By now you should have a pretty good idea of the profile of your best customer, and your desired best customer. If you’re following along with this crash course you probably aren’t the type of person who has a lot of time for market research or the budget to create a complex digital or traditional ad strategy. Don’t worry. There are only two things you need to know to create the strategies and tactics for your 2015 Marketing Plan (we start those next week, so relax).
1. Where do your customers get their information?
2. What kind of messages do they respond to?
#2 is something that is an ongoing task for you and you’ll be working on that throughout the year. Therefore, the last tidbit we need to gather is #1.
All I want you to do right now is consider your 1) best and 2) desired best customer. If you can, try to numerically prioritize their information sources (in other words, do they use Facebook, Twitter, do they like to read print papers, etc.). If not, just put an X next to the three you think are their PRIMARY sources of information. To get a better handle on this, start with yourself and narrow it down to your top three. Then think of those two sets of customers (or one if you’re already happy with your customer base) and do the same.
If you prefer to do this task with a printable PDF worksheet, you can download one here.
___ Print daily newspaper
___ Print magazines national (list a couple if you can)
___ Print magazines local (list a couple if you can)
___ Online search (Google, Bing, Yahoo)
___ Genre & influencer blogs (lifestyle, music, etc)
___ Online national news sites (Huffington Post, New York Times, etc)
___ Online local news sites (your local paper.com, etc)
___ Direct mail
___ Email
___ Your own content (blog, website, etc)
___ TV news
___ Radio news
___ Facebook
___ Twitter
___ Instagram
___ LinkedIn
___ Social media*
*If there is a dominant social media network for your industry call it out. Otherwise social media should be one of your choices unless your customer is 55+.
