The good sales are the target of any successful and profitable business. Many criteria, such as competitive pricing, a perfect product or service, reach the target audience, effective advertising. The right target marketing or target audience is the solution.
The first step is the target audience. It is the major factor to increase your sales. Because if you can not reach the right customers you can not make sales. The right customers are known as targeted customers or niche market, those who will be happy to buy products that fulfill their needs.
You have to know their needs or problems and give them the best solutions.
Small businesses shouldn’t fear competition with large companies as their products considering a bigger market, which sometimes won’t be customer specific as the products are more generalized.
This gives an opportunity to the smaller business to produce products, which can cater to the need of a section of people whose needs aren’t met specifically by the large companies.
A business should understand who are the people they want to target. The success lies behind understanding this, which requires thorough research and analysis. Various factors must be considered. The age group is the first factor, whether the product will be useful to babies or children, teenagers or youngsters, middle-aged or old.
Sometimes there is a possibility that the product will cater to the needs of all age groups. Next thing to consider is gender. Marital status, occupation, ethnic background, health status, income status, education, hobbies, etc., are some of the factors that should also be pondered upon.
After decided upon the customer group to be targeted, the benefits that can be provided by the product to this group should be jotted down. A thorough examination of the service or product should be done for this purpose.
If there is sufficient time, a survey can be conducted on the current customers and pose them with questions like what they liked in the products they are using, anything discomfort they are facing, do they want anything to be changed to make the product better, etc.
After making a list of all the benefits, thought should be applied to which of these benefits will actually help the targeted audience. Make a short list of the benefits that will be advantageous and send it to the marketing department. It can surely help in their marketing plan and can boost up sales.
With search engines, you can reach the targeted customers pretty fast. Search engines can be utilized to the maximum extent for this purpose. The thing to be exactly searched can be typed as a keyword or search phrase in the search engines and the results brought on the first three pages will be of great value.
But lots of time and investment is involved in this process, as different keywords will fetch different search results. So efforts should be made to finally get what is desired.
Next, the best thing is reaching out by newsletters, a business blog, and ezines. Many ezines are related to marketing, finance, shopping, Internet, etc. A number of ezines websites can be found in an ezines directory, which even contains the contact information, advertising price, etc.
The list of ezines website sites should be cut down to which are relating to the target market and the ad should be placed in the ones selected which should include all the product advantages if the ad allows that many words.
Recognizing the target market is crucial to any successful advertising and sales campaign. Once it is recognized, they can be reached through different channels like websites, newspapers, magazines, etc.
This makes the customer think that he is being directly addressed to. And since the whole approach will interest them, the amount of traffic received in return will be simply overwhelming and the whole effort will be worth it.
Relationship Marketing
Relationship Marketing is targeted at building stronger and long-lasting relationships with clients and other companies. The business is done with a strategic orientation, where the relationship is improved with existing customers rather than finding new customers. Its major part involves studying the need of the customer and how it changes in different circumstances.
Relationship marketing applies techniques like marketing, sales, customer care, and communication. The relationship is not only enhanced but its life period is increased by these strategies. And as the customer realizes the value of the relationship, they are drawn closer.
This marketing not only focuses on building a relationship and attracting customers to their products and services but also how to retain them.
Over the period of time, various marketing strategies were improved and relationship marketing was one of them.
Relationship marketing is applicable where the customers have many options in the market for the same product or service and the customer is entitled to make a selection decision. In such a kind of market, businesses try to maintain their clients by providing comparatively better products and good service and hence, achieving customer loyalty.
The customer turnover wasn’t paid attention to as the main attention was on customer satisfaction. This kind of marketing was initially named as defensive marketing. Offensive marketing is the marketing strategy where not only new customers are attracted, but also the sales are stepped up by increasing the purchase frequency.
According to a research, the cost of retaining an old customer is only ten percent of the cost of getting a new customer, which makes sense to not to run around to get new customers in relationship marketing.
Another research, says that a five percent improvement in customer retention is responsible for twenty-five to eighty-five percent of the profit.
Usually, the high cost is incurred when getting new customers, so if a sufficient number of existing customers is retained, there will be no need of acquiring new customers.
Once the customer trust is gained his chances of switching to other company becomes relatively less, he buys goods in bulk, he buys other supplementary goods and he starts neglecting average price variation.
The existing customers will be like a living advertisement. If he is satisfied with the company he will recommend it to his friends and acquaintances.
The customers are divided into groups based on their loyalty. This procedure is known as the relationship ladder of customer loyalty. The groups in ascending order are prospects, customer, client, supporter, advocate, and partner.
Due to the advancement in computers and the Internet, the software has been developed to facilitate customer relationship management. With the help of this software, the activities, preferences, and complaints of customers are tracked.
Almost all the companies have this software in their marketing strategy, which benefits the customer as well as the company.
Thus the main aim of relationship marketing is to construct and maintain a relationship with committed clients who are meant to bring profit to the company.