Empower Your Business with Customer Funneling in Mexico

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The first step in building an effective marketing funnel is to identify your ideal customer. And this is important because not all customers are the same in terms of the value they bring to your business. Some customers are going to love your brand much more than others, and as a result, they're much more likely to leave positive ratings and reviews. Spread the word to others and buy from you again in the future. So the very first step here is to identify your ideal customer. That way, you can tailor your marketing efforts around them to increase conversion rates and boost word of mouth referrals. Now, you can be successful without doing this, but the path is just that much more difficult. And to illustrate the point, I want to quickly tell you the story of Drumeo. The leading brand in online drum education. This is a company that I co-founded about 15 years ago, and at the time, my co-founder and I were in our mid-twenties and we blindly assumed that our ideal customer was someone like ourselves somewhere in the age range of 18 to 25. They went online because they're interested in learning how to play the drums. Now at the time we were shipping out physical products, so typically someone would click an ad on Google, they would visit our website. If they bought, we would ship them out a physical box set of DVDs and CDs with training videos and play along songs and things like that. But we didn't have a lot of direct customer contact. They would simply buy a product and we would ship it off to them. And at the time we didn’t really understand the value of identifying our ideal customer, and we had just blindly assumed that we already knew who our best customer was. Embarrassingly enough, it took us 2 to 3 years to eventually realize that our ideal customer was between the ages of 40 and 65. And the narrative that started to emerge is that typically they either just retired or their youngest child just moved out and they had a spare room in the house for the first time in a while, and it was time to get back into a hobby from their youth or to pursue a new hobby for the very first time. And oftentimes they had money, they had time. Oftentimes they actually had a lot of expensive drum and music equipment, and they were just looking for training videos to improve their skills and to be able to play along to some of their favorite songs. Once we actually realized who are ideal customer was, it had a profound impact on almost everything in the business. Of course, the marketing started to change a lot. The imagery we would feature on our websites had to change. The testimonials that we would choose to feature started to change because of course we wanted to choose students that we knew were more relatable to our ideal customer. And even the instructors that we started to use for future lessons started to change because again, we wanted the instructors themselves to be more relatable. So once we actually understood who it was that was benefiting most from our product, almost everything in the business started to shift to better match their needs and their interests. Now, a common marketing mistake is trying to appeal to every potential customer of the product. And the idea here is that if you have more potential customers, then you will have more sales. But the issue with this strategy is that the world is a very noisy place and people are inundated with all kinds of products and services that may or may not be relevant to them. And just because you might be able to benefit from a product or service doesn't mean you're necessarily going to buy it. That people reject all kinds of products that might be able to create value in their lives. So the issue here is by creating a generic marketing message that is intending to appeal to everybody, you really fail to convert almost anybody. Everybody just sees this as a generic product and they'd rather spend their money on things that are more custom tailored to them or much more attuned to their specific needs or interests. So a much better strategy is to identify the ideal customer of your product, the one who's going to benefit most from what you sell, and then custom tailor your marketing messaging around them to increase the chances that you're going to stand out to them, and really importantly, to maximize the momentum that you build in the marketplace, because by focusing on one core audience that ideally has the opportunity to talk to other people in that audience, you can create this momentum where when someone has a need for your particular product and they talk to other people in their social circle, several other people in that social circle may have bought your product in the past because your marketing has been so focused that you've been trying to convert more and more of the customers in this particular group. And so as a result, when someone has an issue and they start to talk to friends and family about that issue, they universally get recommended one particular product or service. And if that is your product, you're far more likely to convert the sale. And so instead of just trying to appeal to everybody, you want to build this kind of momentum where you're focusing on a specific group and you're creating momentum within that group around word of mouth, referral, brand recognition and the ability for someone when they do the research to discover your product and make it much more likely that they will ultimately buy from you. Now, down the road, as you begin to build momentum with your marketing, you can eventually start to target multiple customer segments with different marketing strategies and in some cases even different landing pages. But early on, it's very important that you focus on just one core audience, even if there are two or three that all seem equally valuable, where these kinds of customers are all interested in your product or service, it's very important that you focus on just one because by focusing on just one, all of your marketing efforts and perhaps any advertising dollars you intend to spend are all focused on improving the momentum that you have with that one audience, so that when someone in that group is interested in your product or service, it's much more likely that they've heard about it from multiple sources. And these kinds of things, these multiple touchpoints where someone is getting more and more familiar with your product or service, make it considerably more likely they