Know Your Computer Consulting Clients

admin    Web Marketing     Clients, Computer, Consulting, Know

Know Your Computer Consulting Clients

If your marketing does not seem to be working it is likely because you don’t know your prospects as well as you should.

In order to market effectively you have to understand specifically who your audience is and how to get your message to them directly. There are many details about your prospects you should know. Missing just one minor nuance could spell disaster to your entire marketing campaign.

A common mistake I see is that business owners make assumptions about their prospects and then base their entire campaigns around these assumptions. Also, since they don’t do any research or attempt to find out details about their prospects, they tend to have a generalized view of who they are marketing too and this leads to generalized marketing campaigns (which are never effective).

You will not be effective marketing your business if you generalize. When you generalize, you fail to speak directly to a particular audience, and as a result, NO ONE will listen to what you have to say.

Whether you are just starting out or you have an existing business, it is very important that you know the demographics and psychographics of your clients.

Demographics are all the tangible details about your clients: Age range, sex, income, education, # of children, own or rent, etc.

Psychographics are all the intangible details revolving around your clients likes and dislikes: interests, hobbies, places to hang out, favorite websites, businesses frequented, etc.

When you are just starting out and don’t have any past experience to base your answers off of, you’ll want to talk with potential clients and find out first hand details about their lives. You may also need to make educated guesses on certain categories and then update/tweak your answers after you get some experience with clients. You should make it a practice to always be re-evaluating your clients, your understanding of your clients, and your marketing. Constant tweaking will make your business efficient and adaptable.

To start, you’ll want to pick a target group that you want to service. Based on your judgement of your area, pick a target market that is in abundance. Are there more middle class, suburban, families in your area? Are there more small businesses? Are there older folks with lower income? Maybe you live by a huge wealthy community?

Decide which target market in your area you want to focus your business around based on what services you are planning on offering. If you start out offering virus removal, you will be most valuable to families with children. Children are major culprits to downloading viruses by mistake. If you start out offering network security and maintenance, you will be most valuable to small businesses with 3+ machines.

Evaluate where your strongest networking connections are in your community and what target market you think you’d have the easiest time breaking into.

After you decide who you want to target, you’ll want to talk with at least 5 or 6 people in that target market and ask them questions ranging from what kind of computer and how many computers they have, what software they use, what tasks they use their computer for (personal, work from home, etc.), what magazines they read, what websites they frequent, how much money they make, whether they are religious or not, what there hobbies are, etc. You’ll want to gauge the questions as you go. If a prospect seems to not feel comfortable sharing information about income, that’s ok. You could instead ask what income bracket
they fall into (e.g. – under k, k – k, k – 0k, etc.). They may feel more comfortable with that.

The more people you talk to, the more common trends you’ll see. You may also learn information you were not expecting. For instance, perhaps you will find out they go to the same church, or maybe love the same hobbies. Any characteristics that are commonly shared will give you more insight into who these people are, what is important to them, and what motivates them to buy. This will start to give you tons of places you can start marketing that you may never have imagined on your own.

This will also make your marketing more effective because you’ll know exactly who you want to get your message to, how to get your message to them, and what to say.

If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it!