407: Rethinking Marketing Strategies- with Lorraine Ball

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Social Capital Podcast is sponsored by Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency that believes in order to successfully market to your ideal customer, you have to first understand your customer. Learn more about Keystone Click at KeystoneClick. com.

Today's guest is Lorraine Ball. After spending too many years in corporate America, Lorraine said goodbye to the bureaucracy, glass ceilings, and bad coffee to follow her passion to help small business owners succeed.

Today, this successful entrepreneur, author, professional speaker, enjoys sharing what she knows about marketing and presentations to groups around the country, in college classrooms, and in her weekly podcast, More Than a Few Words. She brings creative ideas, practical tips, and decades of real world experience to every conversation.

Lorraine, welcome.

The first is who is your customer? For a campaign to really be effective, you got to go narrow, really, really narrow. And I know that you have lots of different customers. But if you want this campaign to work, pick a target and really embrace them. The second is who is your competitor? And even the most innovative product or service has competitors.

The day before you launched your business, guess what? Your customers had a problem and someone was helping them solve it. And so you need to look much broader and really figure out who you're competing with so you can craft that message. And the third thing is, why this campaign? What's your objective?

Not all campaigns have the same objective. Maybe you want to grow sales. Maybe you want to grow sales of a particular product. Maybe you want to increase the total dollar amount of your sale. Maybe you want to reach a particular audience, existing customers, new customers. And depending on what that objective is, it's going to change your overall strategy.

So get those three questions right and you're kind of on your way.

The first are what I call tier one. These are people that do exactly what you do. For example, you're a marketing consultant. I'm a marketing consultant. If we were operating in the same market, we would be tier one competitors. We're offering essentially the same solution, but there's a business coach over there.

They don't really do any marketing, but if a business owner wakes up one morning and says, you know what? I want to grow my business. He might work with you as a marketing consultant and he might work with that business coach over there. Totally different services solving the same problem. And so you need to look at those tier twos. And then there are tier threes.

And tier threes are really hard sometimes because they don't look like you and they don't solve the same problem, but they're competing for the same dollars. You know, one of my favorite examples was when I was in the heating and air conditioning business, we were working with a builder and he had agreed to buy our equipment for every home he was building.

So we weren't competing with any other heating and air conditioning company. But if you've ever bought a home, you go through that or if you've ever built a home, there's that moment where you decide, do I do the basic carpeting or the upgrade, the basic faucets or the upgrade, that and there's always an upgrade and we had an upgrade.

And in that, in that market, we couldn't talk about how much better than another manufacturer we were in air conditioning because we already had the sale. We needed to explain why an investment in a high efficiency air conditioner would serve you better in the long run than the carpet that your kids were going to spill grape juice on the first week you owned it.

Yep. So those are kind of those three categories. And as you look at your business, Some businesses are going to have more competitors in one, in one category than another, but you got to figure out who were you really selling against in order to sell effectively.

Yeah. You know, if that's, what's hot in that town in that moment. So you can't really define your competitors until you go back to step number one, and figure out who is your customer, what's important to them, and that will help you figure out who you're competing with.

You wouldn't even think about it. If I put a five pound weight, you're going to have to kind of, you know, prepare yourself a little bit. And a 10 pound weight, you're going to get your whole hand under there and you're going to lift. If I'm putting 20 or 30 or 40 pounds, well, you know, two hands, knees, take care of my back. 50 pounds, I'm going to call somebody else and say, do me a favor, dude, lift that for me.

And the same is true for your marketing. Are you trying to increase your sales 5 percent or 50%? As you figure that out and how long you're willing to let this go, it's going to change how aggressively you have to be in the marketplace around this campaign. And also, are you trying to re engage existing customers or are you looking for new customers?

Well, that's going to change where you put your money. If you have a strong customer base and you want to reach new customers, a referral program might be a way better investment than Facebook ads. And so your objective, what are you trying to do? Where are you starting is going to change how much you spend, how quickly you spend it, which medium you work with.

If you're looking for a referral program, Facebook can be great. LinkedIn can be great. If you've got those existing customers and those testimonials and case studies. If you're trying to introduce a completely new product, you might need Facebook ads or Google ads, and you might need to do something completely out of the box.

So just because another company up the street is doing sponsoring a Little League team and you guys do exactly the same thing does not mean you should sponsor a Little League team too. Not going to have anything against Little League. Don't don't want the baseball moms coming after me.

Not necessarily what your competitors are doing. Yeah, I see a lot of companies, especially small companies like to do the competing against the Joneses type of thing, but in the business sense.

We need new customers. So let's do this, or we need more referrals, or we need to re engage our existing customers, or you know what? This one product used to be really good for us. Let's give it one more push to see if we can reignite it, or maybe we retire it. Yeah. And so you have to be constantly evaluating, where are we?

Who do we want to sell to? What else is going on out there? And then what do we want to accomplish?

So I would, I would definitely do that. And I would tell, I would tell myself at every age, travel more. Don't be afraid to walk away from your business or your job for those one and two weeks and see the world and have those experiences and catch your breath.

Just because you sell widgets, doesn't mean that ideal customer is searching for widgets or looking for a widget provider, they're speaking in a completely different language, not even knowing that a widget is a solution for their problem. So you have to understand their language and their perspective.

And I think that is like the biggest pain point that I see when talking to someone that, you know, getting started in their marketing is really understanding how their customer is thinking about the problem that they have that you can sell for.

And really think about, they don't know what you do, they just know that this hurts. When they go to Google, what are they typing in? What are they asking? What are they, what are they asking their neighbors?

Is there anything buried way down under all that junk that's worth bringing back out? And what do you change to stay one step ahead of your competitors and still stay true to you?

If you have a burning marketing or relationship question, reach out. I'd love to answer it on the show. And as mentioned before, let's connect on LinkedIn, connect with me, connect with Lorraine, we're both eager and excited to hear from you. All right. I hope you enjoyed today's show. Now go out there and get noticed.