will eventually buy from you. And ironically, it's this strategy of starting with one core audience that eventually allows you to reach a much larger, broad, mainstream audience. Because by building momentum with one core audience and by using the power of word of mouth referral, eventually more and more people hear about your product. And because word of mouth referral is so powerful, they can be influenced to buy their product, even if it isn't perfectly suited to them. They might hear about it. They might get a recommendation from someone who absolutely loved it, and because it's useful enough to them, they might end up buying so ironically, this strategy of focusing on one core audience allows you to reach that broad mainstream audience. But if you were to start by trying to reach a broad audience, you never really build this momentum. You don't really convert many customers, and you never really get the power of word of mouth referral working in your favor. Now, when it comes to identifying your best customers, the process is really going to be based on the current state of your business. So, for example, if you already have a successful business with many paying customers, you want to start to look for commonalities between your best paying customers, the ones that most easily buy your product or service, the ones that you don't really need to sell very hard. The ones that keep coming back for more are the ones that tend to leave positive ratings and reviews. You want to study these kinds of customers and get a better understanding for what they tend to have in common. Now, if you don't yet have many customers to your business, what do you want to do instead? Is focus on the kind of product or service that people who buy your product might also buy. So if someone was to buy your product right now, what other things are they likely to want to buy or purchase? What kinds of things are they going to need to make the most of your product? Or alternatively, what kinds of things might they already own that ended up influencing them in their decision to buy your product? And once you identify other companies that sell the kinds of things that the people who buy from you might also be interested in, you can start to study those businesses. You can go to their websites, you can study the imagery on their sites. You can look through their testimonials. You can look through their ratings and reviews, and you can start to look for similar patterns. Who is it that leaves them the most positive ratings and reviews? What kinds of people do they feature in their testimonials? And even though this isn't perfect data, you can start to form a basic hypothesis about the kind of person who is likely going to be interested in your product or your service. And one last category, going back to the example at the beginning of this video is a business that already has many customers but perhaps doesn't have direct contact with those customers. And if you're in this situation, the best thing that you can do is to open direct dialog with your customers, start to identify the kinds of people that tend to buy from you more often, or tend to leave you positive ratings and reviews and get in touch with them and learn as much as possible about them so that you can start to identify the common traits that they have that might help you get a better understanding of who is your ideal customer. Now, as you go through this process, you might end up identifying two or more groups that seem to be very promising. And in that case, you want to ask yourself questions like Which group is easiest to sell to? Which group can most afford your product or your service, and which group is likely to engage in word of mouth referral? Just because someone who is interested in buying your product doesn't necessarily mean that they're in regular contact with other people that might also be interested in your product. So given the two options, you want to select a group that is more likely to have the opportunity to influence other members of their group, whether that's through in-person communication or online communication. You're looking for a group that has the opportunity to help spread positive messages about your product or your service among themselves. Now, as you go through this process to identify your ideal customer, as you put together a hypothesis for who might be your ideal customer, it's time to create a customer avatar. This is your assignment for the first step in the Marketing Funnel series. So take out a sheet of paper or start a document on your computer and across the very top. You want to create a fictional name that is to represent your ideal customer. Now, typically, I would base this on the first name of one known customer and the last name of another known customer. But you want to put that across the top of the page, and then you want to bring this person to life by detailing specifics about their lives, things like their age, their gender, their marital status, career, income level, hobbies, interests, even things like what websites they visit, what books they read, what other products they buy, what communities they participate in. And you want to consider things like what caused them to seek out your product? What problem are they wanting to solve and how did they hear about your product? I've created a simple template that you can use as you work through this process and you can find a link to that down in the video description box. But the idea here is to treat this like a real person where you're detailing specifics about their lives and ideally you're basing those specifics on things that you know about your real customers. So you're not just making things up. You're doing your best to actually understand what your ideal customers are like. And then you're detailing one person, one customer avatar that represents this group so that when you're putting together your marketing strategy or working on landing pages or sales emails or advertisements, you have this document that details who it is that you're ultimately trying to serve. And even if it's not perfect, even if it's a work in progress, you at least have something to base your marketing messaging around and you can continually improve this in the future. Next up, we're going to talk about how to create an effective marketing message. So click the like button, subscribe to the channel, and then continue on to the next step. You can find a link to it right here in the video player as well as down below in the video description text.