Hopefully, you will recall that the first way to grow a business involves increasing the number of the customers of the type you want – your ideal customer!
Your ideal customers usually have all of the answers you require when it comes to giving them the products or services they want to buy from you.
Let’s take a look at a real-life example from the property industry where asking ‘the ideal customer’ pays off!
A property development and building company was promoting a new complex. The company thought the major reason tenants moved into its townhouse/ condominium complex was for the facilities, such as a pool, children’s play area, tennis court, and secure gated community.
In keeping with that, all of their marketing and advertisements were focused on those facilities. The problem was the complex just wasn’t filling and about half of it remained unoccupied.
To find out why their marketing wasn’t working the company conducted a phone survey of the existing tenants and ask the following question: “What were the top 6 things (in order of importance) that mattered most to you when you were looking for a new place to live?”
The answers revealed the problem and the solution!
In fact, it wasn’t the facilities that potential tenants set out looking for when they were house hunting! If you’ve ever rented you’ll probably know that to be true – you’re generally looking for a new home usually with a certain number of rooms, rather than a gated community for example.
In this case what the tenants had been looking for was something 3 bedroom, in a certain price range and clean or new.
So suddenly it was clear – promoting the complex facilities wasn’t targeting the potential customers’ ‘hot buttons,’ and that’s why the advertising simply wasn’t working.
Since the tenants the company wanted to attract were similar in nature to those already living in the complex it made sense to change the advertising to reflect those top 3 considerations.
And that’s just what they did.
When the company incorporated those – ‘3 bedroom, $350 per week and brand new’ in the headline of the ads, it took just 2 weeks for the complex to be fully occupied and have a waiting list for future tenants!
So if your existing customers are just like the type of people you’d like to attract – similar in nature, needs, demographics and purchasing patterns – then it makes sense to ask your existing customers what was most important to them and use that in your marketing. That way more ‘like’ people with similar needs will respond to your marketing.
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