3 Simple Steps To Empower Your Small Business To Sell More
- Define Your Ideal Buyer
- Create Content That Empowers Your Buyer
- Ensure The Right People Are Finding Your Empowering Content
1. Define Your Ideal Buyer
If you completed your business assessment, then you have already made some work on this step. Your ideal buyer is a well defined description of the people who are best suited to glean the most value from your solution. As a small business especially, this step is very important because a detailed buyer persona will allow you to be very concentrated in your outreach which can help you focus your team, budget and marketing initiatives to meet your business goals while staying within the limits of your small business budget.
The best way to develop an ideal buyer profile, is to interview the ideal buyers you already have to find similarities in the demographic data and the problems they use your solution to solve. If you are a startup without a core set of ideal customers or you are launching a new product or service you can use a brainstorm session or role play exercise to try to get to the real source of your customers’ problems and why they need you.
How To Define Your Ideal Buyer Without Customer Interviews
- List The Characteristics Of Your Product Or Solution.
You want to list all of your selling your points. This is great whiteboard exercise with your marketing, sales and customer success teams.
- Define The “Why” For Each Characteristic And Keep Asking Why Until You Get To The Real Problem
The real problem is almost never the first answer to why someone would use your solution and your solution likely solves multiple buyers’ problems. For example, a cup of coffee can solve your buyer’s problem of a headache or having a night of broken sleep. Similarly, a rug can solve a problem of cold feet or an uninspiring office space. Buyers can be consciously or unconsciously aware of the problem they are trying to solve for but as your organization’s revenue team you need to be acutely aware of the problems you can effectively solve.
- Define The Types Of People Who May Have The Problems You Can Solve
This is the demographic information. Since you don’t have customer data to compare yet, you will need to guess and test on this front. If we were to paint a picture of a buyer solving for a night of broken sleep with a coffee purchase then we may picture a young mom with a newborn or infant with colic that is not sleeping well. We can make demographic assumptions that your ideal buyer is female, between the ages of 18-35, and recently had a baby. Similarly, your buyer in this situation could be a proposal writer or business developer who was up most of the night putting the finishing touches on a government RFP. Your solution can likely solve the same problem for many different types of people. In this step it is your job to list out as many scenarios as possible.
- Test The Market Size Of Your Ideal Buyer
Once you have your problems and the different types of people you could be solving these problems for, you want to determine if your market size is large enough to sustain your business while still being hyper focused. To gain an idea of the size, take the demographic information you have brainstormed and plug that into Facebook ads, add in any location restrictions (such as a physical coffee shop address), and see what your estimated reach is. Record all of this information and then evaluate if any of these focused markets is large enough for your revenue goals. For example, if you have 10 “moms” near your coffee shop location but you have 5,000 “proposal writers” it would seem that focusing your effort around the “proposal writers” will allow for a more sustainable revenue flow than focusing your team’s time toward attracting the “moms” group.
- Decide On Your Ideal Buyer
By this point, you have talked through what makes your product great, you have described the different people who can help and you know an estimate of your market size; now you need to decide who you should focus on. Keep in mind, this decision should be on finding the narrowest group of people that is large enough to sustain your business goal. Remember, if you did the KPI assessment, you know exactly how many people you need to hit your revenue goals so match up a market size that is still higher than your session goals and you will be able to develop a personalized relationship with your buyers that is sure to produce results.
Need Help Understanding Your Ideal Buyers?
2. Create Content That Empowers Your Buyer
Think about your last purchase, more likely than not one or more aspects of the buying process probably occurred online. You may have:
- Seen an ad on Facebook for something you didn’t know you wanted or even needed but it stirred an interest
- Searched for a solution to your problem on Google
- Saw a company review or brand shout out in an Instagram story
This is content that empowers a buyer. You can spark awareness of a problem your buyer didn’t even know existed, you can offer solutions when they search for an answer and you can provide confidence in your brand; all by creating content that empowers.
To do this, you need to sketch out your buyer’s journey from the period before they even knew there was a problem to the moment they chose you and beyond. Here’s an example, using our coffee scenario:
| Buyer’s Journey | |
|---|---|
| Ideal Buyer | A coffee lover working in the DC area that works long hours developing business through expertly crafted proposals. |
| Awareness Stage | Messaging in this stage should appeal to the desire for energy and how to find the focus and stamina you need to power through work after that long business lunch or into the late evening. |
| Consideration Stage | Messaging in this stage should focus on quality coffee as the best solution and how to find the right beverage for you. |
| Decision Stage | Messaging in this stage should reinforce why your coffee was the best solution. Leveraging visual testimonials of other business people reinforces that this was the best choice and it has placed you in this network of like-minded individuals just trying to grow their careers. |
Now that you understand the messaging for each stage, starting brainstorming content ideas to match it. The best ways to generate ideas if you feel stuck is to use AnswerthePublic.com and Google’s autocomplete and people also ask options.
Here are some examples:
- Awareness Content
- 5 Ways To Stay Energized At Work After Lunch
- How To Maintain Focus To Meet Tight Deadlines
- The Good, Bad and Ugly Of Pulling An All-Nighter In Business
- Consideration Content
- Business Tip Of The Day (Provided by customers and includes their name, job title, company and unique coffee choice)
- 5 Coffee Blends That Provide Long-Lasting Energy
- Why Does Coffee Provide Energy
- Coffee Quiz: How To Find Your Perfect Brew
- Decision Content
- Company Spotlight (Local contractors and companies that bring your coffee baristas in for their employees)
- 5 Reasons Why A Coffee Subscription or Delivery Service May Be Best For You
You may notice that the content seamlessly moves from the problem to your unique solution and ultimately to offering ways to keep you as a long-lasting customer. This is how content can empower your buyer. One important thing to note is that this list took about 5 minutes to create, now imagine how much value you can offer your narrow customer list if you take more time to consider all the ways you can help them move from problem to solution.
3. Ensure The Right People Are Finding Your Empowering Content
All the empowering content in the world means nothing if your ideal buyers can’t find it. There are four main platforms that people will find your content today:
- Web Search
- Social Media
- Push notifications
As a small business, the easiest way to gain focused awareness is to leverage your knowledge of your ideal buyer with social media ads. Facebook, specifically, organizes their advertising options by Awareness, Consideration and Purchase so you can easily start applying the content you created for each stage to the appropriate ad component to start driving the right traffic to your content. Additionally, you can use their extensive targeting options to target by your customers’ demographic information and interests.
You can also take traffic from these sources and create remarketing lists so you can expand you targeting to Google AdWords.
Once you have traffic to your content, try to collect email information and gain allowance to push notification so you can consistently send more valuable information to your ideal buyers as they journey with you.
How Does This Empower Your Marketing And Sales Teams?
Hopefully, the outline above seemed simple but you may be thinking so what about my marketing and sales teams how does this actually empower them? The simplicity of your ideal buyer and providing them the right content is also the simplicity that will empower your teams. Marketing is equipped with a targeted buyer that they can advertise to and focused language to use in all of the marketing materials they create. Sales is equipped with a deep knowledge of their buyer’s problems and has the content they need to reference to their buyers’ through their journeys. This deep understanding also allows both team to be more empathetic to their buyers and naturally provide better a delightful buyer’s experience.
What Happens After You Create A Plan To Find The Right Buyers With The Right Content?
You have found a path for empowering you buyers with the right content and have equipped your marketing and sales teams on how to use it, now you need to work on reducing areas of friction.
