Week 2

Week 2: Defining Your Customer

Looking for last week’s lesson? Week 1

 

The best marketers consistently ask the same questions: What is the problem I am solving? Who is the customer I am serving? Where is that customer?

It is easy to rush into something without stopping to define who exactly needs your product or service.

Even I get it wrong sometimes…

A few weeks ago at AppSumo, we emailed out a pre-sale email to 20,000 people for KingSumo.com.

We were testing copy and prices for the new tool that automatically optimizes WordPress headlines.

This tool has literally made at least $100,000 for AppSumo on our own website, and we expected it to sell like Taco Deli tacos (that’s really good, btw).

Guess how many people bought from that email blast?

3 people. WTF?!?

That’s a .015% conversion rate and a total of $27 a month in revenue we generated.

Okay, raise the flag. AppSumo and our entire business is going down in flames! Anyone hiring?

We resent the email a week later and sold over 300 licenses. Right now it is selling around 5 a day at $99, for a total of about $40,000 in revenue in the past 2 weeks.

So, what changed?

We figured out WHO are customers were and the EXACT problem they were facing.

Through “safe” stalking, we found that our ideal customers have blogs that generate valuable leads and / or enough advertising revenue to generate spending money on growing their blog.

We started looking at the 3 people who bought after the first pre-sale email to truly get in their heads.

Jackpot!

We spent the time to know exactly who our customers are and what problems they face.

As a result we found three key things that had been missing in our original email:

1- Lifetime payment for small sites. Larger more profitable sites could afford subscriptions and justify the ROI. Smaller sites needed an easier pricing decision. To sell to them, we found out even our $9 / month option wasn’t appealing so we let them use the tool at a higher price, forever.

2- SEO. We discovered that SEO was a huge concern. The people who chose not to buy and use the Headlines tool were concerned that it would negatively affect SEO. On the landing page, we clearly addressed the SEO question and alleviate the fear our customers had.

3- Profitable blogs. We thought everyone with a blog would want the tool. We underestimated the extreme value the tool offered to people who got valuable leads from their blog or their advertising revenue paid salaries. This helped us narrow our appeal to the customers who we knew could see the ROI right away.

Changing these three elements changed the success of our marketing.

The more narrow and defined your customer base is, the easier it’ll be for you to find and sell to them.

Last week you decided your 90 day goal and created your Quant Based Marketing.

Most companies struggle with marketing since they try to appeal to a person who doesn’t care for the proposed solution. That won’t be you!

This week you will make sure you know who your exact customer is.

Week 2 Task

Grab the top 10 emails of your favorite customers (or top spenders). If you don’t have customers, make a list of 10 people you believe would be your ideal customers.

1) Search each customer’s email address on Facebook.

2) Fill out this spreadsheet from their profile info (like this):

Name, Age, Location, Gender, Websites, Books, Groups
Tyler Vawser, 28, NYC, Male, Farnam Street / Billguard, Amazon.com

Use this Google spreadsheet OR download it directly from OkDork.

Note: If there’s not enough in Facebook, look at the person’s domain name, their profile on LinkedIn, or who they follow and what they share on Twitter.

You are looking for patterns.

Your ideal customer should be very specific.

So many people don’t want to be SILO’D.

Would you rather be silo’d or solo? 🙂

Every company starts niche:

  • Facebook, yup. Just Harvard.
  • Google, yup. Just Stanford research nerds.
  • Microsoft, yup. Nerd Developers.

Build your foundation and then you can build out.

You should be able to describe your customer in exactness as:

Specific gender
Age range (25-30)
Which state / country do they live in?
What are there 3 favorite websites to learn about businesses like yours?
What do they do for a living?
Which company they work at?
What problem you are solving for them?

For Kingsumo.com Headlines tool, the exact answers are:

Male
30-35
San Francisco, CA
GrowthHackers.com, Inbound.org, ConversionXL.com
Conversion optimizer
GainInsight

Their blog gets them leads that are worth $100 a month. Having their blog get 20% more traffic a month is worth the $100 for KingSumo.com.

Once you know what their problem is, who they are and where they are online, the rest is easy. It always sounds easy!

Don’t forget the WoW formula.

What’s the problem you are solving
whO’s the person that really has that problem?
Where are those people?

Imagine you knew all your exact customers hung at this one place. Wouldn’t it be much easier just to go right there and serve them up?

That’s what we’ll be doing over the next 10 weeks.

3) Leave a very specific comment about:

a) WHAT problem you are solving for them
b) WHO your customer is
c) The #1 niche website WHERE your customers spend time on

The person who leaves our favorite comment, will have their website emailed out to all 12,000+ of you next week 🙂

 

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