Understanding Your Clients

If you think about how local and small businesses get started, it follows a particular pattern. A product or service is created, then the business owner sells it to a friend or family member.

That friend or family member tells other people about the product or service and then word of mouth marketing starts generating more business. The business owner sells more of their product or service and generally keeps expanding based on the amount of people they can personally speak with.

At some point they reach a make or break point. They can’t personally speak with more people in a given week or month. They hire an employee and continue the process of expansion.

Somewhere in this process the business owner will have an epiphany that just working or dealing with people in their sphere of influence can only yield so much expansion.

At this point they turn to marketing as a solution to further expansion, but here’s the rub, this business owner didn’t go to school for marketing. They went to school for being an engineer, carpenter, doctor, chiropractor, hair stylist, etc.

Local and Small business owners are walking a tightrope blindfolded over a chasm with a thousand foot drop and no safety net and getting to the other side has varying degrees of success.

Here at Evolved, we thought it would be a good idea to take the blindfold off; to at least give local and small businesses a fighting chance of making it to the other side of that chasm.

Before any marketing occurs from a business, they need to understand their client. Most business owners have a belief that they do understand their clients.

What we have found is that they understand their needs or problems and have come up with the solution to solve that need or problem.

This does not equal an understanding of their client, it just means they understand their needs or problems.

To find out what people want or will accept or will believe, a business does surveys.

This isn’t a new tactic. You could go on the internet right now and find pages of companies that offer survey services through email or social media platforms, but this is a very ineffective method of survey.

Surveying through an email or social platform isn’t very thorough and we aren’t talking about the amount of questions you can ask.

People don’t make decisions based on words or pictures. They make decisions based on emotions. Surveys through an email or social platform do not translate the emotions.

In addition to missing the emotions, most people give canned responses when confronted with an email or social media survey.

There is an exact technology to doing surveys: creating questions that produce emotional responses, properly spotting the emotion given when responses are given to the questions, picking the pain points or buttons from the answers, crafting positioning questions against the pain points or buttons, etc.

Once the surveys have been compiled and the right information extrapolated then a business can create a marketing strategy that WILL GET RESULTS.

While this isn’t the only failing that local and small businesses make with their marketing, it is a major one.

If you want to make sure that your business is executing the right marketing strategy, always make sure that you have proper surveys done.