With the advance of Social Media to new dizzying heights, today’s sales world brings many new challenges to sales people. Salespeople must understand social media, and more importantly, how to prospect within it. That means a salesperson must become an expert on who the buyer is exactly for the product or service they are selling that will place them ahead of their competition.
Making sale after sale is the ultimate target of any salesperson. Many criteria, such as competitive pricing, near perfect product, reaching out and targeting to the correct audience and motivational advertising, are responsible for these sales successes.
First things first: All of your efforts will be futile if the correct audience is not recognized and specifically targeted. It is the major factor in getting abundant sales, because “IF” the right customers aren’t targeted, then the right customers won’t buy the product. The right customers are known as targeted customers or your niche market; those who are actively searching for and will be very happy to buy the products that not only fulfill their needs, but are also less pricey.
Small businesses shouldn’t fear competition with large companies as they produce products geared towards a bigger spectrum. No matter! Sometimes the bigger companies won’t be customer specific as their products are more generalized and they don’t much care about the competition they might get from others. Like You! This gives an opportunity to the smaller firms to produce products, which they can cater to the needs of a group of people whose needs aren’t met specifically by the large companies.
Although it seems like a silly question, but firstly, a firm should understand who the people are they want to target. The success lies behind understanding this, which requires thorough research and analysis. Various factors must be considered. The age group is the first factor, whether the product will be useful to babies or children or teenagers or youngsters or middle aged or old. Sometimes there is a possibility that the product will cater to the needs of all age groups. The next thing to consider is gender. Marital status, occupation, ethnic background, health status, income status, education, hobbies, etc., are some of the factors that should also be pondered upon. After deciding on the customer group to be targeted, the benefits that can be provided by the product to this group should be jotted down. A thorough examination of the service or product should be done for this purpose. If there is sufficient time, a survey can be conducted on the current customers and pose them with questions like what they liked in the products they are using, any discomfort they are facing, do they want anything to be changed to make the product better, etc.
After making a list of all the benefits, thought should be applied to which of these benefits will actually help the targeted audience. Make a short list of the benefits that will be advantageous as it will definitely help in your marketing plan and can boost sales.
The Internet has made reaching out to the targeted customers very, very easy. Search engines can be utilized to the maximum extent for this purpose. Type your keyword or search phrase that you are exactly searching for in the search engines and the results that are brought back on the first three pages will be of enormous value. But lots of time and investment is involved in this process, as different keywords will fetch different search results. So be prepared to spend some time and energy culling out the results to finally get what you are looking for.
Another option for you here is Facebook Advertising. I personally use this tool constantly to run ad campaigns. Take a small tutorial on how to create an ad here, as you will be amazed on how specifically targeted they can make your campaign. I am truly astonished at every campaign I create for my business, as I can keep drilling down to get more and more targeted audiences for what I am selling. And Facebook is continually improving this so you will be able to target more and more exact customers that your niche appeals to.
Next best thing is reaching out to newsletters, blogs and e-zines. Many e-zines are related to marketing, finance, shopping, Internet, etc. A number of e-zine websites can be found in an e-zines directory, which even contains the contact information, advertising price, etc. The list of e-zine website sites should be cut down to which are relating to the target market and ad should be placed in the ones selected which should include all the product advantages if the ad allows that many words.
In conclusion…Recognizing the target market is crucial to any successful advertising and sales campaign. Once it is recognized, they can be reached through different channels like websites, newspapers, magazines, etc. This makes the customer think that he is being directly addressed to. And since the whole approach will interest them, the amount of traffic received in return will be simply overwhelming and the whole effort will be worth it.
Comments (1)
Knowing your customers is very essential. .Must have knowledge on customer mapping..