When it comes to Customers, focus on Quality, not Quantity…it still works…better than ever!
When I first started my “deep dive” into “Customers” and how to optimize their experience (almost 20 years ago) we didn’t have Social Media. The ability to “spray your audience” with useless tweets, images, or emoticons, and commenting didn’t exist. If you didn’t do a really high quality job with a high quality customer you didn’t get any high quality referrals or recommendations. You weren’t talked about and the customer simply left.
Today, we live in the Internet/Digital Revolution where in a matter of seconds you can reach thousands upon thousands of people with a simple short tweet, image, hashtag, or comment. And if you want to take a little longer, you can blast out an e-mail to the same list of thousands. But just like the old saying goes, “Just because you CAN do it doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it.” This may be more relevant today than any other time in history!
While the “Art and Science” of creating Word-of-Mouth has certainly changed, the power of it and the impact it can have on a business has increased more than anything we have seen. The question is whether or not your business is using it as LEVERAGE or a DETERRENT.
Today we have the ability to reach anyone we want in an instant. This is powerful. The question is whether you are reaching the right people or whether you are simply reaching lots of people. Going after “masses” of people is “so yesterday” as a strategy. It doesn’t work any longer…at least not with any follow-on rewards.
QUANTITY is not the answer today. The answer is not to go after massive “likes” and “followers” and “connections” if they you haven’t identified their Personas as specifically your potential customers. And not only do they need to be your potential customers, they have to be your “ideal potential customer.” No longer do you have time to waste on marketing and connecting to audiences that aren’t ideal.
If a customer is not an “ideal customer” for you, they probably are for someone else and you should let them market to them instead of you. Let them spend the time and resources on trying to attract them. Today, find the “shiny marbles” you really want the most in your customer base and design a strategy to go after them with everything you have…tailored to what would really help them improve their lives or their business.
This is QUALITY over QUANTITY. Choose the few that you would love to have as customers because they fit the way you do business and how you want to grow. When you know who these few, quality customers are then you are focusing in the right way to create LEVERAGE in your marketing.
Here’s why you want to focus on a few, high quality customers and prospective customers…THEY TELL OTHERS JUST LIKE THEM. Everyone knows people like themselves and they hang out with others who have similar interests and needs. A simple example…the person who invests a lot of their time in charities and non-profits knows a whole bunch of other people who do the same. This works in virtually every aspect of your business and with your customers…your “ideal customer” knows other potential ideal customers.
The one question I highly recommend every business owner or leader focuses on is this…“Do you offer a customer experience to your ideal customer that is so incredibly remarkable that they can’t wait to tell other potential ideal customers about you?”
If the answer is YES, then you are well on your way to capturing the ideal customer in your market ahead of your competitors and you will be able to “own that customer persona” going forward…becoming a differentiated and unique brand to this ideal audience…CONGRATULATIONS!!
If you answer NO, there’s room for improvement…both on identifying your ideal customer and on improving the experience you give them so they are motivated to tell others.
This is where developing a strategy that helps you move to an answer of YES would give you tremendous LEVERAGE. It would allow you to truly differentiate yourself with the AUDIENCE YOU WANT instead of just an overall general audience…of which there are many in that audience that either doesn’t care that much about you or you won’t ever be able to make happy. They are DETERRENTS to your strategy!
Here’s the MAGIC to this strategy and focus…QUALITY matters much more than QUANTITY!
When you focus on the QUALITY aspect of identifying your “ideal customer audience” it doesn’t matter how many there are…the numbers work for you today where they didn’t so much before. As little as 10 years ago, if you had 20 in your quality audience, they probably had a leverage power of 2 – 10…meaning they would tell between 2 and 10 people about you. That means your ideal audience 10 years ago of 20 would be able to reach between 40 – 200 new prospective “ideal customers” for you via Word-of-Mouth. Not bad…but certainly not good enough to rapidly grow your business today.
Take those same numbers in today’s new Digital/Internet Revolution. If you have the same 20 people in your “ideal customer audience” they all have (on average) 1000 friends, connections, and followers. This means those 20 ideal customers now have the potential to reach 20,000 potential new “ideal customers” because of their reach. And remember, people know people like themselves so the likelihood that many of these 20,000 potential customers are just like them is extremely high!! Let’s be conservative and cut this number in half…or even more conservative and cut it down by 75% if you are really uncertain…it still gives you a reach of 5,000 potential ideal customers!
When you compare the leverage you have today vs. just 10 years ago, the difference is 4800 potential new customers…and that’s being extremely conservative by just assuming a 25% likelihood they know people like themselves…which I would say is incredibly low.
This is why QUANTITY is not the answer today in the WORD-of-MOUTH Customer Economy we now live in…QUALITY is your answer to getting you to the IDEAL QUANTITY.
Allowing your customers to help you reach the desired, ideal audience is easier than it’s ever been in history…but only if you approach it strategically and with a completely (and I emphasize completely) different frame of reference. Using a traditional approach of “spray and pray” or “campaigns” or “broadcast messages” is not going to work. Investing the time to truly find out what will “help your ideal audience” is what gives you the foundation to create LEVERAGED WORD-OF-MOUTH.
Forget the big numbers people are offering you today…they won’t help you achieve the success you are looking for. Forget trying to blast your messages out to as big of a list or population as you can find…it won’t work any longer and your audience will “turn you off.”
Instead, try a strategy that works in our new world…focus on the “small numbers” of the “ideal audience” and you can take advantage of the leverage available today in our Digital Marketing Revolution and Customer Economy.
This is what will make the difference. In virtually every speech I give I share a simple way to think about and remember this concept…“You have to really SMALL to get really BIG.” Keep this in mind when you are trying to figure out your strategy for moving forward, it might just be the “mantra” you need to develop and eclipse your competition.
And as usual, if you want to learn more about this just shoot me a message. I’m happy to talk with you more about it without a fee…it’s ALWAYS my gift to you to help you be better at what you do. As I always say, my passion is to help you “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is today,” as the famous ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky used to say. If that’s where you want to go as an organization, I’m happy to give you some insights to get you thinking different and headed in the right direction to take advantage of the new world we live in today.
