems better the next guy.

But that’ll have to wait for tomorrow.