Right, enough of the preamble – you want to start off with your digital marketing plan – so here’s what I did (feel free to suggest any of the myriad improvements!)
The first thing you need to do is to discover who your most profitable customers are – discovering who they are allows you to focus on them. It’s also worth working out who your least profitable customers are as they’re the ones you want to avoid (the best marketing targets the good customers while subtly encouraging the worst types of customers to pop along to your competitors and destroy their business instead!)
So what does a good customer look like?
Well they’re the guys who:
- Place big, juicy orders
- High Margin orders
- Pay full price without negotiating discounts
- Don’t cancel or amend orders
- Pay on time
- Need little or no after sales service
- Are a growing company
Essentially, they are regular, loyal, high margin and hands-free customers. Note to self: we like these people.
And who’s a Baaaad Customer? Pretty much the opposite:
- No Loyalty
- Low margins
- Too expensive to service
- Haggle
- Payment delays
- Slow to make decisions
You might find it useful to break these two groups of good & bad down further into Sophisticated or Unsophisticated Customers. If they’re sophisticated it means they know/understand your product or service. If they’re unsophisticated, it means they don’t understand it and will probably rely on your expertise in order to guide them, thereby bringing you closer to these customers. The flip site of course is that they may be more expensive to service.
Doing this initial analysis allows you to get a first view on who the customers you’re wanting to ‘talk to’ are – so you can start to focus on them and not the bad guys.
I have an excel sheet that I used to track this data – and I’m happy to share it with anyone who gets in touch – just post directly or add a comment or get in touch via twitter.
DigitalMarketingVirgins 