You-sfulness: The power of making yourself indispensible

You can sell and pitch and seek to persuade, but what really is the secret to success in marketing today?

It’s providing utility, being useful to your customers. This advice goes way beyond talking up your benefits. It will make you indispensible to your prospects.

You can be astonishingly useful if you know what your target audience needs and cares about. Being useful – even if it’s not in direct support of your service or product – will cause the prospect to hold your company in high esteem and at the top of the consideration set when it’s time to purchase.

To be truly useful, you must know some characteristics of your target audience.

Let’s say you are a heating and air conditioning company and you primarily serve residential customers. Who are those people living in homes in Northern Colorado that want to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter? Just about everyone, you might reply. But that’s simplistic and will not reward you with more devoted customers.

I am reminded of a multi-level marketing cosmetics executive who quipped that her customer was any woman who had a face.

Let’s fine-tune this! Your reward for being explicit in defining your true customer is that what you say and how you say it will be of greater appeal than if you just pitched a message to “all faces out there!”

Figuring out who your customer is – at his or her core – when it comes to your product or service’s appeal, is what is called defining a “buyer persona.”

Buyer Personas

As a copywriter, it helps me address the readers of the website text I write, when I can imagine who it is I’m talking to. I cut out a picture as a “stand in” of the primary target. It goes right on my computer screen. That’s a lot like defining a persona.

To begin defining their buyer personas, our heating and air conditioning company can think of all the customers they’ve had dealings with over the last couple of years and typify a few – three or so – as representing a majority of the population they address.

There’s the single woman in a condo that is thin, gets cold easily and has a small budget and no tolerance for a furnace breakdown. Let’s call her Skinny Sally. She turns her bedroom thermostat up high starting in October. What she cares most about is having reliable warmth and anticipating costs on a budget – in that order. She would be a great target for a low-cost service plan so she can predict her expenditures and always count on the furnace putting out heat. Being useful to her is always being there, a part of her support team.

There’s the family of four in the brick ranch with two kids, one of whom has asthma.

The mother, let’s call her Mom Mary, puts her family’s health above all other considerations. If her service contractor would change the filters on a customized and predictable schedule and alert her to any new ways she can keep the air in her house ultra-clean, she’d value that.

Finally, there’s Baseball Bill. He likes to watch baseball with friends every weekend, and that’s when the house has to be especially cool. He depends on his central air to keep everyone comfortable, as he considers himself the ultimate “game day host.” If you wanted to be useful to homeowners such as Baseball Bill, those who have a penchant for entertaining, you might provide tips on the topic in a monthly newsletter – and perhaps throw a party for them once a year.

Your results may vary, and these are only hypothetical examples. Yet the impact of slicing and dicing and typifying your audience to make your messaging more personal is profound. That’s why all the blue-chip companies do just that. They even model reasons their imaginary Sally, Mary and Bill would hesitate to purchase and what messages might unduly raise their defense mechanisms.

It comes down to this: Purchasers are looking for different attributes of your product or service, so you should provide them information and utility differently.

You-tility

What ideas can you come up with to provide amazing usefulness and value to your customers and prospects? And don’t think price discount!

Hotels started with turning down your pillow and leaving a mint, graduated to having free Wi-Fi that functions 24 hours a day, and a couple have upped the ante now to providing loaner dogs you can walk around the block for a feeling of home.

Our dry cleaners pick up and deliver, and their newsletter has a really helpful list of hints on how to care for clothes when they’re in the closet and out on the town!

Apple knows the new buyers have a learning curve when getting a Mac for the first time – but that they also want to feel a part of the exclusive club. So they offer a number of classes in their stores, all of which you can take at any time with your purchase. (Careful, those Macs are habit-forming!)

Put yourself in your prospect’s or customer’s shoes and anticipate what someone in those particular loafers would want you to do to make his or her life easier or more comfortable or better informed or more included – and do that.

Laurie Macomber, owner of Fort Collins-based Blue Skies Marketing, can be reached at laurie@blueskiesmktg.com or 970-689-3000.

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