Your customers are faced with a mind-numbingly wide array of purchase options, making it tough for your company to cut through the noise and convert anyone, let alone the customer segment who helps you reach your goals, faster.
Time & Available Resources are Always Your Enemies.
You’re always challenged to do more with less budget, thinly-spread resources and still appease the board and investors.
Instead of focusing on tackling the “low hanging fruit” projects that only make small improvements, what would happen to your business if your conversion rates jumped, revenue increased and your marketing budget worked for you, instead of against you?
It would be a good day, indeed.
One Size Fits All?
Some companies treat every one of their customers the same way. They acquire customers through the same marketing channels, convert them using the same sales path, deliver the same messaging and lean on generic personas the creative department created in an afternoon to guide sales copy and marketing campaigns. It’s worked so far, right?
But then run into these situations:
“Our customer acquisition costs are rising, and it’s bleeding us dry.”
“Customers aren’t making repeat purchases at the rate we expected.”
“The marketing campaign didn’t perform as well as we predicted it would.”
“We have to hire more customer service agents to keep up.”
Why do these situations even exist? Because these companies didn’t invest the time to segment their customers and market to the RIGHT kind of customer for their business.
Here’s the harsh truth: Customers won’t naturally or organically filter themselves into your “ideal” customer through your sales process and your ideal customer isn’t one who simply has cash.
You have to aggressively find and market to your RIGHT kind of customer. These are customers who are typically segmented based on behaviors and values – not just demographics or what you think your ideal customer should be. The days of marketing to “Women 30-45 with a household income of $100k+” are over.
Why Customer Segmentation Is Important
I’m not gonna lie, it takes work, hard work, to get clear on the kinds of customers who are going to help you reach your business goals. It’s easy to avoid investing in this kind of project in favor of urgent issues that come screaming into your office (and they are usually screaming, sometimes their hair is even on fire), but urgent isn’t the same as important. You know this.
If you don’t invest the time to discover your RIGHT kind of customer and focus exclusively on meeting their needs, you risk alienating your existing customers, damaging your reputation to potential customers, draining your budget with inefficient spending and being overtaken by a competitor who did the customer segmentation work and is reaping the benefits. It could be a deadly miss for your business.
You Can’t Be A Customer-Focused Business And Treat Every Customer The Same.
You can’t be all things to all of your customers and expect success. Even if you’ve narrowed down your marketing to a super-specific target market, you will see differences in your customers purchase behaviors.
It’s not always clear who the right kind of customer is for your business. The key is to break your customers into groups based on behaviors and values, align them with your business goals and figure out which segment is best for your company.
How Do You Find Your Best Customers?
Want to find the groups of customers who will help you reach your revenue goals and lower your marketing costs? Check out this blog post that will walk you through the specific steps.