Focus is such a fundamental principle of marketing, but many people struggle to get it right. We get distracted by the plethora of options available and instead of narrowing our focus to what’s most critical and discarding the unimportant things, we sometimes get hung up on minor details instead.
- Remember: to your customers, you represent one key thing. The important thing you need to ask yourself is what is the one key message you want to get across to your customers? Asking the following questions should help you to define the answer: What is the unique value that I deliver? When people think about my brand, what is the one thing I want them to remember about me?
- Do you know what your ideal customer looks like? So often we try to please everyone and be everything to everyone, but the more you are able to pinpoint exactly what your ideal customer looks like, the more you can focus your marketing attention to going out and getting those kinds of clients.
- How focused are your marketing strategies? We tend to spread our marketing budget over so many initiatives that we land up doing nothing properly. This actually means we’re diluting our impact. Instead, choose just one or two marketing initiatives that will give your marketing that extra ‘zing’ that it needs.
- Focus on where the money is. Have you recently done an analysis of where the money is in your business environment? In other words, think about how many products/ services you offer and where the greatest sales and margins are. Instead of flooding the market with your offerings, streamline them to get even better results.
- Be focused in your customer feedback mechanisms. It’s not actually necessary to do laborious market research or customer satisfaction surveys – there’s really only one question you need to ask your customers: would you recommend us? If the answer is no, you may have to go back to basics to understand what you need to fix to make them enthusiastic ambassadors for your brand.
- Touch base with your staff. Ask them just one question: What is the one thing that you would change around here to make it the best place to work?
This article first appeared on Entrepreneur www.entrepreneurmag.co.za