Know Your Customers!!
Do You REALLY Know Who They Are?
Michael P. Libbie, Insight Advertising, Marketing & Communications
Well...last week we must have hit a nerve with some folks when we posted "Stow the Shotguns" a blog about the rifle approach to advertising and marketing vs. the shotgun approach. If you want to read the original post and comments...just click and go. But come back...we've got a Guest Blog here.
I've known Joe Baitinger for years, as a matter of fact, Joe once worked for us. He asked if he could write something...and we said sure. Keeps me off the keyboard for a day!
Here's Joe:I was in an Iowa Jaycee professional development seminar recently and the presenter, Matt Booth made a comment that struck home for me: If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter what road you're on. How often do we as agri-marketers or manufactures truly take time to analyze who buys our products/reads our blogs/sees our TV ads so that we can plan where we want to go? If you haven't done so recently, you could be wasting thousands of dollars trying to reach people that have no interest/need for your products...simply because of the clichés "If it ain't broke--don't fix it." or "I'm too busy selling/manufacturing to make any changes to my advertising." There are two basic types of marketing: Mass Marketing and Direct Marketing. However to be effective using either method, you need to know who you want to target. Simply saying "farmers are my customers" won't cut it anymore. There are only 1 million +/- agricultural producers in the United States but there is a HUGE difference in the needs of small farmers versus large farmers both in product usage and their buying habits. As you prepare your next campaign here are three basic steps to help in your planning whether you do the work in house, or hire the expertise of an agency such as Insight Advertising, Marketing & Public Relations. Step 1: Understand that no advertising, direct mail or trade show operates within a vacuum. EVERYTHING you and your company does will affect your results, so it is very difficult to measure based on a single direct mail piece or print advertisement. Step 2: Identify qualified prospects--that is someone that looks most like your current customers. This can be easily accomplished by conducting a demographic profile of your current customers. If you're not set up to track this internally, there are several vendors that can perform this service including Farm Market iD Step 3: Plan your marketing campaign to reach those qualified prospects. If you find that you sell equal amounts to all sized farmers, than mass media is a great alternative for the lions' share of your advertising budget. However, if you find that 80% of your sales come from farmers with 500+ acres, does it make sense to invest the bulk of your advertising budget in mass marketing when they are only 25% of all farmers? Robert Frost may have suggested taking the road less traveled, but if that road leads to the Canadian Yukon, it doesn't help you're supposed to be in Florida.
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