By Melissa McGroder, CEO of My Marketing Department
If I asked your chef to articulate who your target audience is, and why, would they be able to give me some kind of answer? The reason I ask is two-fold. Firstly because these answers are often hidden in a marketing manager’s drawer somewhere collecting dust. Secondly, because really, is it within a chef’s realm to be expected to know such things?
Here’s the thing: understanding your customer, what drives them, what sets your venue apart in their mind from your competitors and what motivates them to spend is something that can easily be articulated in just a few pages. And we’re not talking about 10,000 words of pages – a visual representation of your ideal customer is the kind of tool that should be accessible to all employees, preferably as part of their induction process.
We like to call it a Customer Profiling Document, and when designing them we tend to split them up by either areas of a venue or customer groupings. At a glance anyone from a glassie to the DJ coming in on a Saturday night can “get it”.
It’s not fluffy Marketing mumbo-jumbo that takes a degree to read, it’s a visual, graphical representation of your customer/s.
Once firmly established and agreed upon, so many decisions can flow freely.
For starters, the tone of voice that will appeal to these identified key markets can then be established with a copy bank full of key phrases. Imagine already having paragraphs and snippets of copy to draw upon when it comes time to create campaigns or refresh the wording on your website?
Your social media framework can also be formulated to attract these specific target markets because you’ve already outlined where they live and what their interests are, making social media ad placements a breeze.
Your promotions & events calendar can be re-assessed to make sure it appeals to the markets you’ve clearly outlined, and in order to really grab their attention your graphic design style guide can be formulated to ensure that posters, flyers, and your online media are all grabbing the attention of the right audience.
Because here’s the thing; marketing (properly) is bloody time consuming. It’s not that it’s rocket science (it’s not), but getting it right can take a lot of precious time. Putting some effort in to powering up your positioning can save bucket-loads of hours.
Just think about all the time that’s been wasted before because your fundamentals weren’t in place as a reference guide for the creator:
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That poster that just went back & forth with the designer 72 times because it “wasn’t quite us” and resulted in a $650 design fee.
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That menu launch that got poor feedback because it didn’t appeal to your locals
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That promotion that you spent way too much money on getting off the ground but never really worked
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That Facebook ad that cost $8 per click instead of 18c because it wasn’t ever targeting the right demographics
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That eDM that took some poor sou two days to get right because they were trying to get the brand colours to match your website but couldn’t find the colour swatches or font selection
For this reason alone our new on-demand marketing and campaign activation service requires all venues to complete a Positioning Power-Up first.
Our Positiong Power-Up is designed to identify who your customers are, what’s important to them and what it’s going to take to get you from first base right through to a home run.
For a very limited time only, we’re halving the fee for our Positioning Power-Up service. PLUS, all graduates then qualify to access our new on-demand marketing service MMD ACTIVATE.
Developed specifically to help venues navigate their “new normal” in the wake of COVID-19, ACTIVATE delivers quality, on-demand marketing services at a fraction of the price venue would usually expect to pay.