How to Survive Targeting the Wrong Customer (and Other Crafting Your Offer Tips)

Small businesses that want to succeed must cut through the vast array of options and make the right decisions about what they should do next.  Businesses that make better decisions faster, grow faster and more efficiently.

Making the right decisions also enables you to speed up the growth of your business.  This means that with all that’s happening online, business owners should resist the temptation to get distracted by bright shiny objects and not forget about the successful marketing they’ll need to have in place.

If that’s not enough, things are so competitive in the world today that it has become much easier for customers to shop around.  And since they expect more, it’s even more essential for you to remain focused on solving their problems.

Looking for ways to solve the problems of your ideal customer, enables you to understand them better than ever before.  And by knowing your customer, you can deliver what they want so it will encourage them to continue buying on a frequent basis.  But not forgetting that while you’re engaging them, you must continually treat them with the utmost of respect by continually adding value into their lives.

Crafting Your Offer

You must give your ideal target market a reason to consider your offer, if you don’t they will make their decision based on price.  After all if vendor A sells his apples for $1 and vendor B sells the same apples for $1.50 whose apples would you buy based on this information?

Consumers are faced with such choices on a regular basis. This is why it’s essential that you create an offer that is exciting and radically different from your competitors. If you don’t, your ideal customers will make choices based purely on price.

Here are two great questions to think about when you’re crafting your offer:

1. Of all the products and services you offer, which one gives you the most confidence that it will deliver?  This is to say, if you only got paid when a client achieved their desired result, what product or service would you offer?  If phrased another way, what problem are you sure you could solve for a member of your target market?

1. Of all the products and services you offer, which do you enjoy delivering the most?

Other questions that can help in crafting your offer:

Marketing campaigns fail because of lazy and poorly thought out offers.  The offer is one of the most important parts of your marketing campaign and you need to spend the time and energy on structuring it the right way.

Meeting the Wants and Needs of your Target Market

You want to avoid the mistake of putting the right offer in front of the wrong people and the wrong offer in front of the right people.  This is why you must identify a specific target market for your marketing efforts.

Once you’ve laid the groundwork, you need to structure an offer that will stand out from all the boring and lazy offers of your competitors so that prospects would whip out their wallets and buy.

You can also find out what your prospects want by simply ASKING them.  This can be done through a survey or through more formal market research. Be aware that most people don’t know what they want until they’ve actually been presented with it.  When people respond to a survey or to market research, they do it through logic; however, when they actually buy, it’s done with emotions and justified with logic after the purchase.

Henry Ford is quoted as saying: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

You can do market research by analyzing what your target market are actually buying or looking for.

To find what your target market is buying, you can keep an eye out for products and categories that are trending on marketplaces like Amazon and EBay.

You can also do search engine analysis through Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool.  You can also see what topics are trending on social media and industry news sites.  What are people commenting on and reacting to?

By using these tools you get a glimpse into the global consciousness and it gives you a good idea of what is currently in demand and being talked or thought about.

Give Them An Irresistible Offer

Once you know what your target market wants, you need to package it up and present it as an irresistible offer.  Here are the elements that make up such an offer:

Value: Think about what is the most valuable thing you could do for your customers?  What result will take them from point A to point B that you can take them through while making a good profit?

Language: If you’re not a part of your target market, take the time to learn the language and jargon used within that market.  If you’re selling golf clubs you will need to speak their language by using terms like “hooks,” “slices” and “handicaps.”

Have A Why: When your offer is great, you need to justify why you’re doing what you do.  People are tired of being short-changed and when someone makes a strong, value-filled offer, they become skeptical and look for the catch.

Don’t fabricate reasons for your offer but be ready to have a solid reason why you’re offering a great deal, e.g. clearing old stock, damaged inventory, overstock, moving your office or warehouse, etc.

Stacking Value: Pack in many bonuses to your offer because this can dramatically increase conversions.  It’s a good idea to make the bonuses more valuable than the main offer.  Infomercials do a great job at this: “We’ll Double Your Offer,” “That’s Not All…” etc.

Upsells:  We’ll talk more on upsells later.  When you have a hot prospect in a buying frame of mind, this is the perfect time to offer them a complimentary product or service.  With upsells you have the opportunity to tack on a high margin item even if the primary product you are selling is low margin.  It’s the fries with the burger, the extended warranty, the car rustproofing.  It gives the customer added value and gives you more profit per transaction.

Payment Plan: This is good for ultra-high-ticket items and can mean the difference between the customer balking and walking away or making the sale.

If something is $5,000 and you give prospects the chance of paying 12 easy payments of $497, it makes it much easier for them pay.  This is because people think of their expenses on a monthly basis and $497 per month feels much easier that $5,000 in one lump sum. When you do the math, 12 X $497 adds up to more that $5,000.  In fact, it makes it almost $6,000.  The first reason to do this is to cover the cost of you financing the sale.

Secondly, it gives you the ability to give those who pay in a lump sum an incentive where they receive a “discount” for paying upfront.

Guarantee:  An outrageous guarantee reverses the risk of doing business with you.  People have been disappointed too many times that they might not trust any of the claims you make.  So you need to make it where dealing with you is a risk-free transaction.  In their minds, you’re placing the risk on you should you fail to deliver on your promises.

Scarcity: Your offer needs to have an element of scarcity to encourage people to respond immediately.  People respond much more to fear of loss than the prospect of gain. When using this approach you also need a good “reason why” the scarcity exists as you don’t want to be disingenuous with your scarcity claims.

Limited supply, limited time, limited resources are examples of scarcity that give your marketing an advantage.  Having a running countdown clock or available stock can further turn up the heat on the fear of loss emotion.

As you’ve seen there are many moving parts to crafting a compelling offer.  So take the time to craft a compelling, well thought out offer.  This will cause your conversion rate and bottom line to skyrocket.