Who Will You Be Working For?

Franchise owners don’t work for themselves…they work for their customers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling…be it food, equipment or a consulting service; the best products aren’t sold….they’re bought. So who’s buying your product or service….how did they hear about you….why do they buy from you and how can you reach more people like them?

A critical factor in discovering more about your customer is market segmentation; defining the who’s who of your clientele. What do they have in common with each other and how can you attract more like them? Customer profiles can be broken down into the following areas:

Geographics – profiling customers based on where they’re coming from….city, province, country or as targeted as a neighborhood or street.

Demographics – how old are your customers, are they male or female, do they fall into a certain income bracket, are they married, single, etc.

Psychographics – what kind of behavioral patterns or lifestyle characteristics do they share. What are their beliefs, values and attitudes towards themselves and society

Geodemographics – also known as cluster marketing, combines all the above. Its basic premise is that people who have similar backgrounds or live in the same area tend to have the same buying habits and patterns….”birds of a feather flock together”.

By knowing your customer geographics you know where to reach your customers. Knowing their demographics you know who to reach and using psychographics you’ll know how to reach them. Once you know who you’re trying to reach, where to reach them , you need to know what to say or offer them in order to make them buy from you. How do you motivate, inspire and attract them to buy.

When consumers gravitate to a business, their decisions are rarely based on marketing messages alone. Consumers rely on their own experiences. They choose to stay loyal based on what they have personally seen, sensed and experienced. As a result, you should devote the bulk of your marketing efforts to the steps that lead up to the “sale”. Target your customers, ensure that your product line meets your customer’s wants and needs and communicate your offering in a way your customer can relate to. If you accomplish this, then when your customer is ready to buy, all you have to do facilitate the exchange…and they won’t feel like you’ve “sold” them anything. Never underestimate the power of the relationship. Your customers may choose to buy from your business over another simply because you make them feel better when they walk through your door.

Without customers a business is out of business. The only boss that really matters in business…is the person who just opened their wallet!