August 8, 2017

By Intrigue

Maybe you’re looking to grow your business? Or, maybe your sales have slowed down and the phone isn’t ringing like it used to? Or, maybe your website traffic has dropped?

Don’t worry, you’re not alone! These are common situations we find our clients in on a regular basis. They want to get the word out about their amazing organization, and they want solutions to solve the frustrations they’re experiencing — and we want to help get them.

So where do we start? We start with an A-Client profile.

What’s An A-Client Profile?

When a client comes to us, we start by asking them about their A-Clients. We ask, “Who are the Awesome clients you have? What are their characteristics and purchasing habits, and why do you like working with them?”

The A-Client Profile is the first piece to creating an integrated marketing strategy that helps a business define its goals and better understand its audience — and it helps our expert team define the strategy for their marketing action plan.

The Key Components of an A-Client Profile

  1. SMART Goals

We begin by asking you about the frustrations, or problems, your business is having and we ask you what your ideal situation would be.

SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. These goals will help your business focus efforts on goals with set timeframes to achieve them. For example, you might want to increase new product sales by 10%, increase engagement on your social media profiles, or generate online leads. Whatever your business goals are, defining them and writing them out will help shape the direction of your business.

  1. Tell Us About Your Business

We want to know what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and what makes your business unique.

We can help you define the ‘why’, or the purpose of your business, so that we have a clear understanding of your motivation, what drives your business forward, and what success looks like.

In our experience, we’ve found that sharing this ‘why statement’ with your business helps to align your team. It also helps our team understand your business better so we can develop a compelling marketing campaign that resonates with your target audience.

  1. What are the Focus Areas of the Campaign?

We want you to think about your current business situation and narrow in on the specific areas we can focus on to help improve this situation:

  • Which specific products or services are we focusing on?
  • Are there any products or services you want to exclude?
  • What locations and geographies are you targeting?

For example: Do you want to attract new customers into your store from the local area, or are you looking to drive website traffic from anywhere in the country?

Buyer Personas (A.K.A. Figuring out who your A-Clients are.)

This is where we get into the nitty gritty details of your best customers and this is where we can find some great wins together!

We recommend identifying your best clients. The ones who buy from you often, love what you do, and really understand your business. For each of these A-Clients, you’ll want to identify the following characteristics:

  • Type of client (ie. Business-to-Business or Business-to-Consumer)
  • Beliefs and attitudes
  • Hobbies and interests
  • Location, age, gender, and other key demographics
  • Company size and industry
  • Purchasing habits and history

Understand Your A-Clients’ Journey with Micro-Moments

Once you have a better understanding of who your A-Clients are, it’s time to find out what their micro-moments or customer journey looks like.

It’s important to understand what led your audience to start their search for your product or service. What was their buying catalyst? For example, if you own a local tire shop, you want to know all of the reasons why someone might look for new tires so that your brand can be present in all of these search moments.

Mapping out the journey your A-Clients took to find your business is essential to understanding what they’re looking for and where they look to find it.

There are four important categories of micro-moments that we look at to find out where your A-Clients could fall into:

  • Want-to-know
  • Want-to-go
  • Want-to-do
  • Want-to-buy

If you want to learn more about the micro-moment journey, you can read my team member Mike’s blog here!

Once you’ve mapped out the journey of each of your A-Client’s journey, you will have completed the A-Client profile, and you will have a clearly defined vision of where your business wants to go, your SMART goals, your target audience, and where your customers are looking for information.

After having this meeting with the team at Intrigue, you’ll walk away with a strategic, marketing action plan!

If you’re interested in learning more about our process, connect with us!

Intrigue is a Canadian digital marketing company delivering solutions to help businesses get noticed and found. Guided by a commitment to empower leaders to strengthen communities, Intrigue offers website design and development, branding, online advertising, content marketing, graphic design, video production, SEO, and analytics. Take your marketing to the next level and Get Noticed. Get Found.® intrigueme.ca

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