Have you ever heard of the Pareto Principle?
Perhaps better known as the 80-20 rule, it simply means that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In business, for instance, 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. It’s a simple, yet robust mantra for marketers. The main idea to take away here is that building long lasting relationships with your customer pays off… literally!
So how do you set up your marketing campaigns to seek out these extremely loyal and long lasting customers? The simple answer is designing and executing segmented marketing campaigns for your target audience.
Breaking this down, it’s important to understand who your buyers are. Over time you will have (hopefully) collected specific data related to your main buyers demographics and psychographics. Meaning, you want to not only know about the gender, age, race, religion, family size, ethnicity, income, and education, but also their values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. When it comes time to pick and choose your message to the right people you will have the right information you need to connect with them. Using this data will not only allow you to be efficient in your marketing and sales prospecting moving forward, but also make your marketing campaigns more effective, purposeful, engaging, relative, and deliberate.
Once you have the knowledge who your loyal buyers are then you can start marketing campaigns to their specific wants and needs. Having that clear understanding of who your customer is and where they want your relationship to progress to will be your greatest influence to your bottom line. So how do you build this sought after rapport that seems irreplaceable?
The simple answer is purposeful and valuable communication.
In other words, it’s having a touch sequence playbook. Remember that 80/20 rule we talked about early? That applies heavily here in the sense that your communication strategies should be mapped out to target that 20% of your most loyal and long lasting customers. In fact, if you develop marketing campaigns, you might notice that 20% of your marketing messages account for 80% of your campaign results.
With a robust touch sequence playbook that focuses on your segmented 20%, you will not only have the plan to communicate with your customers but you will know, based off of their relative demographics, psychographics, and the previous data you have collected from them, what they want to hear and why they want to communicate with you.
While knowing the target is crucial, it's also important to make sure that your touch sequence playbook has multiple points of touch. What we mean by that is that your best results are not going to come from a single interaction. Just like getting to know a person, building rapport takes time and effort- your marketing and communications campaigns need to reflect that! From articulating the value you are going to provide to illustrating the best applications of the product/service, your communication needs to go beyond just asking for a sale. This all needs to consistently provide value for the customer, but to use a music analogy, there are going to need to be multiple notes to create a masterpiece.
Depending on the characteristics of your business and your audience it also can be important to mix up the means of delivering your points of touch. Be sure to consider the limitations you have in your business when coming up with your strategy, but mixing up phone calls, emails, direct mail, website, and digital marketing can help strike a different chord with your audience. Measuring the data analytics from each medium will be what allows you to understand what is working best and doubling down on the approach that is leading to the best results.
Oak Street Associates specializes in helping clients design and execute a strategic communications playbook that is customized for the client’s business. If you need help getting started or optimizing the approach you are utilizing now, be sure to reach out today to schedule a free project consultation!