How do I reach my potential customers? Part 2

Dear Aunty B,

I know you’re a very busy lady, But a very good friend of mine is trying to start his own ‘business knowledge’ firm; he’s got experience in that area.

Now, I’ve done my bit for him – leveraging Roy Morgan and Nielsen. But I’m still not able to come up with potential marketing opportunities for him.

Are you able to suggest some ways he could go about targetting businesses that need intelligence and information about the market place?

Good friend,
Sydney

Dear Good friend,

I answered the first part of this yesterday. Now you need to focus on one of the most important parts of business than never gets enough attention: channels to market.

To do this you get further obsessed by your customers. You want to know everything about them. First divide them into groups based on emerging trends. The trends could be geographical. For instance, people are doing more business in Asia and need intelligence on potential joint venture partners. You might call that group Going Asian. Then get even more obsessed with them because your aim is to meet them in a variety of ways: online, offline at events, through intermediate and so on.

So ask a further series of questions: What do they read? Where do they congregate online and offline? What events do they attend? What trade shows? What social networks are they in? How do they search online?

Who reaches them and can you offer your services in with their offering?

Once you have a map of the channels to market, you tell your friend he has to embark on a credibility building exercise. He must get prominent people from those networks as consultants, door openers and on advisory boards. He needs to link up with large companies and he needs well-known ambassadors to offer introductions.

He then needs to start blogs and link them to well known sites where his customers congregate, he needs to attend relevant trade shows, talks, online events and hang out online with potential customers.

Your friend also needs to SEM and SEO his website up the wazoo and make sure he appears when customers search for those type of services. He can also advertise online with direct lead generation products.

There is no quick and easy way to do all this. You do a little bit day after day, week after week, month after month. You also end up hiring employees as it is impossible to do that front-end work which is essential to building a smart company if no one is at the backend doing all the work.

Good luck!
Your Aunty B

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