Offline Marketers - Your ideal customer profile

The smartest thing you can do for your business, even before you begin it, is pick an ideal customer profile. By focusing in your mind and on paper who you want to go after in your business you eliminate waste and have a better understanding of who to listen to.

For offline marketing there are several schools of thought. Some say go after any local business, others say niche, still others sit on the sidelines and just watch.

My opinion - I only want to deal with people who have money. Funny I know but you see it everyday that there are people who try to get broke people to buy from. That's about as smart as going into a "going out of business sale" store and wanting to talk about their marketing options.

High priced items

If you had your choice between getting paid $1500 or $500 which would you choose? I'll take a wild guess and say you went with the first choice of $1500 because it is 3 times more than the second. Let me ask the same question another way - if you had to pick a business that could recoup your cost to them in 1 sale or 200 sales which would you prefer? Again I am guessing the first one.

When approaching businesses take a look at their average sale and what they make on it. If you go into a 99 cent store and are charging $1500 for a website it is pretty obvious that it is going to take 1500 sales (or about 3 a day) to break even with what the website cost. But if you go into a dentist office and see that it only takes one root canal to make the money back which one do you think you'll have an easier time selling?

That is why I like to deal with businesses that make it easy to justify the cost VS the benefits (ie .. if you only make X number of sales (less than 5) all year you'll still make money with the website).

So focus on bigger sale businesses - car dealerships, dentist, attorneys, plumbers, construction companies, etc.

Already doing some sort of advertising

Get out a phone book and go to any section in their. Lets take plumbers for example. In my phone book there are a ton of full page ads for plumbers. The same holds true for carpet cleaners. But when I go to other sections - accountants for example, there are just a few display ads (bigger ads) and a ton of just name, phone number, address ads.

What does this mean? If you find a section in the phone book that has a lot of display ads - you've hit paydirt. That means that this business is looking to attract new customers AND is willing to pay to get them. Guess what else they are prepared to do - PAY FOR ADVERTISING, like a website.

If there are a bunch of just basic ads, it normally means that they don't see advertising as necessary and it isn't worth their time or yours to try and change their opinion.

My wife to be says I would be a lousy preacher because I only want to preach to the converted - not the non believers. I'll let someone else educate them, I am here to help those who have already helped themselves.

So now you have your target market, you have picked out the guys who are selling higher priced items and already doing some form of advertising.

We'll cover the next part soon enough. Your homework for today is to think about what you want your ideal customer to look like - pick either by industry or geography. Next get out the phone book and start making a list of the businesses in your target area that are already doing some sort of display advertising.

More to follow ...