Three Keys That Unlock Business Momentum
Most businesses or organizations start with a unique idea, a passion, or a perceived need as a spark to ignite their enterprise. Sometimes just simply appearing and setting up shop in the right time and place is enough to create success.
I recall a company I worked with recently that experienced early success with their technology. They were extremely competent at producing their process. Because they experienced early success, they were of the misguided belief that all they had to do was hang their sign and answer the telephone. This worked well for a brief amount of time. After a while the phone quit ringing. What happened? Success brings attention and creates fertile ground for competitors. The company in question was so convinced their offering was right on the mark they didn’t take the time to see if they were meeting the needs of the customer.
The point is: Knowing your craft and doing it well is a baseline building block for laying the groundwork for success and growth. In fact, this is the first key of unlocking the momentum that creates dynamic sustainable growth.
Key #1 What do you do?
Perhaps it is too obvious to say that it is important to have definable skill sets, ideas, and processes underpinning your enterprise. It does not necessarily mean you have to have a world-shaking invention. Rather it is essential that you can provide a clear and explainable description of what you are offering.
You should have a solid understanding of your profession in such a way that you can succinctly provide a description of your enterprise and offering. This is most often called the “elevator speech”. In essence, in one paragraph you should be able to provide a high-level explanation of what you do.
By understanding the fundamentals of your organization, definable products or services will emerge. These are the tangible unique offerings that form benefits. It is important to make these distinctions between what you do and what you offer in order to fully utilize the second key.
Before we go there, let’s look at one more aspect of Key #1 What Do You Do. You may have heard the saying “If you can’t measure it, then it is just practice.” There are various versions of that statement you may have heard. The question to ask yourself for this discussion is; what does success look like?
I think it would be fair to say that anyone who engages in a profession wants to be successful at it. Perhaps for a business, success might be measured by profitability. An organization might measure success by the size of membership. Or an association would consider it a success to see increasing momentum towards a goal. The points of measurement can vary, but the common thread hinges on active participation of people beyond yourself.
This leads us to the second key.
Key #2 Who would your offer benefit?
Like the company I spoke of in the beginning of this article, sometimes an organization can become so focused on what is exciting and relevant to themselves only to miss the people needed to participate in making it work. Your customer might not share that same exuberance as you.
Armed with knowledge of Key#1 you should ask yourself: Who is the right fit for the product or service we are offering? That requires you to step away from your product and look back at it through the eyes of the person you perceive is best suited to benefit from it. The operative word here is “benefit”. Merriam Webster defines benefit as “something that produces good or helpful results or effects or that promotes well-being.” They go on to use the word “advantage”.
It may seem too much trouble to go through this exercise of understanding your prospective clients. Stick with it. By defining and understanding who your likely beneficiaries are, your offering can create a powerful approach that will set the stage. This will lead to cost effective marketing techniques and produce the results that will satisfy your measure of success.
Reading minds is not an option. This means a reasonably accurate understanding of your future client will involve a process of investigating, learning, trial and error endeavors. For this to be effective, this process should be an on-going discipline. Seeing through your client’s eyes is essentially a universal principle for healthy business growth.
There are entire sciences devoted to the study of human behavior. As these principles become more essential to your business growth, there will be no shortage of services that can produce the information to further fine-tune your marketing approaches.
The task is to create a framework (often referred to as “Persona”) by which you can organize observations and understand the individual or organization’s interests. The idea of a Persona is to identify a grouping of people who have something in common to one another. The challenge is to create a description of the ideal person within a category. Once that is accomplished then determine the benefit from your offering.
By selecting three to four general Persona groupings, you can create the ability to understand key “pain points” and motivators that are specific to each grouping. As we have been discussing, it becomes more effective to address their need and provide the benefit they gain from your offering.
Alright then, we know what we do, we know what we offer, and we know who will benefit. How then do we proceed?
Key #3 Why would they select you?
I know I am guilty of this. Perhaps you are to. We have a great offering, and we know who the ideal person would be. It feels good, it feels right, and we believe it is a good fit. Why should “they” care?
Many times, it could be as simple as they do not know you exist. Or more pointedly, they do not understand that you have something that provides a solution to a challenge they are facing.
This is where marketing can really shine. The digital medium provides a cost effective and controllable environment to really dial in and refine your understanding of the client and test your offering on how it aligns with individual needs of the customer who would benefit.
Here are some words of wisdom relative to this discussion from Jodi Harris, director of content strategy at Informa Connect: “Without personas, you may only be guessing what content your audience wants, which means you are more likely to revert to creating content around what you know best (your products and company) instead of around the information your audience is actively seeking.”
Marketing messages are most powerful when they produce a tangible benefit to the reader. By using the digital mediums (website, social media, publications, etc.) as a testing lab, it is possible to measure effectiveness of various campaign approaches. Using this technique, you can refine both your Persona as well as provide direction for an expanded marketing campaign that may involve more activities beyond the digital medium. The knowledge gained from measured digital messaging can provide ideas and guidance for activities such as point-of-sale, events, print, and broadcasting mediums.
When considering developing a Persona framework I am reminded of the movie A River Runs Through It. There is the scene where Brad Pitt’s character is fly fishing with his brother in their special location on the river. Brad was producing results where his brother was not. They were both there at the right place at the right time, but the difference was knowing what fly was working. Developing an accurate picture of your client segment will require time spent, observing, and gathering information.
The focus is to develop messaging that is of interest to the viewer that will resonate and create an action. However, it is as important to be in the right location with the right tools in order to deliver the message that provokes the desired response. Digital tools that are readily available and are cost effective are websites, social media, email, e-publications. These methods are excellent places to develop the exact message needed. Digital vehicles can stand alone in function. However, the power is in using combinations that run a unified and refined campaign employing the proven message.
Improving the accuracy of your Persona modeling will translate into increasing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It is important to understand that each Persona will evolve over time. To begin with, you may have an intuitive knowledge through direct contact with existing clients. Discussions with peers, and related association studies can add to the Persona detail. From this understanding, a more targeted series of marketing campaigns can be enacted.