Need a Plan for Content Marketing? Start by Talking to Your Best Customers

The best way to grow your sales is to figure out your best customers and “clone” them—that is, find other customers that are just like them in terms of needs, buying habits, and so on.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that you find customers in the same industry. Or that are the same size. (See my earlier piece on knowing who your customers really are.) It means that you need to learn what brought your best customer to you and seek to replicate that process. Doing so will help focus your marketing strategy like a laser—and help you save budget.

I can prove that by sharing the story of how I talked my agency out of a substantial contract—and was proud to do so.

It started with a client who was engaging us for both blog content and social media content plus management. The social media contract was a lucrative one. But after a few quarters, we felt like progress was slow, and it was unclear how much business was coming in.

Flip to an unrelated call I was having with this client. They had begun to ask questions about what methods would work, what were considered best practices, and so on. Questions like “Should we be investing more in social media? Or less? And should we be running more email campaigns? What about guest blogging—would that work?”

Now, I knew that my team and I could handle any and all of the above. I could have easily said “Yes, do more, and we can help!” to each of those questions. But instead, I was honest. I said “I don’t know what will work because I don’t know which is the best way to reach the customers you really want.”

I then suggested something both radical and simple: That we talk to their top ten clients and find out the answers. Ask them, straight out, what works for them. Do they read email? Do they hang out on social media for work purposes? Which social media sites do they frequent? What kind of articles do they read? How do they find vendors in this area? How are purchase decisions made?

(BTW, those meetings became the forerunner of what is now our Triangulate service. We still ask many of these same questions!)

After talking with several of their customers, we got some pretty surprising results. The first was this: The decision-makers were more or less dead set against social media. A lot of these people were in IT, and were worried (rightly so!) about data privacy and cybersecurity. And even when they were on social media, it was solely to stay connected to family. In short: Social media was a terrible way to reach these folks. The only people talking about the industry on social media were other marketers trying to do the same thing we were.

And just like that—there went our social media contract.

But we also found some positive results. We learned that those best customers were very open to email offers, even if they were “cold.” We also learned that they did look for information online, and we found the places that were their “go tos” to get it.

The point is this: If you want to “clone” your best clients (and you should really want to do that), you need to find the best ways to engage other clients like them. You can find out the best ways to engage those people simply by asking your current best clients. And if you can get a neutral third part to ask for you, that’s even better—customers tend to be more open and candid that way.

(Want a list of the best questions to ask? Reach out to me and I’ll hook you up.)