To dominate your market, ask the right questions!

As a result of this column you and your organization will:

Identify your best customer groups and what they want.
Adopt a marketing plan to attract even more of these “best” customers.
Increase marketing efficiency while keeping your cost in check.

Who are your priority target customer groups? They should be the focus of all marketing decisions designed to meet your profit goals. How do you keep current customers, attract new target customers, and keep costs in check? How do you build an integrated marketing plan that documents your goals, and tracks them along the way?

Market analysis lets you see what is and what could be.
Market planning bridges the gap and creates a road map to guide your decisions.

A children’s clothing store would need to know the number of households with children, preferably by age, in their area. You also need to understand your current customer mix and its potential!

A retail bank survey may say that the “average” customer is satisfied. However, if two of the target groups are high-deposit seniors who want a comfortable place to sit, and dual-income professionals, who need longer banking hours, their needs may be diluted in the pool of responses. Survey your top customers separately to reveal their unique needs and how well you are serving them. For example…

Dual income bank customers want longer hours. Opening one night a week may keep important accounts from leaving, bring you more of their business, and attract profitable depositors away from your competition.
Meanwhile you may want to consider raising the fees for those customers who keep balances below a minimum dollar amount.

Ask your staff how to improve service to key customer groups. Not only will you gain insight into better performance, you will inspire your employees to “buy into” the concept. Therefore, you can make changes for the better, dominate the market, and structure weekly activities to realize the most profits possible.

As a cautionary note, however, you need to determine which segments within each group you will target. Adding more people and hours may double your branch, office, or store traffic, but if your cost quadruples and you fail to add value for your best customers, you won’t come out ahead.

Sum up all your plans and tactics so that they fit onto a single page. This Summary Market Plan includes facts about the market, changes staff will make, and the improvement these changes will bring to the bottom line.

When the plan is put into action, everyone’s work changes. Teams set goals, based on the plan, to keep, grow, and attract profitable customers. They will change the sales strategies and the service levels they offer to A, B, and C customers, which we’ll talk about in more depth in a future column.

Additionally, you have to unlearn the idea that one size fits all customers, or one solution works for all.

You must relearn the old-fashioned way that small-town banks and grocery stores treated their best customers.
Today, you need to customize your service to match the value of each customer.

When all is said and done, every business is a service. The winner will be the one who delivers not only the best service, but also the best service to the best customers, and less costly service to less profitable customers.

Some customers want speed while others desire quality, convenience, or low prices. To dominate your market, you can’t do the same thing for all customers. Rather, you must do the right thing for each priority targeted customer group.

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This article is provided by Joe Murtagh, “The DreamSpeaker™” www.TheDreamSpeaker.com. For keynotes, facilitation, workshops, consulting and questions or or a free report on The 3 Most Common Mistakes Organizations Make, email us at Joe@TheDreamSpeaker.com or call 800-239-0058.

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