This sequence encourages you to explore relational marketing in-depth. The first post was about your vision or business purpose. These posts build into a questionnaire to help coaches, consultants and freelancers prepare their relational marketing strategy. If you want to understand your prospects, you need to understand your use of psychographics.
What are Psychographics?
We often think markets in terms of demographics, things like sex, age, race, location – all things most people are unable to do much about. Perhaps these are more accurately described as your niche. So, you may offer solutions to the problem of stress at work. Your market is naturally those who experience stress but you can choose your niche based on sex or location, etc.
Psychographics are a better way to describe your market, it’s desires, frustrations and personalities. There is a closer tie into your market through psychographics than demographics. (When you follow the second link, please note I did not use the word psychographics, using demographics to cover both demographics and psychographics. This is fairly common usage.)
Your Market
- Describe your market in terms of their psychographics. Consider their desires, frustrations, hopes, personalities, dreams, interests, career, culture, education.
- Do you use demographics, eg age, sex, location, etc to further niche your market? If so, why do this? Remember this is not necessarily wrong but it should be intentional.
- Prepare an avatar for your market. Focus on what they believe and why they believe it.
Finding Your Market
Be aware, often the best market is the one that finds you! You can anticipate the kind of people likely to be interested in your offer. You might decide to target business owners. As you find customers, work out what they have in common. Why have they chosen you?
Markets are in constant flux and people who choose you today may lose interest tomorrow. However, if you find people who know like and trust you, they are likely to listen to what you say. Be alert to changes among your followers and respond to them.
Never forget markets are communities. Consider how you can encourage conversations between your followers.
This is the second in a post sequence to help businesses reflect on their relational marketing. Sign up below to get a weekly round-up of posts and a pdf about how you can make sure you charge what your business is worth. Most weeks you will receive an email with useful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.